Field: Chinese Theater
Advisor: Wei Shang
Email: f.zhao@columbia.edu
Fran Zhao is a PhD candidate in Chinese Theater. Her research focuses on early Ming court theater and its historical context.
She has taught topics in Chinese history, religion, and visual culture, and has contributed illustrations and maps to academic publications.
Education:
BSocSci, Geography – NUS
Yifan ZhangField: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Email: yz2681@columbia.edu
Yifan is a Ph.D. student in Chinese literature, with a focus on the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1912). He received his B.A. (2014) from Peking University and M.A. (2016) from Columbia University. He works primarily on Ming-Qing short and long narratives, fiction in particular, and has a keen interest in examining how they speak to the issues that derive from and respond to urban history, local history, elite society, print culture, and material culture. His current dissertation project explores language practice and cultural innovation in the Wu dialect area that centers on Suzhou, the economic and cultural pivot in early modern China.
Iris ZhangField: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: iris.zhang@columbia.edu
Iris Zhang is a PhD candidate in premodern Japanese religions. With an interest in the interplay between speech acts and religious rituals, her research project focuses on the use of chanting practices in late Heian Japan. In her dissertation, she analyzes how lay people perceived ritually formatted language as efficacious and how chanting practices were integrated in the quotidian life of the populace. Her second ongoing project is an extension of her M.A. thesis, which examines the deification of Murasaki Shikibu at Ishiyama Temple near Kyoto, Japan. Iris received her B.A. in Economics with a minor in East Asian Studies from University of California, Los Angeles and her M.A. in EALAC at Columbia before joining the PhD program.
