Field: Modern Chinese Media and Literature

Advisor: Ying Qian
Email: jhp2164@columbia.edu

John Payne is a Ph.D. student of modern Chinese visual media and literature. His research concerns practices of photographic reference, representation, remediation and fabulation across visual media and poetry from 20^th-century China. His research considers what is at stake when documentary media and fiction, respectively, emulate the other; and how writers responded to, altered, or contested the photographic record and its claim to facticity. John is also interested in high-definition imagery, virtuality and simulation in analog industrial media, intermediality, utopianism, and the influence of the topos of indefinite deferral and historical intermediacy on cinematic and literary form in the late Mao Era and after. John maintains an interest in poetry and chuanqi tales from the Tang dynasty, as well as jianghu and wuxia movies and fiction. John has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia, and a BA in China and Asia-Pacific Studies from Cornell.

John is pursuing a certificate in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Field: Modern Chinese Literature

Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: zw3023@columbia.edu

Adam Zhengyuan Wang is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature with a focus on poetry. His research examines the intellectual practices oriented toward the theorization of new poetics in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to travel writing, the tradition of Chinese poetic criticism, modernist poetry, and the philosophy of poetic language. His dissertation project traces the emergence of the concept of the “word” in modern Chinese literary discourse and investigates its impact on the making of modern poetics.