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Eveline Washul

Adjunct Lecturer, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Office: 909B IAB
Office Hours: T 10:00-11:00
Email: esy2103@columbia.edu

Educational Background
PhD: Indiana University
MA: Columbia University
BA: University of Colorado, Boulder
Classes Taught
HSEA GU4017 Ethnographic Tibet
HSEA GU4813 Early Tibetan History and Its Relations with China
Research Interests

Historical geographies of Tibet; Tibetan genealogies; anthropology of space and place; urbanization on the Tibetan Plateau

Eveline Washul is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and Tibetan Studies from Indiana University in 2018. Her research methods combine ethnography with Tibetan historical sources from the 12th to 20th centuries. Her dissertation research studied how the particularities of Tibetan relationships to places shape their transition from rural to urban livelihoods in the late-socialist reform period in the People’s Republic of China. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the history of geographical regions in Tibet.

Selected Publications

“Tibetan Translocalities: Navigating Urban Opportunities and New Ways of Belonging in Tibetan Pastoral Communities in China.” October 2018. Critical Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1520606

“Tracing the Chol kha gsum: Reexamining a Sa skya-Yuan Period Administrative Geography.” 2016. In “Ancient Currents, New Traditions: Papers Presented at the Fourth International Seminar of Young Tibetologists,” edited by Franz Xaver Erhard et al. Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, 37: 551-68. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_37_29.pdf

So-Rim Lee

Academy of Korean Studies Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Lecturer at the Center for Korean Research

Office: 909A IAB
Office Hours: R 2:30-4:00
Email: sl2179@columbia.edu

Educational Background
PhD Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
M.A. Text and Performance, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art — Birkbeck, University of London
M.A. English Literature, Seoul National University
B.A. Film Studies, Columbia University
Classes Taught

EAAS UN3217 Korean Popular Cinema
EAAS UN 3207 Lights, Camera, Action: The Visual Culture of K-pop

Research Interests

Contemporary performance and popular culture in Korea, critical race and gender theories, performance studies and visual culture, film and global media studies, transnational East Asia

So-Rim Lee is the 2018-19 Center for Korean Research-Academy of Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Lee researches on contemporary popular culture’s complex embodiments of neoliberalism through performance studies and visual culture, with a focus on South Korea. Lee’s doctoral dissertation, “Performing the Self: Cosmetic Surgery and the Political Economy of Beauty in Korea,” weds historiography, cultural studies, media studies, and performance analysis to construe cosmetic surgery as a mode of performing one’s subjectivity in contemporary Korea. Lee has previously written for New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, and Theatre Survey, and is a recipient of the Ric Weiland Humanities and Sciences Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and the Charlene Porras Graduate Scholar Award from the El Centro Chicano y Latino at Stanford University.

Kwi Jeong Lee

Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism

Office: 80 Claremont Ave, Rm. 210
Email: kl3122@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Princeton University

Research Interests

Buddhist apologetics, inter-religious debate, material/visual culture, sensuous religion, media theory

Kwi Jeong Lee specializes in medieval Chinese Buddhism. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Princeton University in 2018. Her current project examines how and why Buddhist cultic images fueled controversy among learned circles from 300 to 700 CE. Through the analysis of the anti-Buddhist controversy over the devotional use of material objects, her project tracks the trajectory in which the rhetoric of idolatry prompted Buddhist apologists to formulate a sophisticated theory of cultic images in medieval China.

Hye Eun Choi

Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow

Office: 907A IAB
Email: hec2137@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: University of Wisconsin-Madison (’18)
MA: University of Texas at Austin (’10)
BA: Dong-A University (’94)

Research Interests

Modern East Asian History, Korean History, Sound Culture

Hye Eun Choi is a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Her dissertation, titled “The Making of the Recording Industry in Colonial Korea (1910-1945),” explores the birth of the Korean recording industry at the intersection of capitalism, colonialism, and globalized modern sound culture, revealing that the recording industry played an essential role in the formation of modernity in Korea under Japanese rule. During her stay at Columbia, she will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript.

