Xiaoke Yang

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: xy2504@columbia.edu

Xiaoke Yang is a Ph.D. student in medieval Japanese Religion and Material Culture. Her research interests center on the materiality of religious objects that facilitate relations between humans, objects, and deities. She focuses on how religious objects generate and empower living networks that translate tangible materials into intangible religious and socio-political benefits. She is also interested in how religious objects described in literary works like folktales, myths, and performative texts serve similar functions as actual offerings in cultic belief construction.

Xiaoke received her BA in East Asian Studies from New York University (2020), and MA in Japanese Religion from Columbia University (2023).

Hekang Yang

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Madeleine Zelin
Email: hy2614@columbia.edu

Hekang studies late imperial and modern China. His research interests revolve around three intersecting and recurring themes: state formation, frontier and province, and bureaucracy. His dissertation project, “The Qing Fiscal Policy, 1875-1916” analyzes the consolidation, coordination, and constitutional reforms of fiscal planning in the late Qing state. He presents a revisionist assessment of the declined nineteenth century thesis. Hekang also explores the party-state apparatus in socialist China, which is a hybrid of the Soviet Nomenklatura and the Qing’s Manchu-Chinese civil service. The two models emphasized noble bloodlines, ethnic balance, cyclical rotation of posts, and systemic evaluation. Hekang, a native of Zhejiang, studied in Bremen, Minnesota, and Chicago before coming to New York City.

Liu Xuan

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Li Feng
Email: lx2267@columbia.edu

Liu Xuan is a doctoral student in early Chinese history. His current research project investigates the complicated process of social mobility as well as the social transformation in early Chinese society, with a particular focus on the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods. Before joining the PhD program of EALAC, Liu Xuan received both his B.A. (2017) and M.A. (2020) in history from Beijing Normal University.