Tyler Walker

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Paul Anderer
Email: jtw2129@columbia.edu

Tyler received his B.A. in Japanese Studies from Middlebury College in 2008. Before coming to Columbia he worked as a translator in Hiroshima, Japan, before teaching Japanese language in Massachusetts and in his native Mississippi. Alongside his interest in ecocritical theory, the modern novel, and Japanese film, Tyler has focused on the relationship between country and city in twentieth century Japan. His dissertation explores the intersection of cultural production and radical political and social movements in the Japanese countryside during the early twentieth century. An avid cyclist and hiker, he often draws inspiration from long journeys through rural Japan.

Myra Sun

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: mms2213@columbia.edu

Myra received her B.A. in English and Chinese Language from UC Berkeley (2007). Before coming to Columbia in 2009, she worked for two years in Nara, Japan as an assistant language teacher with the JET program. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and a fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her current research explores issues of intellectual and creative labor, textual authority, and literary practice in late Qing and early Republican China. Her dissertation project will focus on the influences of editing and early 20th century new media on the formation and canonization of modern Chinese literature. She is also broadly interested in Chinese theater and performance, film, and media culture from the late 19th century to the present.

Joshua Schlachet

Field: Japanese History
Advisors: Carol Gluck & Gregory Pflugfelder
Email: jes2276@columbia.edu

 

 

 

 

Joshua Schlachet is a historian of early modern and modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current project, “Nourishing Life: Diet, Body, and Society in Early Modern Japan,” examines the emergence of a dietary “common knowledge” as new practical guidebooks circulating among ordinary readers expanded the concept of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. His research interests include global and comparative food studies, histories of science and health, book history and popular publishing, material culture and artisanship, and Dutch-Japanese exchange.

Schlachet teaches courses on Japanese and East Asian history, dietary cultures, and everyday life at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and holds an M.A. (Japanese Studies) from the University of Michigan and B.A. (History) from Cornell University