admin

Ying Qian

ying_qianYing Qian

Associate Professor

Office: 930 IAB
Office Hours: F 4 PM-6 PM, Appointment required

Phone: (212)854-5027
Email: yq2189@columbia.edu

Educational Background

AB: Harvard University
MPhil: University of Cambridge, UK
PhD: Harvard University (’13)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3322 East Asian Cinema
EAAS GU4572 Chinese Documentary Cinema
EAAS GR8998 Media Cultures in China

Research Interests

Chinese-language cinema and media; transnational media histories; media of activism, reform and critique; media ecology and knowledge formation

As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in the role of media
and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms
of experience. Her first book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media
in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024) excavates
documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary
movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political
campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It approaches
documentary as an “eventful medium,” and as a prism to examine the mutual
constitution of media and revolution: how revolutionary movements gave
rise to specific media practices, and how these media practices in turn
contributed to the specific paths of revolution’s actualization. This book has
won the Lionel Trilling Book Award from Columbia College, and the best
book in journalism history award from the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Ying Qian’s articles have
appeared in positions: asia critique, Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, China
Perspectives, New Literary History of Modern China, Oxford Handbook of
Chinese Cinemas, and other journals and websites. She is also the co-editor
(with Nicholas Bartlett) of a special issue, Neng 能and China’s Long 1980s
(positions: asia critique, 33.3 August 2025). At Columbia, she teaches classes
on East Asian cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary media, media of
science and technology, and comparative media theory and history. Drawing
from her experiences in filmmaking, she has incorporated creative
assignments in her classes, guiding students to try their hands on media
productions.

Selected Publications

“The Rise of the Brain: Envisioning Human Potential in 1980s China” (single-authored), and
“Neng and China’s 1980s: a Reevaluation” (co-authored with Nicholas Bartlett), in Nicholas Bartlett and Ying Qian eds., Neng 能 and China’s Long 1980s (special issue), 
positions: asia critique v. 33, no. 3, August 2025.

Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia
University Press, 2024)

“When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism: Documentary Cinema in China’s Great Leap
Forward”, Critical Inquiry (Spring 2020).

“The Spectre of Liu Shaoqi,” in A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard, 2017)
“Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets, and the Reconstruction of an Activist Cinema,”
in China’s iGeneration: Filmmakers, Films and Audiences in a New Media Age (Continuum,
2014)

“Power in the Frame: Independent Documentary in China,” The New Left Review (2012)

Andrew Plaks

Andrew Plaks

Adjunct Professor
Office: 410A
Office Hours: WF 9:00-10:00
Email: ap3606@columbia.edu

Educational Background

AB: Princeton University (’67)
PhD: Princeton University (’73)

Research Interests

Chinese and Japanese Classical Literature

Selected Publications

Pu Andi Zixuanji (Collected Works of Andrew Plaks). Beijing: Sanlian shuju (2011)

“Zheng Xuan’s Commentary on the Zhouli,” in Statecraft and Classical Learning: the Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Martin Kern (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

“Why the Chinese Gods Don’t Suffer?,” in Studies in Chinese Language and Culture: Festschrift in Honor of Christoph Harbsmeier (2006).

“Xin as the Seat of the Emotions in Confucian Self-cultivation,” in Love, Hatred, and Other Passions, ed. Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp.113-25.

“Completeness and Partiality in Traditional Commentaries on Honglou meng,” Tamkang Review (XXXVI:1-2), Fall-Winter 2005. pp. 117-35

“Xin as the Seat of the Emotions in Confucian Self-cultivation,” in Love, Hatred, and Other Passions, ed. Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp.113-25.

The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean. London: Penguin Classics (2003)

John Phan

John Phan

Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities

Office: 620 Kent Hall

Current Office Hours: Thursdays 4-6pm (in-person)

Phone: (212) 854-5744
Email: jp3720@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Saint Olaf College (’02)
MA: Columbia University (’05)
PhD: Cornell University (’12)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1367 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Vietnam
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS 8630 Braided Languages: Diglossia and Cosmopolitanism in Premodern Vietnam
EAAS GU4412 History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia
EAAS UN3710 Fiction & Film in the Making of Modern Vietnams
HSEA GR6300 Vietnamese Studies: Historiography & Methodology

Research Interests

Language as an historical record, Language ethics through time, Translation, Vietnamese
Writing Systems and Vernacular Scripts, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Contact
between China and Vietnam


John Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken
language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political
realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues
of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnames Language,
focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is forthcoming from Harvard
Asia Center Press. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern
Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary
Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical
regionalization of that period. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad
issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical
issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple
languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and
of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically
diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.

For a complete list of publications, please visit his personal website.

Selected Publications
“Sesquisyllabicity,  Chữ Nôm, and the Early Modern embrace of vernacular writing in Vietnam.” In Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Online First advance version (2020), pp. 1-14.
“Vietnamese Lexicographic Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019). Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, pp. 356-365.
“The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic,” Journal of World Literature (2016)

“Rebooting the Vernacular in 17th Century Vietnam,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919 (Brill, 2014)

“Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2013)