recent-phds

Filed Under: recent-phds

Yiwen Shen

Yiwen Shen

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: ys2473@columbia.edu 

Yiwen is a Ph.D. candidate in premodern Japanese literature. Her research interests include Japanese and Chinese literature, with particular focus on the literary and visual analyses of the netherworld and influential death-related icons. Her dissertation examines the literary representations of women in hell in late medieval Japanese popular narratives. 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 to examine how representations of female body, borders, and motherhood evolved during the transition from the late medieval to the early modern period. The dissertation also considers the differences between China and Japan in terms of the understandings of marginality, purification, and how this world relates with other world. Before joining Columbia’s PhD program in the fall of 2013, Yiwen received her B.A. in Chinese Literature from Fudan University, Shanghai (2008), M.A. in Japanese Literature from Columbia (2011), and M.A. in Chinese Literature from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012).

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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

Carolyn Pang

Carolyn Pang

Field: Japanese Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: cp2596@columbia.edu

Carol is a Ph.D. candidate in Japanese Religion. Her research interests focus on East Asian religious practices and folk beliefs, and extend to the study of traditional ritual performances in Japan, specifically kagura. Carol is currently in Japan doing her dissertation fieldwork on the Izanagi-ryū, a folk religion that is still practiced in contemporary Kōchi, Shikoku. Through a study of the scriptures and ritual practices of the Izanagi-ryū, Carol’s research investigates how peripheral regions in Japan used local cultic practices to position themselves in relation to the capital center, and how religion functioned in these distant provinces’ construction of their local identities. She received her B.A. (2005) and M.A. (2010) in Japanese Studies from the National University of Singapore. During this period, she participated in research programs at Waseda University and Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

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