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.

Nhat Phuong Ngo Vu

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: nn2338@columbia.edu

Phuong is a Ph.D. candidate in premodern Japanese literature. Her research is centered on classical Japanese poetry (waka) of the Heian period, with a special focus on how this versatile form of poetry functioned in the everyday life of the Japanese aristocrat. Using as her primary source a female poet’s personal poetry anthology known as the Ise shū (Lady Ise Collection), which has neither been translated into English in its entirety nor studied in detail in English scholarship, she also hopes to bring attention to the interconnectedness between issues of gender, genres, and patronage in early Heian waka.

Ling-Wei Kung

Field: Chinese and Tibetan History
Advisors: Gray Tuttle & Madeleine Zelin
Email: lk2627@columbia.edu

Ling-Wei Kung is a Ph.D. candidate in History and East Asia Studies. His principal research area is the history of early modern/modern China and Inner Asia. He is completing his dissertation entitled “Great Convergence: Intelligence Collection, Trans-Regional Trade, and International Relations Between Modern China, Inner Asia, and the World.” His dissertation investigates modern China’s relationship with Inner Asia by focusing on global economic exchange and knowledge formation from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, supplementing modern and classical Chinese sources with multilingual materials in Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Japanese, and a range of European languages. Supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Japan Foundation, he has conducted on-site research in China, Japan, and Tibet for eighteen months. In recognition of his exceptional intellectual ability and originality, the Tang Prize Foundation awarded him the Yu Ying-Shih Prize for Humanities Research in 2019. He has published widely on the history of China and Inner Asia. His works are available on his Personal Website.

Ling-Wei received a B.A. in History from National Taiwan University (2012), and his M.A. (2015) and M. Phil. (2018) from Columbia University. He has studied abroad at Tibet, Kyoto, Kyushu, Peking, and Renmin Universities.