Nicole Roldan

Angelo Wong

Angelo Wong

Field: Japanese Literature
Adviser: Tomi Suzuki
Email: angelo.wong@columbia.edu

Angelo 王若 grew up in Hong Kong. He received his BA from the University of Hong Kong and his MA and MPhil from Columbia University.

His PhD dissertation project at Columbia follows the development of genres of popular print collections of oral narratives in early modern Japan, focusing particularly on collections of comic narratives (hanashibon) and narratives depicting the supernatural (kaidanshū). Examining a range of such collections from the 17th to the 19th centuries, it explores how oral storytelling cultures intersected with print literature in playful and socially-aware ways, like imagining differences between the country’s provinces or parodying urban class hierarchies. It also examines the depiction of supernatural entities like ghosts and monsters in early modern popular literature, shedding light on the imagination of the beyond-human at a time marked by a fluid ambivalence about the existence of such beings.

Angelo was a runner up in the 5th JLPP International Translation Competition (2020).

In his free time, Angelo enjoys exploring New York’s parks. He is also a gamer and an anime fan.

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Jiaqi Wang

Jiaqi Wang

Field: Premodern Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Email: jw3983@columbia.edu

Jiaqi Wang is a PhD student of premodern Chinese literature. She is primarily interested in late imperial Chinese fiction, intellectual history, and cultural history. Her current project focuses on the popular publications, literary writings, and theatrical performances during the Ming-Qing transition to examine the dynamic relationships among media and investigate the political and historical significance of literary writings during the dynastic transition. Before joining the EALAC PhD program, Jiaqi received her B.A. in Chinese literature (2017) and M.A. in classical Chinese literature (2020) from Peking University, and M.A. in East Asian studies from Columbia University (2022). An abridged version of her M.A. thesis (2020) has been published in Chinese as “Shilun Honglou Meng de wenzhang jiegou (On the Compositional Transitions and Narrative Structure of The Story of the Stone)” in Honglou Meng xuekan (Studies on “A Dream of Red Mansions”), 2022(04).

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Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: bas2260@columbia.edu

Benjamin is a doctoral student in Chinese History. He studies the history of science and technology and the military history of Middle Period East Asia (~ AD 900-1300). Benjamin hopes to use material historical methodologies borrowed from Archaeology and Art History as well as digital humanities tools, like GIS, to better understand the production of technologies like gunpowder and their transmission among the many states that existed in East Asia in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Benjamin received his BA in History from Emory University where he began his research on this period. This past spring he received an MA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University.

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