current-phd-students

Yelim Oh

Yelim Oh

Field: Modern Korean Literature and Film

Advisor: Theodore Hughes

Email: yo2294@columbia.edu

Yelim Oh is a PhD student in modern Korean literature and cultural studies. She is currently interested in the exchanges between mobility and political praxis in 20th-century Korea. Media theory and infrastructural history are her other interests. Yelim completed her MA in East Asian Studies and BA in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia before joining the PhD program. Her MA thesis traced how the portrayals of affective motion in the leftist cultural production of the immediate post-1945 era locate a renewed political energetics in the notion of elevated humanity.

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Daniel Penner

Daniel Penner

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Email: dp2964@columbia.edu

Daniel is a PhD candidate in Japanese literature and cultural history. His dissertation, “Languages of Critical Enlightenment: Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Writing in Meiji Japan,” examines emergent cultures of knowledge production, organization and circulation in the Meiji period (1868-1912). In particular, his work focuses on how the demands of translation brought issues of language, orthography, and rhetoric to the forefront in the critical engagement with Euro-American conceptions of nature and society. Before joining Columbia’s EALAC department, Daniel received a BA in Mathematics at Princeton in 2014, and an MA in Statistics at Stanford in 2016. He is also an avid rock musician and language learner.

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Dan Nguyen

Dan Nguyen

Field: Early-Modern Vietnamese History
Advisor: John Phan
Email: dtn2123@columbia.edu

Dan Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate on the History-East Asia track. His work focuses on the post-Ming Chinese diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Vietnamese states of Tonkin and Cochinchina. His dissertation focuses on the formation and collapse of indigenous Cochinchinese elite clans during the pre-imperial Nguyen period (c.1558-1786), and their subsequent replacement with the hybrid Sino-Vietnamese elite normative of the Nguyen dynasty proper (1802-1945). His interests include middle period and late imperial Confucianism across East Asia, the intellectual history of civilization (hua) and barbarism (yi) within the Confucian tradition, Literary Sinitic prose and poetry in Vietnam, and the influence of Chinese peoples and institutions on state and identity formation in early modern Southeast Asia.

Prior to joining the EALAC department, Dan received a B.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Music from the University of Houston.

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