Postdoctoral Fellow

Filed Under: Postdoctoral Fellow, recent-phds

Chi Zhang

zhangchiChi Zhang

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: cz2185@columbia.edu

Chi is a PhD student in Japanese Literature, with interests broadly centered on the construction of China in the Japanese literary and cultural imagination, including the transformation of Chinese philosophical and religious writings in Japanese literature and the use of different genres in the depiction of Chinese images, and the ways in which different Japanese genres bonded with specific Chinese “sources” or genres, mostly from the Heian through the medieval period. She is also interested in examining the Edo period in which a number of earlier threads of Japanese cultural and discursive constructions of China were first brought together and emerged within a range of new forms of writing and texts. Chi received her B.A. in Japanese Language from Tsinghua University, Beijing before joining Columbia.

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Kwi Jeong Lee

Kwi Jeong Lee

Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism

Office: 80 Claremont Ave, Rm. 210
Email: kl3122@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Princeton University

Research Interests

Buddhist apologetics, inter-religious debate, material/visual culture, sensuous religion, media theory

Kwi Jeong Lee specializes in medieval Chinese Buddhism. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Princeton University in 2018. Her current project examines how and why Buddhist cultic images fueled controversy among learned circles from 300 to 700 CE. Through the analysis of the anti-Buddhist controversy over the devotional use of material objects, her project tracks the trajectory in which the rhetoric of idolatry prompted Buddhist apologists to formulate a sophisticated theory of cultic images in medieval China.

John Tseh-han Chen

John Tseh-han Chen

Lecturer, Wm. Theodore de Bary Postdoctoral Fellow

Office: B-204 Heyman Center
Office Hours: W 2:00-4:00
Email: jtc2148@columbia.edu

Educational Background
PhD: Columbia University (2018)
MA: Columbia University (2013)
BA: Harvard University (2008)
Classes Taught
AHUMV1400: Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia (Spring 2020)
HSEA GU4222: China’s Global Histories: People, Space, and Power (Fall 2019)
HSEA GU4221: Many Belts, Many Roads: China and the Islamic World, c.600AD-Present (Spring 2019)
East Asian UN1002: Major Topics in East Asian Civilization (Fall 2018)
Research Interests

John Chen’s first book project, The Worldliest Minority: A Global History of Muslims in Modern China, examines the transformation of Chinese Muslim (Hui) identity as empires across Asia gave way to nation-states. It shows how leading Chinese Muslims engaged extensively with modern Islamic thought from the Middle East and Indian Ocean, but also played crucial roles in China’s domestic and foreign policies toward Muslims. In this context, these leaders articulated a new vision of Chinese Muslims as a minority group uniquely connected to the outside world yet uniquely important and loyal to the Chinese nation. Using a wide range of Chinese and Arabic sources, this project rethinks the relationship between transnational mobility and national consolidation, and offers a connected, contingent, and non-monolithic view of both Islam and China.

Beyond the book project, Dr. Chen is interested in a variety of topics including Chinese Muslim pharmacies and materia medica trade, Islam and communism, and modern Chinese and Arabic thought. In terms of concepts and methods, he is especially interested in exploring new intersections between global history, area studies, intellectual history, and histories of science.

Selected Publications

“Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow-Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism.” ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 3/2 (Spring 2018): 120-39.

“Medicine and Muslim Modernity in China.” Ottoman History Podcast. July 2, 2018.

“‘Just Like Old Friends’: The Significance of Southeast Asia to Modern Chinese Islam.” Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (SOJOURN) 31/3 (November 2016): 685-742.

“Re-Orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938-55.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and Middle East (CSSAAME) 34/1 (Spring 2014): 24-51.