Field: Premodern Chinese literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Email: sd3524@columbia.edu
Sophie Dodds is a Ph.D. student of premodern Chinese literature with interests primarily in reading culture, late imperial “desktop dramas” and novels (as well as commentaries thereof), novel theory, and book history. She is also completing the ICLS graduate certificate in comparative literature and society.
Before joining the graduate school, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia College.
Email: Np2632@columbia.edu
BA: Duke University
MA: Harvard Divinity School
PhD: Columbia University
Palden Gyal, Ph.D., is a historian of empire, statecraft, and frontier governance in early modern and modern Asia. He is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University’s UCAME and a Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Frontiers of Empire: Statecraft and Sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, 1650–1911, a book project developed from his dissertation, reexamines the Sino-Tibetan borderlands as dynamic spaces of ideological contestation and political negotiation rather than passive peripheries shaped solely by imperial power. Drawing on multilingual archival materials, monastic abbatial records, and hagiographies, the study foregrounds the Tibetan princely states of Gyalrong as pivotal actors in Qing imperial expansion, highlighting their political, economic, and religious agency.
In addition to his academic work, Palden is active in literary translation from Tibetan and Chinese into English. His translations and essays have appeared in Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books (China Channel), and various scholarly journals and edited volumes. Through translation, he maintains an ongoing engagement with contemporary Tibetan literary and intellectual culture.
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Email: CF2747@columbia.edu
Cameron Foltz is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research examines the intersections of religion, governance, and territoriality in Inner Asia, with a focus on the environmental and political histories of the Tibetan plateau. Broadly, his work engages questions of sovereignty, monastic institutions, and the transformation of frontier zones through religious and economic exchange.
His book project, “Constructing Qinghai: Pastoralist Settlement, Monastic Territorialization, and State Incorporation (1724–1935),” argues that Tibetan pastoralists territorialized the Blue Lake (Chinese: Qinghai hu; Tibetan: Tsongönpo; Mongolian: Kokenuur) grasslands through the establishment of permanent monasteries. The monasteries’ integration of Tibetan pastoralists as their patron communities, their wider religious networks, and their role in taming local territorial deities remade the Blue Lake region. The Tibetan communities funded monastery construction through the sale of their sheep’s wool during an international wool boom (c. 1880–1929) fueled by US carpet production. After the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1912, the wool trade drew the Xining-based Ma militarists into the Blue Lake region. Ma Qi (1869–1931) and his brother and son, Ma Lin (1876–1945) and Ma Bufang (1903–1975), engaged in their own practice of territorialization that sought to secure their place in the nascent Republic of China. This process resulted in the establishment of Qinghai Province in 1929. However, the Chinese administrative presence on the Blue Lake grasslands was hollow and contingent upon the monastic territorialization established by Tibetan pastoralists.
Support for his research has been provided by Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia, and the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund.
