current-phd-students

Melissa Li

Melissa Li

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: gl2595@columbia.edu

Melissa Li is a Ph.D. student in premodern Japanese literature. During her graduate studies, she intends to untangle the theatrical experience of late Edo kabuki through literary analysis, theatre criticism and cultural studies. She is interested in the duality of kabuki theatre, both as a form of entertainment to be performed and consumed, and an agency to shape commoners’ reading preferences, dramatize circulating texts, and further construct a new communal identity of Edo that overlaid the city’s previously shared historical memories centered on samurai and household. Her current project engages with the continuities and transformations in the dramaturgy of 19 th -century Edo kabuki, through a comparative study of representative sewamono (contemporary-themed) plays by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, Segawa Jokō III, and Kawatake Mokuami. Melissa received her B.S. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA in 2015.

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Crismon Lewis

Crismon Lewis

Field: Chinese History

Advisor: Feng Li

Email: crismon.lewis@columbia.edu

Crismon Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate of pre-modern Chinese history. His dissertation project, entitled “Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE) Bronze Inscriptions and the Beginnings of Early Chinese Literature,” traces the evolutionary development of early bronze inscriptional practice and explores their literary and aesthetic qualities. His research also concerns questions of literacy and its expansion in early first millennium BCE China.

Prior to joining the EALAC department, Crismon received an M.A. in Chinese from the University of Colorado Boulder and a B.A. in Chinese from Brigham Young University.

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Hana Lethen

Hana Lethen

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: hana.lethen@columbia.edu

Hana Lethen is a PhD candidate specializing in theater and performance in premodern Japan. In particular, her work focuses on how the embodied techniques, aesthetic conventions, and other distinguishing characteristics of medieval theatrical genres offer insights in excess of privileged textual and documentary archives. Her dissertation, Choreographies of Eccentricity: Madness and Gender in Medieval Noh Theater, examines how the identification of madness with dance shaped embodiments of difference in noh’s genre of “madness plays.” Evidencing her steadfast commitment to scholarship informed by praxis, she has extensive training and performance experience in noh dance and chanting as well as nihon buyō.

Hana’s article, “Moving Spectacles: Madwomen and Human Trafficking in Noh’s Peripheries,” is forthcoming in the Spring 2026 issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright and FLAS fellowships. She received her AB in comparative literature from Princeton in 2017.

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