current-phd-students

Euiyeon Kim

Euiyeon Kim

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Seong Uk Kim
Email: ek3431@columbia.edu
Euiyeon Kim is a Ph.D. student whose research explores the intersection of ritual practice and monumental visual culture in Korean and Tibetan Buddhism between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Her broader interests include transregional Buddhist exchange and the social history of Buddhism across Inner and East Asia. She holds a B.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Emily Ren

Emily Ren

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: yr2529@columbia.edu
Emily Yian Ren is a PhD student specializing in medieval Japanese religion. Her research focuses on children and sexuality, particularly on youthful acolytes known as chigo, adolescent boys who received accommodation, education, and material support in exchange for companionship and sexual relations with high ranking clerics or elite courtiers between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Her broader interests include female patronage, gendered perception, goddesses and demonesses, constructions of motherhood, and the negotiation of sexual taboos and transgression within religious contexts. Before joining EALAC, Emily received her B.A. in Art History from New York University (2023) and M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University (2025).

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Xinmeng Guo

Xinmeng Guo

Field: Premodern Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Email: xg2436@columbia.edu

Xinmeng Guo is a Ph.D. student of late imperial Chinese literature and cultural history. Prior to joining Columbia, she received her B.A. and M.Phil. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her master’s thesis traces how seventeenth-century narratives registered the anxieties accompanying the era’s economic and social changes and envisioned new possibilities of selfhood. Her current research centers on Southeast China and the ocean during the early stages of globalization (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), where she explores the intersection of literature, historiography, and visual culture during this episode of maritime plurality and interconnectedness.

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

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