current-phd-students

Iris Kim

Iris Kim

Field: Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Email: ik2398@columbia.edu

Iris is a Ph.D. student of modern Korean literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include constructions of family and gender, visual culture, and translation. In her M.A. thesis, she examined how the changing representations of the orphan in the cultural field intertwined with constructions of motherhood and gendered identities in postwar South Korea. Iris received her B.A. in International Comparative Studies from Duke University and completed her M.A. in EALAC before joining the Ph.D. program.

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Mairead Hynes

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 20th 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.

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Samuel M. Hellmann

Samuel M. Hellmann 

Field: Chinese Media and Cinema
Advisor: Ying Qian and Lydia Liu
Email: smh2282@columbia.edu

Samuel Hellmann is a PhD candidate in Chinese media and cinema. He is affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Center for Comparative Media. His dissertation, tentatively titled “International Form / Socialist Content,” looks at the work of central state architects in the early years of the Chinese Revolution alongside their Soviet counterparts, turning to both design work and theoretical output to reconstruct the parameters of socialist internationalism as it materialized in the physical spaces of urban and rural China. Before coming to Columbia, he earned a BA in history from McGill University and an MA in political theory from the CUNY Graduate Center

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