Field: Modern Chinese literature and culture
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: yan.l@columbia.edu
Yan Liu (刘衍) is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and culture. His research probes the entanglements between art, literature, and politics, with a focus on the Chinese Revolution in the twentieth century, the cultural Cold War in the Sinophone world, and the political history of China’s avant-garde movements.
Field: Chinese History
Advisors: Robert Hymes and Zhaohua Yang
Email: xl3020@columbia.edu
Xinzhi is a Ph.D. student in pre-modern Chinese history, he studies the political, intellectual, and religious history of the Song dynasty. His primary research focuses on the development of the Song emperorship system, the evolving roles of emperors and those high officials, the changing nature of the imperial-subjects relationships, also how Song emperors were able to position themselves above religious hierarchies through political maneuvers on the one hand and ideological reframing of religion on the other hand.
Xinzhi was born in the ancient capital city of the Song- Kaifeng, in Henan Province of China, and grew up in Flushing, New York. Xinzhi received his BA in History and International Relations from Syracuse University in 2020 and his MA in EALAC from Columbia in 2022.
Field: Chinese Cinema, Media, and Arts
Advisor: Ying Qian
Email: yl4587@columbia.edu
Yilun Li is a Ph.D. student in Chinese Cinema, Media, and Arts at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC), where he is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Comparative Media through the Center for Comparative Media (CCM). He hails from China (B.A., Tsinghua University) and holds an M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University.
Standing at the intersection of cinema and media studies, art history, and environmental humanities, his research investigates the politics and aesthetics of Chinese experimental media practices, with a particular focus on their entanglement with urban development, infrastructural construction, resource extraction, environmental degradation, and biopolitical governance. Other interests include nonfiction cinema, modern and contemporary visual arts, media archaeology, and feminist and queer science and technology studies (STS). His academic writing has been published in journals such as Dianying Yishu (Film Art).
