Tenggeer Hao

Field: Chinese Literature and Cinema
Advisor: Ying Qian
Email: t.hao@columbia.edu

Tenggeer Hao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees respectively from the School of Chinese Language and Literature of Beijing Normal University and the Critical Asian Humanities Program at Duke University. He focuses on Chinese film studies, film and media theory, and comparative philosophy between the Yijing philosophy, Kantian-Hegelian idealism, and contemporary philosophy of mind. His dissertation, “The Heart-Mind Medium: Towards A Yin-Yang Philosophy of Media,” aims to construct a philosophy of media using concepts of the Yijing philosophy and articulate the philosophical foundation of its methodology.

Palden Gyal

Field: Tibetan Buddhism and Sino-Tibetan History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: palden.gyal@columbia.edu

Palden Gyal is a doctoral student in Sino-Tibetan history and Tibetan Buddhism. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Duke University (NC) and an M.A. in philosophy of religion and Buddhist studies from Harvard Divinity School (MA). Palden’s research interests lie broadly at the intersections of religion, ethics, and political philosophy. His dissertation project focuses on the practices of governance, the political and institutional history of Tibetan communities in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands from the 18th to the 20th century.

Personal website:  https://pal-den-gyal.com/

Yifan Zhang

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Email: yz2681@columbia.edu

Yifan is a Ph.D. student in Chinese literature, with a focus on the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1912). He received his B.A. (2014) from Peking University and M.A. (2016) from Columbia University. He works primarily on Ming-Qing short and long narratives, fiction in particular, and has a keen interest in examining how they speak to the issues that derive from and respond to urban history, local history, elite society, print culture, and material culture. His current dissertation project explores language practice and cultural innovation in the Wu dialect area that centers on Suzhou, the economic and cultural pivot in early modern China.