Faculty-Discipline

Gavin Healy

Office hours: M 10am-12 noon
E-mail: gh148@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University
JD: Columbia University School of Law
MA: Chinese University of Hong Kong
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: China
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia

Research Interests

History of Late Imperial/Modern China, Cold War in Asia, Comparative Labor History, Tourism History,
History and Cinema Gavin Healy is a historian of modern China. In addition to his teaching at Columbia, he is a Center
Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His book, A
Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests, examines how personnel within China’s
state tourism bureaucracy struggled to balance the use of tourism as a form of political, historical, and
cultural representation with the demands of developing a revenue-generating service industry in a socialist
economy. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research
Council, the American Historical Association, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Prior to his work
as a historian, he practiced law in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul for ten years.

Selected Publications

A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests (Cornell University Press, 2026).
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501785900/a-guide-to-maos-china/#bookTabs=1

“Michelangelo Antonioni, Tourist Snapshots, and the Politics of the ‘Backward Scene’ in 1970s China,”
Journal of Contemporary History 59, no. 4 (October 2024): 732-753.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00220094241271006

“Fuwuyuan on Film: Cinema, Socialist Education, and Service Labor from the Great Leap Forward to
Reform and Opening Up,” Modern China 50, no. 2 (March 2024): 200-230.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00977004231170526

“Touring the Socialist World: The Political and Cultural Economy of China’s Outbound Tourism, 1956-
1965,” Twentieth-Century China 46, no. 1 (January 2021): 83-102.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2021.0005

Cameron Foltz

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Office:
Office Hours:

Email: CF2747@columbia.edu

Website: www.cameronfoltz.com

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.

Agnes Hsu-Tang

Distinguished Senior Fellow in EALAC

Educational Background

BA: Bryn Mawr College
MA: University of Pennsylvania
PhD: University of Pennsylvania (’04)

Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang is Board Chair of The New York Historical and Co-chair of the Objects Conservation Visiting Committee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Trained as an archaeologist and art historian, Dr. Hsu-Tang served on UNESCO’s (Paris) scientific committees from 2006 to 2013, participated on missions to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and China, and authored a white paper on the multi-national UNESCO inscriptions of the Qhapag Ñan (the Incan Road) and the Continental Silk Road (Chang’an to Tianshan Corridor). From 2013 to 2014, Agnes advised President Obama’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee on the renewal of a bilateral agreement to reduce the illicit trafficking of cultural objects. Agnes began her training in Classical languages in high school, and studied Classical art and archaeology and English literature at Bryn Mawr College. After college, Agnes served as a special assistant to the late U.S. Ambassador James R. Lilley, a former envoy to China and Korea. She also holds a M.A. in East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

Agnes was a Mellon pre-doctoral fellow in History of Science at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University in 2003; she received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Hsu-Tang was an inaugural Joukowsky fellow in archaeology at Brown University; she was a Mellon scholar in Classics at Stanford University from 2007 to 2008. She joined Columbia University in 2015 and was appointed Distinguished Consulting Scholar at University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2018.

From 2008 to 2015, Dr. Hsu-Tang was involved in several international films on art and archaeology. She was the bi-lingual host and narrator of two award-winning documentary series: an archaeology series on History Channel Asia (2011-2013), and a contemporary art series on Discovery Channel Asia (2014-2015) that premiered during 2014 Art Basel Hong Kong. Her prior film credits include “The Giant Buddha at Leshan” (2009) and “Xi’an: China’s Forgotten City” (2010) on Discovery USA, “China’s Terracotta Warriors” on PBS (2011), and Mankind: The Story of All of Us series on History Channel (2012).

Dr. Hsu-Tang has been a director at the Institute of the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University since 2013. She is a co-founder of the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University (2015), Tang Center for Silk Road Studies at UC Berkeley (2018), and Hsu-Tang Library for Classical Chinese Literature at Oxford University Press (2021). She is a founding member of the Artist Protection Fund at the Institute of International Education (2014-2022), and served on the boards of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (2013-2018) and the Peabody Institute of Archaeology at Phillips Academy Andover (2015-2018). She chaired Asia Society’s Global Arts Council (2015-2020), and was Executive Chair of Asia Society’s inaugural Triennial of Contemporary Asian Art in 2020.

Dr. Hsu-Tang is a longtime trustee of The New York Historical, and formerly, a managing director on the board of the Metropolitan Opera from 2014 to 2021, at which she chaired its nominating committee from 2018 to 2020 and served on the oversight committee.

Formerly trained as a Classical musician, Agnes made her debut at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1989. She is a recipient of two Mellon fellowships for her academic research, a teaching recognition from Brown University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, and of the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Centennial Medal and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Women Leaders Award for her work in cultural heritage.

Select Publications

“A Tomb with A View: Axonometry in Early Chinese Cartography” in Designing Boundaries: The Exercise of the Spatial Imagination in Pre-Modern China: Shaping the Expanse (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022)

“Executive Chair’s Preface” and “Art of Virtue” in exhibition catalog We Do Not Dream Alone (Milan: Skira Editore SpA, 2021)

“Dreaming Together in a Divided World” in exhibition catalog Dreaming Together: New-York Historical Society and Asia Society (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2020)

“Structured Perceptions of Real and Imagined Landscapes in Early Imperial China” in Geography, Ethnography, and Perceptions of the World from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

“An Emic Perspective of the Ancient Mapmaker’s Art” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

White paper: The Exceptional Universal Value of the Road Systems in Ancient Empires: A Comparative Study of the Chinese Oasis Route of the Early Silk Road and the Qhapag Ñan (Paris: UNESCO, 2006)