current-phd-students

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, Dance, 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,” was published 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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Hetty Ye-Jae Lee

Hetty Ye-Jae Lee

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

Hetty is a PhD student in EALAC focusing on modern Korean cultural history. Her research interests include Korean socialist feminist literature and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies. Under this umbrella, she is interested in analyzing women’s writing, censorship, and the intersections between colonialism, socialism, and the history of science and technology in 20th century Korea.

Hetty received her BA in comparative literature from Princeton University in 2017 with a focus on German and Ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She received her MA in modern Korean literature and cultural studies from Columbia University in 2023.

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