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

Kristopher Reeves

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: klr2151@columbia.edu

 

 

 

 

Kristopher is currently a PhD candidate interested in issues of literary heteroglossia, focusing primarily on Chinese-style poetry (kanshi) composed by Japanese writers in the ninth and tenth century. Kristopher seeks to draw more attention to the so-called private or family anthologies (shikashū) of Chinese-style poetry. He is currently exploring, on the one hand, ways in which these family anthologies adapted, combined, and, by interweaving poetic traditions taken over from the world of waka verse, significantly transformed earlier genres of Chinese-style poetry, and, on the other, how these literary transformations might be understood simultaneously as sociopolitical responses to different types of readers, from the exalted patron to the fellow poet.

Christopher Peacock

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: cp2657@columbia.edu

Christopher graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Chinese & History and Chinese Literature, respectively. His research interests are focused on Tibetan literary writing – primarily Tibetan-language texts, but also Chinese-language literature about Tibet written by both ethnically Tibetan and ethnically Han authors. His dissertation aims to tackle some of the major questions that arise from considering Tibetan literature in the context of the modern Chinese literary and national spheres. Beginning with late-Qing and Republican-era conceptions of ethnicity, race, nation, and state, particularly the discourse of ‘national character’ and the work of Lu Xun, his project sets out to question assumptions about the meanings and implications of these key ideas in modern China. The bulk of the dissertation goes on to explore Tibetan literary and intellectual nationalism from the 1980s onward. It examines, among other issues, how Tibetan intellectuals have deconstructed and re-purposed Chinese nationalist discourses to create their own iterations of ethnicity and nation, and how in doing so they have complicated our understanding of these notions both in the present day and throughout modern Tibetan and Chinese (literary) history. In addition to his research, Christopher also works on translations of modern Tibetan literary texts.