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Filed Under: recent-phds

Tianyuan Huang

Tianyuan Huang

Field: Japanese History
Advisor: Gregory Pflugfelder
Email: th2750@columbia.edu

Tianyuan Huang is a PhD student in early modern and modern Japanese history. Through the evolving conceptions, discourses, and practices surrounding female-specific health issues, her research explores the intersection of the history of medicine, gender and sexuality studies, and the sociology of knowledge. In her dissertation, Tianyuan investigates both the deliberate and the unintentional enacting of ignorance in relation to women’s health, analyzing how different forms of “not knowing” shaped social relationships, legal proceedings, along with individuals’ life and death. In addition, Tianyuan is interested in the historical movement of medical texts, techniques, and therapeutic substances in East Asia, as well as digital humanities and the application of historical geographic information systems (HGIS).
Tianyuan received her Bachelor of Laws (2014) and Master of Laws (2017) in International Politics from Peking University and a Master of Public Policy (2017) from the University of Tokyo. Before entering the PhD program at Columbia University, she worked for an LGBTI rights NGO as a part-time researcher with a focus on international human rights mechanisms and human rights diplomacy.

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Samuel M. Hellmann

Samuel M. Hellmann 

Field: Chinese Media and Cinema
Advisor: Ying Qian and Lydia Liu
Email: smh2282@columbia.edu

Samuel Hellmann is a PhD candidate in Chinese media and cinema. He is affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Center for Comparative Media. His dissertation, tentatively titled “International Form / Socialist Content,” looks at the work of central state architects in the early years of the Chinese Revolution alongside their Soviet counterparts, turning to both design work and theoretical output to reconstruct the parameters of socialist internationalism as it materialized in the physical spaces of urban and rural China. Before coming to Columbia, he earned a BA in history from McGill University and an MA in political theory from the CUNY Graduate Center

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Michelle L. Hauk

Michelle L. Hauk

Field: Modern Japanese History
Advisors: Gregory Pflugfelder & Paul Kreitman
Email: mlh2210@columbia.edu

 

Dr. Michelle L. Hauk is an Assistant Professor in Architectural History and Theory at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Trained in both architectural design and history, she specializes in the history of architecture, technology, and society in twentieth-century Japan. After earning her Ph.D. in Japanese History from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2023, she spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. A recipient of both the Fulbright Graduate Study/Research Award and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant, Dr. Hauk received her M.Arch and MSAS from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) in 2015.

Dr. Hauk’s research focuses on the rapid evolution of Japan’s residential environment and everyday life in the twentieth century on both an urban and domestic scale, particularly in the design of public housing and postwar new towns. Her current project examines how the development of water infrastructure and the technologies that organize its flow reconfigured the twentieth-century Japanese dwelling and paved the way for the prefabrication of its kitchens and baths. In her scholarship and teaching, she considers the ways in which the design of water within domestic environments intersects with social relationships, cultural practices, and the natural environment.

Dr. Hauk offers seminars on topics including Japanese architecture, East Asian urbanism, women in architecture, and the design history of water-related spaces, where she combines research and writing with studio-based exercises that directly engage students with primary-source architectural documents, literature, and film.

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