Qichen (Barton) Qian

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisors: Gray Tuttle and Zhaohua Yang
Email: qq2109@columbia.edu

Qichen (Barton) Qian is a doctoral student of Sino-Tibetan history and esoteric Buddhism from the 17th to 20th centuries. His research incorporates military and economic history of the Tibetan Ganden Podrang regime (1642–1959) and the Qing empire (1644–1912), as well as violence in Buddhism and material culture of firearms. Barton received his B.A. in Political Science/Math with a minor in Economics from Emory University and his M.A. in Tibetan and Chinese history from Columbia University.

Peter Moody

Field: Korean History
Advisors: Gregory Pflugfelder and Jungwon Kim
Email: pgm2116@columbia.edu

Peter is a PhD student in East Asian History specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Korea and Japan. He is interested in looking at how the discourse of tradition vs. modern evolved during the colonial and post-war periods, particularly when state actors used notions of civilization and advancement to win support for political projects that were sometimes at the expense of the subaltern. Before coming to Columbia, he obtained his Master’s in East Asian Studies from the University of Virginia where he wrote his thesis on mass mobilization campaigns in North Korea. His recent research interests include microhistories of North Korean coastal cities and the intersection of North Korean ideology and cultural production, particularly when it comes to the popular music soundscape.

Dongming Wu

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Li Feng
Email: dw2595@columbia.edu

Dongming Wu is from China and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Sichuan University in China majoring in Chinese Literature. He started his PhD study at Columbia University since 2015. His area of concentration focuses on reconstructing the social lives in the Zhou dynasty (1045-256 B.C.E) by combining archaeological, paleographical, and textual data. His dissertation examines the southern frontier of the Zhou dynasty from the perspective of metal economy to see how economic activities contributed to social interaction and transformation on the southern frontier in Zhou China. By examining the economic activities of metal in the whole spectrum of society, he hopes to demonstrate how metal industry was organized and performed in different social levels and how it was integrated in the state policies in the Zhou dynasty.