Nicole Roldan

Daniel Penner

Daniel Penner

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Email: dp2964@columbia.edu

Daniel is a PhD candidate in Japanese literature and cultural history. His dissertation, “Languages of Critical Enlightenment: Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Writing in Meiji Japan,” examines emergent cultures of knowledge production, organization and circulation in the Meiji period (1868-1912). In particular, his work focuses on how the demands of translation brought issues of language, orthography, and rhetoric to the forefront in the critical engagement with Euro-American conceptions of nature and society. Before joining Columbia’s EALAC department, Daniel received a BA in Mathematics at Princeton in 2014, and an MA in Statistics at Stanford in 2016. He is also an avid rock musician and language learner.

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Eason Lu

Eason Lu

Field: Chinese Literature and Cultural History

Advisor: Shang Wei

Email: eason.lu@columbia.edu

Eason is a Ph.D. student of premodern Chinese literature and cultural history, with special attention to the performance traditions, drama, and material culture. His doctoral research centers on the burgeoning of theater as a form of entertainment during late imperial to early modern China, examining the accompanied engagement and anxiety among literati of the period. Eason holds an M.A. from EALAC at Columbia University, and his thesis analyzes nüshu, the “women’s script” in China, exploring the academic and artistic reifications and (mis)interpretations. Eason is an award-winning television and animation producer. He also contributes scholarly work on contemporary East Asian media cultures and popular entertainment. His recent work, Remapping spatiality in contemporary East Asian media engagement: reevaluating China’s Got Talent, can be found in Media, Culture & Society.

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Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Field: Tibetan and Chinese Visual Culture
Advisor: Gray Tuttle and Ying Qian
Email: yl3452@columbia.edu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu is a PhD student on the History-East Asia track, focusing on Tibetan and Chinese visual culture. Her research interest covers Tibetan cultural productions including art (both traditional and contemporary), photography and film. Victoria has written on topics such as the representation of Tibetan people in portrait photography, the use of traditional religious vocabulary in contemporary art and the indexicality of photographic technology in Tibetan cinema.

Her current project focuses on Tibetan portraits under the influence of photographic technology. With training in comparative media, she approaches the act of portrait making, image forming and photo taking as visual, cultural and social practices and attempts to place them in a context that is closely correlated with the evolution of Chinese visual culture and social environment.

Before joining the doctoral program, Victoria received her BA in Art History from Barnard College and MA in Tibetan Studies from EALAC at Columbia University.

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