admin

Filed Under: recent-phds

Harlan Chambers

Harlan ChambersHarlan Chambers

Field: Chinese Literature and Culture
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: hdc2116@columbia.edu

Harlan Chambers is a Ph.D. student affiliated with Columbia’s Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Before coming to New York, he earned a license in Chinese language and civilization at France’s Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) as well as an MA in Asian Cultures and Languages from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation research interrogates the cultural practices of thinkers committed, both body and pen, to refashioning China’s agrarian world, from the land reforms of the 1940s through the formal establishment of the People’s Communes during the Great Leap Forward.  Formerly an actor in Paris, Harlan also has an avid interest in theatre and other forms of live performance. Additional research areas include Marxist thought, political economy, and histories of revolutionary internationalism.

by

Madeleine Zelin

Madeleine Zelin

Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies

Office: 611 Kent Hall

Phone: (212) 854-2592 [I do not use my phone, please email]Email: mhz1@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University (’70)
PhD: University of California, Berkeley (’79)

Selected Classes Taught

HSEA GU4891 Law in Chinese HIstory
HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China I
HSEA GU4884 Merchants, Markets and the State
HSEA GR8888 Colloquium on Chinese Legal History
HSEA G8861 Industrial Revolutions

Research Interests

Modern Chinese Legal and Economic History, Comparative History of Law and the Economy

Madeleine Zelin has, since her Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, taken an iconoclastic approach to the complex forces shaping modern China. Professor Zelin’s recent research has focused on legal history, the role of law in the Chinese economy and the interface between law, culture and the market in early modern China. She has written on state handling of economic disputes as well as the role of Chambers of Commerce as new sites for economic mediation. Her chapter on “Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China” (in William Kirby, ed., Realms of Freedom in Modern China, Stanford, 2004) challenges the assumption that the politically autocratic late Ming and Qing imperial regimes were restrictive in their handling of the private economy. Her latest book, The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China, is a study of an advanced industrial community in southern Sichuan from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and provides new insights into the role of customary legal and business practices in China’s early modern economic development. It has been awarded the Fairbank Prize (American Historical Association), Alan Sharlin Memorial Award (Social Science History Association) and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS). As part of her commitment to mentoring younger scholars in legal and economic history of East Asia Professor Zelin serves as co-director of the first AAS New Directions Workshop: Economic History of Asia and is a founding board member of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. She is currently completing a book on China’s earliest company and bankruptcy law reforms at the onset of the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600‐1980 (co-editor, Pickering and Chatto, 2015)

The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch’ing China (University of California, 1984)

Filed Under: Emeritus

Chun-fang Yu

Chun-Fang Yu

SHENG YEN PROFESSOR EMERITA

Office: 304 80 Claremont
Phone: (212) 854-4147
Email: cy2126@columbia.edu
Educational Background

BA: Tunghai University (’59)
MA: Smith College (’61)
PhD: Columbia University (’73)

Research Interests

Chinese Buddhism, East Asian Religions, Buddhism and Gender, Buddhism and Modernization

Chun-fang Yu was born in China and educated in Taiwan, coming to the States for graduate study. Before coming to Columbia, she taught at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, from 1972 until 2004, serving as the chair of the Religion Department from 2000. Her primary field of specialization is Chinese Buddhism and Chinese religions. She is interested in the impact of Buddhist thought and practice on Chinese society as well as the impact of Chinese religious traditions on the domestication of Buddhism in China. She is the author of The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis, Kuan-yin, the Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara, and the co-editor of Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (Univ of California Press, 1992). In 2013, she completed a study of Buddhist nuns in contemporary Taiwan, focusing on the roles they have played in the revival of Buddhism in Taiwan during the last three decades.

Her current research interests reflect her continuing fascination with the transformation of Buddhism in China. She has begun a new project which is tentatively entitled “The Creation of a Buddhist Pantheon”; it studies the pairing of two bodhisattvas: Guanyin and Dizang, in iconography and temple architecture from the tenth century to the present.

Selected Publications

Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii, 2013)

Encountering the Dharma: Studies in Chinese Buddhism (Global Scholarly Publications, 2005)

Kuan Yin, the Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara (Columbia University, 2001)

In Search of the Dharma: Memoirs of A Modern Chinese Buddhist Pilgrim (editor, State University of New York, 1992)

The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (Columbia University, 1981)

by