current-phd-students

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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Eason Lu

Eason Lu

Field: Chinese Literature and Cultural History

Advisor: Shang Wei

Email: eason.lu@columbia.edu

Eason is a Ph.D. student of premodern Chinese literature and cultural history, with special attention to the performance traditions, drama, and material culture. His doctoral research centers on the burgeoning of theater as a form of entertainment during late imperial to early modern China, examining the accompanied engagement and anxiety among literati of the period. Eason holds an M.A. from EALAC at Columbia University, and his thesis analyzes nüshu, the “women’s script” in China, exploring the academic and artistic reifications and (mis)interpretations. Eason is an award-winning television and animation producer. He also contributes scholarly work on contemporary East Asian media cultures and popular entertainment. His recent work, Remapping spatiality in contemporary East Asian media engagement: reevaluating China’s Got Talent, can be found in Media, Culture & Society.

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Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Field: Tibetan and Chinese Visual Culture
Advisor: Gray Tuttle and Ying Qian
Email: yl3452@columbia.edu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu is a PhD candidate on the History–East Asia track, specializing in Tibetan and Chinese visual culture and trained in comparative media studies. Her research spans Tibetan cultural production across traditional and contemporary art, photography, and film, with particular attention to the intersections of visual practices, media technologies, and social and religious life. She has written on topics including representations of Tibetan people in portrait photography, visual vocabularies and social contexts of contemporary art in Tibet, the indexicality of photographic technology in Tibetan cinema, and the intermediality of Tibetan Buddhist portraiture and photography.

Her dissertation, The Work of Images: Photography and Visual Culture on the Twentieth-Century Tibetan Plateau, traces cultures of image-making under the influence of photographic technology, situating photography within Tibetan Buddhist visual conventions and Chinese media cultures..

Before joining the doctoral program, Victoria received her BA in Art History from Barnard College and her MA in Tibetan Studies from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.

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