Gavin Healy

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Madeleine Zelin
Email: gh148@columbia.edu

Gavin Healy is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Chinese history. His dissertation, “The Political and Cultural Economy of Sightseeing: Foreign Tourism in the People’s Republic of China (1949-1978)”, examines how personnel within China’s state tourism bureaucracy struggled to balance the use of tourism as a form of political, historical, and cultural representation with the demands of developing a revenue-generating service industry in a socialist economy. He received his BA in Asian Studies from Cornell University, a JD from Columbia Law School, and an MA in Chinese Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before entering the PhD program, he practiced law in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul for ten years. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he was a visiting student at the School of Tourism of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.