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.

Hetty Ye-Jae Lee

Field: Korean Cultural History
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Email: yl2693@columbia.edu

Hetty Ye-Jae Lee is a PhD candidate in EALAC studying the history of forensic psychiatry and psychology in modern South Korea. Her research examines how diagnostic technologies shaped the medical-legal categories of “mental incapacity,” “deception,” and “trauma” from 1945 to 1987, amid postcolonial technology transfer, national security legislation, and democratization movements. She is also pursuing a certificate in the Psychoanalytic Studies Program within ICLS.

Hetty received her BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University with a focus on German and Ancient Greek literature and psychoanalysis. She received her MA in modern Korean cultural studies from Columbia University in 2023.

Mairead Hynes

Field: Modern Japanese History
Advisor: Gregory Pflugfelder
Email: mch2203@columbia.edu

Mairead Hynes (she/her) is a PhD student in the History Department, studying the comparative transpacific history of women’s war mobilization and anti-military feminism in 20^th century Japan and the United States. She focuses on how women in both countries have understood and articulated women’s war responsibility and complicity with empire, and investigates alternative feminist historical methodologies as they appear in movement practices of women’s history. Before entering the Ph.D. program at Columbia University, Mairead graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2013 with a BA in History, and in 2018 earned her MA in Contemporary Asian Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.