current-phd-students

Songgu Cai

Songgu Cai

Field:
Advisor:
Email: sc5345@columbia.edu
Songgu Cai is a Ph.D. student in premodern Chinese history. He is working on law and legal systems in pre-imperial China, with a particular interest in their origin and development in the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods (11th—5th cen. BCE). His research interests also extend to commemorations of the early legal system during the Warring States period (4th—3rd cen. BCE). Songgu received his B.A. in Economics and History from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. from Columbia University.

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Peter Chen

Peter Chen

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: pc2936@columbia.edu

Peter Yuanxi Chen’s dissertation, tentatively entitled “Otherwise than Empire: Anarchist Philology in Late Qing China,” examines the political and ethical space between philosophy and philology and the possibility of literature therein. Before coming to Columbia, he received his BA in Religious Studies from Pomona College and his MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School in Philosophy of Religions. He spent a year after college in Hangzhou at the China Academy of Art on a Fulbright, conducting a research project on aesthetics and ethics in the work of the twentieth-century artist Feng Zikai.

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Xuexin Cai

Xuexin Cai

Field: Chinese and Environmental History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Year of Enrollment: 2020
Email: xc2546@columbia.edu

Xuexin Cai is a PhD candidate in the History-East Asia Program. He works at the intersection of environmental humanities, borderlands studies, and the history of science and technology. While his current research focuses on Yunnan, in Southwest China, he is also interested in the broader Sino-Southeast Asian and Sino-Tibetan borderlands.

His dissertation, titled “Between Wasteland and Wilderness: Rubber, Nature, and the Making of Tropical China, 1945-2000,” explores the socio-environmental history of Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna), which sits at the intersection of China, Laos, and Burma, and is one of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and critical use of scientific studies and digital geospatial mapping, his dissertation traces two intertwined historical processes in the half century following the end of WWII: the biophysical, socioeconomic, and discursive transformation of southern Yunnan (particularly Xishuangbanna) from a remote borderland into the center of China’s tropical sciences and agriculture, and China’s transformation into a state with serious commitment to environmentally sustainable development. Focusing on China’s coterminous establishment of rubber farms and nature reserves, this project explores questions that are key to understanding the environmental changes and the lived experience of millions of people in southern Yunnan and beyond, from the Maoist to the Reform periods.

Experiences before coming to Columbia have shaped Xuexin’s current research interests. During his undergraduate years at New York University Abu Dhabi, he studied the history of tea trade between communities in Southwest China and those on the Tibetan Plateau. Upon graduation, he went to Yunnan and spent three years there, working first in the public humanities and then at a village primary school not far from the China-Burma border. The people and places that he became familiar with during those years continue to be an important source of inspiration for his current research.

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