current-phd-students

Alexander Sogo

Alexander Sogo

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: acs2299@columbia.edu

Alex is a PhD student in premodern Japanese religion. His studies focus on demonic spirits, possession, exorcism in Heian Japan. This work frequently overlaps with topics such as disease etiology and healing, as well as questions of the identity of “Shinto” in the premodern period. He is also interested in modern issues surrounding theories of religion and magic both in the West and in Japan.
Alex received a BA in Music and Religious Studies from Brown University (2015) and an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley (2017).

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Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: bas2260@columbia.edu

Benjamin is a doctoral student in Chinese History. He studies the history of science and technology and the military history of Middle Period East Asia (~ AD 900-1300). Benjamin hopes to use material historical methodologies borrowed from Archaeology and Art History as well as digital humanities tools, like GIS, to better understand the production of technologies like gunpowder and their transmission among the many states that existed in East Asia in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Benjamin received his BA in History from Emory University where he began his research on this period. This past spring he received an MA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University.

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Komei Sakai

Komei Sakai

Field: Japanese Religion
Advisor: D. Max Moerman
Email: ks2602@columbia.edu

Komei Sakai is a doctoral student of pre-modern Japanese religion. He received his B.A. (2013) in East Asian Studies from New York University. His primary research interest is in the religious iconography of Japanese arms and armor from the Kamakura period, with an emphasis on the engraving on sword blades related to the worship of Fudō Myō-ō. He believes that his research will be able to provide a new perspective in the understanding of the samurais’ religious beliefs. He is also interested in the exchange of swords in pre-modern Japan and China.

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