recent-phds

Filed Under: recent-phds

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes

Field: Japanese History
Advisors: Gregory Pflugfelder & David Lurie
Email: ak3627@columbia.edu

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes is a doctoral history student in early modern Japanese history. Alexander’s primary research focuses on male-male sexuality among elite samurai networks during the Warring States Period and how fragmented political and cultural authority at this time created spaces for experimentation that in turn influenced normative male-male sexual practices and behavior during the Edo Period. He is also interested in modern popular culture interpretations of major historical figures and events of the Warring States Period and how this shapes and reflects so-called “common knowledge” about them. He received his BA in East Asian Studies from Occidental College in 2011 and his MA in East Asian Studies from University of California, Los Angeles in 2014.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Yuki Ishida

Yuki IshidaYuki Ishida

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Email: yi2182@columbia.edu

Before joining Columbia University, Yuki received her B.A. in Comparative Japanese Studies from the University of Tokyo and her M.A. in Russian Literature from Saint Petersburg State University (Russia). Her master’s thesis (2015) addressed the interplay of the documentary and the fictional in 20th-century postwar literary imagination in Russia and Japan. Her current dissertation project, tentatively entitled “Constructing the Literary in Translation: Futabatei Shimei and the Formation of Values of Artistic Production in Modern Japan,” explores the complex process of the formation and transformation of the concepts of artistic production and its agents and values from late 19th- to early 20th-century modern Japan, with a special focus on the works of the writer and Russian-Japanese translator Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909). Her project aims to illuminate the conditions that enabled the discourse on literary values in modern Japan, which had profound and far-reaching ramifications on the shaping of views on the modernization of Japan.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Yanjie Huang

Yanjie Huang

Field: Chinese History
Advisors: Eugenia Lean & Madeleine Zelin
Email: yh2798@columbia.edu

Yanjie Huang is a doctoral candidate in modern Chinese history. His research interests center on state-society relations from late imperial to contemporary China. Based on archives, oral history, and thousands of letters from Shanghai, his dissertation, A Revolution Domesticated: Negotiating Family Life in Urban China, 1959-1984, examines how urban families negotiated their everyday life and heralded a de-politicization of the revolution under the shadow of the Maoist austerity policies in the 1960s and 1970s. He received his BA in Economics (2008) and MA in History (2015) from the National University of Singapore. His master thesis focuses on the conceptual transformation of sacrifice in late Qing and Republican China. His co-authored book, Market in State: The Political Economy of Domination in China (Cambridge, 2018), studies the conceptual foundation, historical evolution, and contemporary institutions of state-market relations in China. Before joining Columbia, he worked as a researcher in a Singapore-based think tank focused on contemporary China studies.

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