Selected Publications

“The Emergence of Transnational Recording Companies in the Japanese Empire and Local Autonomy in Korean Record Production,” Nikkan bunka kōryū kikin ronbun-shū (2016)

“The Nipponophone Company and Record Consumption in Colonial Korea,” International Journal of Korean History (2015)

“Ilbon Ch’ugŭmgi Sanghoe wa SingminjiChosŏn ŭi Ŭmban Sijang,” Taejung ŭmak (2014)

The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is now accepting applications for our 2019 graduate programs. The deadline for the EALAC Ph.D. program is November 30, 2018. The priority deadline for application to the EALAC M.A. Program is November 30, 2018. Space permitting, applications will be accepted for the M.A. program on a rolling basis until May 31, 2019.

All applications to EALAC graduate programs, both M.A. and Ph.D., are submitted through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences online application system.

John Tseh-han Chen

Lecturer, Wm. Theodore de Bary Postdoctoral Fellow

Office: B-204 Heyman Center
Office Hours: R 2:00-4:00
Email: jtc2148@columbia.edu

Educational Background
PhD: Columbia University (2018)
MA: Columbia University (2013)
BA: Harvard University (2008)
Classes Taught
East Asian UN1002: Major Topics in East Asian Civilization (Fall 2018)
HSEA GU4221: Many Belts, Many Roads: China and the Islamic World, c.600AD-Present (Spring 2019)
Research Interests

John Chen’s first book project, The Worldliest Minority: A Global History of Muslims in Modern China, examines the transformation of Chinese Muslim (Hui) identity as empires across Asia gave way to nation-states. It shows how leading Chinese Muslims engaged extensively with modern Islamic thought from the Middle East and Indian Ocean, but also played crucial roles in China’s domestic and foreign policies toward Muslims. In this context, these leaders articulated a new vision of Chinese Muslims as a minority group uniquely connected to the outside world yet uniquely important and loyal to the Chinese nation. Using a wide range of Chinese and Arabic sources, this project rethinks the relationship between transnational mobility and national consolidation, and offers a connected, contingent, and non-monolithic view of both Islam and China.

Beyond the book project, Dr. Chen is interested in a variety of topics including Chinese Muslim pharmacies and materia medica trade, Islam and communism, and modern Chinese and Arabic thought. In terms of concepts and methods, he is especially interested in exploring new intersections between global history, area studies, intellectual history, and histories of science.

Selected Publications

“Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow-Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism.” ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 3/2 (Spring 2018): 120-39.

“Medicine and Muslim Modernity in China.” Ottoman History Podcast. July 2, 2018.

“‘Just Like Old Friends’: The Significance of Southeast Asia to Modern Chinese Islam.” Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (SOJOURN) 31/3 (November 2016): 685-742.

“Re-Orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938-55.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and Middle East (CSSAAME) 34/1 (Spring 2014): 24-51.

JM Chris Chang

Lecturer, Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities

Office: 303 Heyman Center
Office Hours: W 10:00-12:00
Email:  jcc2174@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Amherst College
MA/MSc: Columbia University/London School of Economics
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Intro to East Asian Civ: China
EEAS UN3971 Technology and Power in Modern China

Research Interests

Socialism, bureaucracy, knowledge production, material culture, the archive

JM Chris Chang is a historian of modern China, having received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2018. His research focuses on issues of bureaucracy, archive, surveillance, and political culture in 20th century China. His current project is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork as understood through the dossier system, the socialist institution of comprehensive files on individual Chinese subjects. The project examines how the paper routines of the dossier consumed the bureaucratic profession and became the material for everyday political acts. His work utilizes what are known in the field as ‘garbage sources’–files previously discarded from official archives that have since resurfaced in book and paper markets. The use of this sourcebase has informed a broader interest in the material culture and afterlife of government paper. His research has received support from the Social Science Research Council and the ACLS/Mellon Foundation.

