Faculty

Palden Gyal

Palden Gyal

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Heyman Center for the Humanities
Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
 

Email: Np2632@columbia.edu

BA: Duke University

MA: Harvard Divinity School

PhD: Columbia University

Palden Gyal, Ph.D., is a historian of empire, statecraft, and frontier governance in early modern and modern Asia. He is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University’s UCAME and a Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Frontiers of Empire: Statecraft and Sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, 1650–1911, a book project developed from his dissertation, reexamines the Sino-Tibetan borderlands as dynamic spaces of ideological contestation and political negotiation rather than passive peripheries shaped solely by imperial power. Drawing on multilingual archival materials, monastic abbatial records, and hagiographies, the study foregrounds the Tibetan princely states of Gyalrong as pivotal actors in Qing imperial expansion, highlighting their political, economic, and religious agency.

In addition to his academic work, Palden is active in literary translation from Tibetan and Chinese into English. His translations and essays have appeared in Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books (China Channel), and various scholarly journals and edited volumes. Through translation, he maintains an ongoing engagement with contemporary Tibetan literary and intellectual culture.

Cameron Foltz

Cameron Foltz

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Heyman Center for the Humanities
Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
 

Office: 
Office Hours: 

Email: CF2747@columbia.edu

 

Cameron Foltz is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research examines the intersections of religion, governance, and territoriality in Inner Asia, with a focus on the environmental and political histories of the Tibetan plateau. Broadly, his work engages questions of sovereignty, monastic institutions, and the transformation of frontier zones through religious and economic exchange.

His book project, “Constructing Qinghai: Pastoralist Settlement, Monastic Territorialization, and State Incorporation (1724–1935),” argues that Tibetan pastoralists territorialized the Blue Lake (Chinese: Qinghai hu; Tibetan: Tsongönpo; Mongolian: Kokenuur) grasslands through the establishment of permanent monasteries. The monasteries’ integration of Tibetan pastoralists as their patron communities, their wider religious networks, and their role in taming local territorial deities remade the Blue Lake region. The Tibetan communities funded monastery construction through the sale of their sheep’s wool during an international wool boom (c. 1880–1929) fueled by US carpet production. After the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1912, the wool trade drew the Xining-based Ma militarists into the Blue Lake region. Ma Qi (1869–1931) and his brother and son, Ma Lin (1876–1945) and Ma Bufang (1903–1975), engaged in their own practice of territorialization that sought to secure their place in the nascent Republic of China. This process resulted in the establishment of Qinghai Province in 1929. However, the Chinese administrative presence on the Blue Lake grasslands was hollow and contingent upon the monastic territorialization established by Tibetan pastoralists.

Support for his research has been provided by Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia, and the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund.

Yifan Zhang

Yifan Zhang

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Heyman Center for the Humanities
Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
 

Office: Heyman Center B-204
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2-4 pm (and by appointment)

Email: yz2681@columbia.edu

 
Educational Background
BA: Peking University
MA: Columbia University
PhD: Columbia University
 
Classes Taught
Asian Humanities UN1400: Colloquium on Major Texts
East Asian GU4255: Cities and Everyday Life in Chinese Cultural History
 
Research Interests

Early modern Chinese literature (particularly fiction, drama, and popular literature); urban history; local language, writing, print, and oral media; knowledge and material cultures


Yifan Zhang is a scholar of Chinese literature and cultural history with a focus on the Ming-Qing period (1368-1911). He originally trained in Chinese philology and classical textual scholarship. His interest in the heterogeneity of the Ming-Qing cultural landscape has led him to draw on interdisciplinary methods to engage with both canonical and non-canonical genres, with particular attention to the role of literary practices in world-making.

He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation on the entrepreneurial editor Feng Menglong’s (1574-1646) Mountain Songs. This project explores the generative potential of the local Wu language, otherwise marginalized or romanticized, in Feng’s artful reinvention of a racy song genre across media, and in the making of the city of Suzhou as both a material arena and sensuous imagery of fashion in early modern China. By rectifying conventional discourses on the folksong, it offers a new framework for understanding the localized, embodied dynamics of early modern culture-making.

His second book project seeks to probe the interrelation between environmental disorder, literary imagination, and empire-building by focusing on the issue of water in China’s long eighteenth century. His other ongoing projects include the craze for a Suzhou-branded playing-card game in the seventeenth century, and the intertwined aesthetics of Ming-Qing vernacular fiction and the decorative arts of domestic spaces and objects.