current-phd-students

Joanna Suwen Lee-Brown 李素文

Joanna SW Lee-Brown 李素文

Field: Modern Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia H. Liu
Joanna Lee-Brown is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature, affiliated with the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Her dissertation explores the shifting relationship between global Islam, socialism, and Third World internationalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present. It asks if religion is compatible with global emancipatory left-wing politics by tracing Chinese Muslims’ historical attempts to theorize and narrativize the relationship between Islam, anti-imperialism, and socialism through translingual writing and media practices. She works primarily with Chinese and Arabic in her research.Joanna has conducted archival research in both China and Egypt. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), as well as by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) and Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) at Columbia University. Her study of Arabic at the prestigious Center for Arabic Study in Cairo (CAASIC) at the American University of Cairo (AUC) was supported by the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. She has presented her research at the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) and Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual conferences, as well as at workshops at Columbia University and Lingnan University in Hong Kong.Joanna believes that education in the humanities remains critical to responding to the crises of our times. Competitively selected to be a Columbia GSAS Teaching Scholar, she is currently teaching her own course, “Religion and Revolution in Modern China and the World”, at Columbia University.

You can learn more about Joanna at https://joannaleebrown.com/ and contact her at jsl2230@columbia.edu.

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Lingran Xie

Lingran Xie

Field: Modern Tibetan Studies
Advisor: Dr. Gray Tuttle
Email: lx2306@columbia.edu

Lingran Xie is a Ph.D. student in the East Asian Religion program. Her research interest focuses on monasticism in central Tibet (Lhasa and Shigatse), Sino-Tibetan relations during the
modern era, and Buddhist modernity in China. She wrote her M.A. thesis on how Lhasa’s
Drabzhi Lhamo Temple (གྲྭ་བཞི་དགོན་), a Tibetan Buddhist female treasure deity temple,
has encountered Buddhist modernity. In the summer of 2023, through field studies, she examined
the history of Drabzhi Lhamo Temple and its locative area Drabzhi Thang (གྲ་བཞི་ཐང་)
during the reigns of the Yongzheng Emperor and the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty,
explored the possible explanation of Grabzhi Lhamo’s origin and identity, and analyzed factors
contributing to Drabzhi Lhamo’s recent rise in popularity.

She received her B.A. in Religious Studies and Asian Studies from DePauw University
and her M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) from Columbia University. At
DePauw, her research broadly included analysis of pre-modern and modern Chinese literatures,
relations between the Chinese government and religions in the contemporary era, and the
political significance of religious imageries in modern Tibetan history. Before joining the M.A.
program at EALAC, she worked for two years as a research assistant at Yak Museum of Tibet in
Lhasa, where she conducted field research on the city’s monasteries.

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Andrew Kahn

Andrew Kahn

Field: Japanese Media and Literature
Advisor: Takuya Tsunoda
Email: ak3398@columbia.edu

Andrew Kahn is a PhD student in Japanese film and media. His current research seeks to understand how concepts of “indigeneity” functioned to define nation and self in discourses of the 1960s and 1970s. He takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining film and works of literature alongside their critical reception, and is fascinated by the remediation in modernity of the premodern past. He is pursuing graduate certificates from the Center for Comparative Media and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Andrew received an M.A. in EALAC from Columbia, where his thesis project situated Imamura Shōhei’s filmmaking practice in the 1960s within contemporary discussions about autochthony (dochaku). Before that, he received a B.A. in Literature from Yale. In between, he worked as a journalist, programming web interactives and writing on culture, and performed sketch comedy in New York City. He collects Edo-period Japanese porcelain. For more information, please visit andrewmkahn.com

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