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Naoko Sourial

ADJUNCT LECTURER IN JAPANESE

Teaching Hours: M Tu W Th 11:40 am -12:45 pm
Office Hours: W 1:30-2:30 pm
Phone: (212)854-5502
Email: nns2111@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Columbia University
BA: Nanzan University

Classes Taught

JPNS UN1101 First Year Japanese I
JPNS UN1102 First Year Japanese II

Research Interests

Japanese Pedagogy, Use of Technology in Japanese Language Learning, Sociolinguistics

Naoko Sourial started teaching at Columbia University in Spring 2017. Before teaching at Columba, she has taught Japanese at New York University and Baruch College, City University of New York. She has developed curriculum and teaching lessons for Business Japanese for intermediate and advanced level students at Baruch. She also has implemented various unique and creative language learning projects while teaching at NYU and Baruch, including video projects and virtual exchange blog projects in collaboration with other universities.

Selected Publications

“Connecting “Senpai” and “Kohai” through a blog-based Junior Sensei Project,” Asia Pacific Virtual Exchange Association (2017)

“Efforts in Improving Learner’s Welfare: Effects of repetitive practice by exchanging text messages via cell phones,” The 2016 Symposium on Japanese Language Education; The 20th Japanese Language Symposium in Europe; The 5th conference on Japanese Linguistics and Language Teaching (2016)

“A Collaborative Video Project in Cross-Institutional Settings ”, The 20th Annual Meeting of Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum (2013)

We are proud to announce the opening of a new program of Vietnamese language study beginning in the fall of 2018. Our new instructor, Nguyễn Phương Chung, comes to Columbia with extensive experience teaching Vietnamese at the college and graduate levels in Vietnam, developing pedagogy tailored to the specific demands of the Vietnamese language, and training diplomats at the US Embassy to Vietnam in Hanoi according to State Department standards.  Classes utilize a functional approach with heavy emphasis on learner participation and practical communication. Our program combines the basic six-tiered plan for language mastery currently used by the University of Social Sciences & Humanities in Vietnam with the standards and techniques developed by the State Department for diplomatic language training. Students are encouraged to apply and enhance their practical communicatory skills through exploration of Vietnam’s rich cultural heritage, as well as the diversity and vibrancy of contemporary Vietnamese society.

We currently offer an introductory level of Vietnamese, UN1101 (no experience necessary) and UN1102, as well as a second-year + heritage level course UN1201 and UN1202 (placement exam required)  throughout the year, with additional possibilities on a case-by-case basis, for those interested in advanced study during the 2018-2019 academic year. Regular third- and fourth-year courses will also be offered as the program grows.  The Vietnamese language program is also proud to serve the needs of Columbia’s newly-formed graduate program in Vietnamese studies.  With the recent appointments of Liên-Hằng Nguyễn (History) and John Phan (EALAC), Columbia is now one of the only institutions to offer a unified graduate program on Vietnamese history, culture, and literary criticism, from premodern to contemporary times.  The Vietnamese language program is working closely with Professors Nguyễn and Phan to establish a premier center for Vietnamese language training here at Columbia.  Our long-term goal is to develop a program that will serve the needs of all levels of interest, from the beginner, to the heritage learner, to advance graduate students working on primary materials.

For more information on the Vietnamese language program, please contact Nguyễn Phương Chung.  For more information on Vietnamese studies at Columbia University, please contact Professor John Phan.

Photo by Clay Eaton

We are pleased to announce that Ying Qian, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, along with Debashree Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Modern South Asian Studies, and Brian Larkin, Professor of Anthropology, have been awarded a Global Humanities Projects Grant.

The grant supports their project Thinking the Ecological in Media Studies which conceives of “ecology” as methodology as well as material reality, both fundamentally predicated on the specificities of time and place. With India, China, and Nigeria as their primary sites of study, the lead faculty hope to initiate a broad conversation on campus on the ways in which media condition our sensory environments, the ecologies of media labor and production, and the urgent need to think with “other” media from “other” places.