recent-phds

Filed Under: recent-phds

Tristan Revells

revells

Tristan Revells

Field: Chinese History
Advisors: Madeleine Zelin and Eugenia Lean
Email: ter2121@columbia.edu

Tristan works on the history of the renewable energy industry in China. His dissertation focuses on the dongli jiujing  biofuel program of the late 1930s and 40s, an alternative fuel program which emerged from the research of Chinese and Japanese biochemists and microbiologists in the late Qing and early Republican era. His most recent work is a digital humanities project initiated at the Science History Institute which uses 3D modeling software to rebuild China’s first large-scale ethanol plant from archival blueprints and photographs. Tristan received his BA from the University of Chicago in 2008 and studied at National Taiwan University prior to the start of his PhD.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Chelsea Zi Wang

Chelsea Zi Wang

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: zw2159@columbia.edu

 

 

 

Chelsea Wang is a PhD candidate in Chinese history. Her research interests include communication networks, technologies of information management, and comparative models of government. Her dissertation, “Communication, Paperwork, and Administrative Efficiency in Ming China (1369-1644)” examines the Ming government’s infrastructures of information management and the bureaucratic costs that they produced. More broadly, she is interested in incorporating comparative East Asian perspectives into the study of Chinese history. Chelsea received her BA in History from the University of British Columbia and started PhD studies at Columbia in 2009. During the academic years 2013-15, she conducted dissertation research at the University of Tokyo with support of the Japanese MEXT Scholarship. Her personal academic blog can be accessed here.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Luke Thompson

Luke Thompson

Field: Japanese Religion
Advisor: Bernard Faure
Email: lnt2106@columbia.edu

 

 

 

Luke Thompson’s research focuses on Japanese Buddhism during the tenth-to-fourteenth centuries. He is particularly interested in Buddhist historiography and the way in which Japanese Buddhists have thought about Buddhist history and their own place within it. His PhD dissertation examined Japanese views of Śākyamuni during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in light of contemporaneous changes in Japanese understandings of Japan’s historical and geographical position within the Buddhist world. He is currently working on a second project focused on the rebuilding of Nara in the last decades of the twelfth century and is also teaching Buddhist Studies courses in New York State prisons through the Bard Prison Initiative’s undergraduate degree program.

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