Postdoctoral Fellow

Filed Under: Postdoctoral Fellow

Yiwen Shen

Yiwen Shen

Lecturer, University Committee on Asia and the Middle East Postdoctoral Research Scholar

Email: ys2473@columbia.edu

Educational Background:
BA: Fudan University
MA: Columbia University
PhD: Columbia University
 
Classes Taught:

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia

EAAS GU4425 Women, Body, and Borders in Japanese Literature and Culture

 
Research Interests:

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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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.

Chloe Estep

Chloe Estep

Lecturer, Joseph E Hotung Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asia Institute
Educational Background:

AB: Princeton University
MA: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught:

AHUM UN3400 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
EAAS UN3999 Research in East Asian Studies

Research interests:

Chloe Estep’s research centers on the changing role of the zi, or character, in modern China and its effects on Chinese poetry. Her work explores the zi as a material, visual, and theoretical site which transgresses the boundaries between calligraphic inscription, pictorial representation, modernist symbol, and poetic utterance and where the temporal, aesthetic, and political properties of poetry are articulated. This research shows that not only did changing modes of inscription reveal the traces of classicism in the modern period, but also formed the building blocks of poetic nationalism.

Her article, “’Still holding the pipa to hide half her face’: Visions of Bai Juyi’s ‘Song of the Pipa‘ in Republican China” appears in Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China 23, no. 1 (2021). Her paper, “Futurist Biopoetics in Republican China” received the Best Graduate Paper prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

She has also published translations of modern Chinese literature and translation theory, including Lu Yao’s 1982 novel Life and “An Exchange on Translation” between Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai, which was included in the most recent edition of The Translation Studies Reader.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Weatherhead East Asia Institute. She earned a PhD in modern Chinese literature from Columbia University in 2021.