Postdoctoral Fellow

Filed Under: Postdoctoral Fellow

Gavin Healy

Gavin HealyGavin Healy photo

Lecturer, Early Career Fellow

Office Hours: W/R 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

Email: gh148@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University
JD: Columbia University School of Law
MA: Chinese University of Hong Kong
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts
EAAS GU4625 Socialist China in the Western Gaze (1949-1978)
ASCE UN1359 Intro to East Asian Civ: China
EEAS G6991 MA Thesis Writing
Research Interests

Late Imperial/Modern China, Cold War in Asia, Comparative Labor History, Tourism
History

Gavin Healy is a historian of modern China. His current book project, “The Political and
Cultural Economy of Sightseeing: Foreign Tourism in the ‘New China’ (1949-1978),”
examines how personnel within China’s state tourism bureaucracy struggled to balance
the use of tourism as a form of political, historical, and cultural representation with the
demands of developing a revenue-generating service industry in a socialist economy. His
research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research
Council, the American Historical Association, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Before entering Columbia’s PhD program in Chinese history, he practiced law in New
York, Hong Kong, and Seoul for ten years.

Selected Publications

Touring the Socialist World: The Political and Cultural Economy of China’s Outbound
Tourism, 1956-1965,” Twentieth-Century China 46, no. 1 (January 2021): 83-102.

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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.

JM Chris Chang

JM Chris Chang

Lecturer, Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities

Office: 303 Heyman Center
Office Hours: F 1:00- 3:00
Email:  jcc2174@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Amherst College
MA/MSc: Columbia University/London School of Economics
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Intro to East Asian Civ: China
EEAS UN3971 Technology and Power in Modern China

Research Interests

Socialism, bureaucracy, knowledge production, material culture, the archive

JM Chris Chang is a historian of modern China, having received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2018. His research focuses on issues of bureaucracy, archive, surveillance, and political culture in 20th century China. His current project is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork as understood through the dossier system, the socialist institution of comprehensive files on individual Chinese subjects. The project examines how the paper routines of the dossier consumed the bureaucratic profession and became the material for everyday political acts. His work utilizes what are known in the field as ‘garbage sources’–files previously discarded from official archives that have since resurfaced in book and paper markets. The use of this sourcebase has informed a broader interest in the material culture and afterlife of government paper. His research has received support from the Social Science Research Council and the ACLS/Mellon Foundation.