current-phd-students

Kaitlin Hao

Email: kh3124@columbia.edu

Kaitlin Hao is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Columbia University. Her research concerns overseas Chinese-run industries (1980s-2000s) in sites like the island of Saipan and New York City. She is interested in using film, media, and literature to trace the experiences of overseas migrant women employed in industries like garment manufacturing, sex work, tourism, and entertainment. Her work has received support from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia Center for Political Economy.  She received her MA from the Columbia EALAC program, and holds a BA in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard College. Kaitlin is passionate about public education and social media-based pedagogy, and has pursued projects in collaboration with the Asian Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and Museum of Chinese in America.

Sophie Dodds

Field: Premodern Chinese literature

Advisor: Wei Shang

Email: sd3524@columbia.edu

Sophie Dodds is a Ph.D. student of premodern Chinese literature with interests primarily in reading culture, late imperial “desktop dramas” and novels (as well as commentaries thereof), novel theory, and book history. She is also completing the ICLS graduate certificate in comparative literature and society.

Before joining the graduate school, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia College.

Mackenzie A. Fox

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: maf2292@columbia.edu

Mackenzie is a Ph.D. candidate studying Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) intellectual and cultural history. Before coming to Columbia, he received a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures and History from Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

His research challenges the standard narrative that Song intellectual life was dominated by the rise of Neo-Confucianism and other systematic philosophies. Drawing on sources ranging from technical treatises to prefaces and literary miscellany, he argues that Song intellectual culture can be seen as a repertoire, with literati drawing contextually on multiple frameworks including, to cite just a few examples, empirical rigor, Confucian moral philosophy (including Neo-Confucianism), and aesthetic ideals such as self-expression, rather than rigidly adhering to any single systematic vision.

His dissertation examines how this intellectual plurality functioned in practice. It traces the development of rigorous empirical inquiry as a widely accepted mode of investigation, analyzes how systematic thinkers such as Zhu Xi engaged with particularistic and technical knowledge, and explores the defensive strategies literati used to justify their diverse interests. By attending to the gap between rhetorical justification and actual practice, the dissertation develops a new model for understanding Song intellectual culture as irreducibly plural, with implications for how we understand the nature of “orthodoxy” in both Song and later imperial China.