Postdoctoral Fellow

Filed Under: Postdoctoral Fellow

Yiwen Shen

Yiwen Shen

Lecturer, Postdoctoral Research Scholar

Email: ys2473@columbia.edu 

Yiwen Shen is a scholar of Japanese literature and culture whose research focuses on premodern prose fiction, visual culture, and intersections of literature, religion, and art. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2021. Her research interests include Japanese and Chinese literature, with particular focus on the literary and visual analyses of the netherworld. Her doctoral dissertation titled “The Female Body, Motherhood, and Old Age: Representations of Women in Hell in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Japan” examines the literary and visual representations of women in hell in late medieval and early modern Japan. The project engages a group of otogizōshi texts and hell paintings, looking into a constellation of new hells emerged in the late Muromachi period that had serious ramifications for women. Her current research examines what was viewed as the danger of parental attachment and the conception of childhood and motherhood in the late Muromachi and early Edo periods. She also examines woman as erotic object, as mother, and as aging body from a comparative Japan-China perspective.

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Abigail MacBain

Abigail MacBain

Lecturer, Postdoctoral Research Scholar
Office Hours:  W 4:00-5:00 PM, F 1:00-2:00 PM and by appointment
Educational Background:
BA:  St. Lawrence University
MA:  McMaster University
PhD: Columbia University
Classes Taught:
Fall 2021:  Intro to Major Topics: East Asia – Religious Landscapes of East Asia
Spring 2022: TBA
Research Interests:
Japanese Religions, Religious Transmission, Religious Amalgamation, Silk Road Studies
Abigail MacBain is a history of religion scholar specializing in Japanese religions and Buddhist transmission. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2021. Her dissertation titled “Precepts and Performances: Overseas Monks and the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Japan” focused on the arrivals of several Buddhist monks from various parts of the Asian mainland to Japan in the mid-eighth century and their influence on the religious, cultural, and political affairs of the period. Her current research looks at the role that state protection scriptures and deities played in Buddhism’s spread throughout East Asia. She is also looking at how religion-adjacent material cultural such as musical instruments and artistic motifs contributed to the early Japanese court’s awareness of other peoples, countries, and cultures. Her research has been supported by grants from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Blakemore Foundation, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the U.S. Department of Education via the Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship.

Benjamin Kindler

Benjamin Kindler

Joseph E Hotung Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Educational Background
BA: University of Oxford
MPhil: University of Oxford
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

UN3435 Chinese Revolution, Asian Revolution, World Revolution

Research Interests
Cultural production under Chinese socialism; intellectual history of Chinese and global Marxisms; working-class writing; humanism and anti-humanism; anti-colonial thought
Benjamin Kindler is a recent graduate of the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Writing to the Rhythm of Labour: The Politics of Cultural Labour in the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976’ examines the complex interrelations between the formation of the “culture worker” (wenyi gongzuozhe) as the new subject of cultural production under Chinese socialism, and the capacity of varied cultural forms and genres to support the transformation of social relations as part of the movement towards a more egalitarian society. In addition to preparing this dissertation for book publication, Ben is also pursuing a second project on the question of humanism during the socialist and post-socialist periods. It takes up the involvement of Chinese Marxists in the debates that emerged around the question of the human within the international communist movement of the 1960s, as well as the re-emergence of humanism as part of the reassessment of Marx’s early writings during the reform period. Ben’s work has been published or is scheduled for publication in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), International Quarterly for Asian Studies, and Modern China, as well as in the edited collections The Afterlives of Chinese Communism and Proletarian China. Ben teaches courses on the global history of the Chinese Revolution and the legacies of proletarian literature in East Asia.