Modern

Madeleine Zelin

Madeleine Zelin

Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies

Office: 611 Kent Hall

Phone: (212) 854-2592 [I do not use my phone, please email]Email: mhz1@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University (’70)
PhD: University of California, Berkeley (’79)

Selected Classes Taught

HSEA GU4891 Law in Chinese HIstory
HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China I
HSEA GU4884 Merchants, Markets and the State
HSEA GR8888 Colloquium on Chinese Legal History
HSEA G8861 Industrial Revolutions

Research Interests

Modern Chinese Legal and Economic History, Comparative History of Law and the Economy

Madeleine Zelin has, since her Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, taken an iconoclastic approach to the complex forces shaping modern China. Professor Zelin’s recent research has focused on legal history, the role of law in the Chinese economy and the interface between law, culture and the market in early modern China. She has written on state handling of economic disputes as well as the role of Chambers of Commerce as new sites for economic mediation. Her chapter on “Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China” (in William Kirby, ed., Realms of Freedom in Modern China, Stanford, 2004) challenges the assumption that the politically autocratic late Ming and Qing imperial regimes were restrictive in their handling of the private economy. Her latest book, The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China, is a study of an advanced industrial community in southern Sichuan from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and provides new insights into the role of customary legal and business practices in China’s early modern economic development. It has been awarded the Fairbank Prize (American Historical Association), Alan Sharlin Memorial Award (Social Science History Association) and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS). As part of her commitment to mentoring younger scholars in legal and economic history of East Asia Professor Zelin serves as co-director of the first AAS New Directions Workshop: Economic History of Asia and is a founding board member of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. She is currently completing a book on China’s earliest company and bankruptcy law reforms at the onset of the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600‐1980 (co-editor, Pickering and Chatto, 2015)

The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch’ing China (University of California, 1984)

Gray Tuttle

Gray Tuttle

Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Office: 401 Kent Hall
Office Hours: By appointment
Phone: (212) 854-4096
Email: gwt2102@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Princeton University (’91)
MA: Harvard University (’96)
PhD: Harvard University (’02)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1365 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Tibet
EARL GU4310 Life Writing in Tibetan Buddhism
HSEA GU4720 20th Century Tibetan History

Research Interests

Tibetan History & Religion

Gray Tuttle studies modern Tibetan history, from the 1600s to the 1950s. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examined the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. Instead, he argues, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory). His current research project, “Amdo Tibet, Middle Ground between Lhasa and Beijing (1578-1865),” is a historical analysis of the economic and cultural relations between China and Tibet in the early modern periods (16th – 19th centuries) when the intellectual and economic centers of Tibet shifted to the east, to Amdo — a Tibetan cultural region the size of France in northwestern China. Deploying Richard White’s concept of the “Middle Ground” in the context of two mature civilizations — Tibetan and Chinese — encountering one another, this book will examine how this contact led to three dramatic areas of growth that defined early modern Tibet: 1) the advent of mass monastic education, 2) the bureaucratization of reincarnate lamas’ charisma and 3) the development of modern conceptions of geography that reshaped the way Tibet was imagined. Recently he has turned to increasingly large data sets in an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history. In an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history, Gray has turned to increasingly large data sets over the course of his career. Starting with a database of over 1000 Amdo monasteries with dozens of fields of data (GIS location, foundation data, number of monks, rooms, livestock, etc), led to building datasets on 100s of incarnation series and monastic colleges as well, which have shaped the direction of the Amdo history book project in significant ways. Lately, with a research assistant, Gray has worked with larger datasets and the statistical computing and graphing programming language called “R” to examine existing data on Tibetan (mostly monk’s) longevity in comparison with Chinese monks, Chinese literati, and Europeans in history. Future plans include working with even larger datasets by examining the hydrology of the Tibetan plateau with climate scientists, to see if new perspectives of the large arcs of Tibetan history might be reframed by a deeper understanding of climate data.

Selected Publications

With Geoff Childs (Washington University in St. Louis), Rebecca Kippen (Monash University), “Longevity and Life Expectancy Fluctuations among Tibetan Lamas from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century,” Forthcoming in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines.

“A Qing Court Lama Dreaming His Place in the World,” A Living Endeavor: Individuals and their Inner Worlds in Chinese Religious Life. Edited by James Benn and Ben Brose. Brill, 2025, pp. 98-118.

With Lan Wu. “Tibetan Buddhist Vanguards among the Mongols and Manchus, 1576-1638.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, (October 2021).

“Pattern Recognition: Tracking the Spread of the Incarnation Institution through Time and across Tibetan Territory.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines. 38 (February 2017)

Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West. Co-edited with Ben Hillman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Sources of Tibetan Tradition (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

The Tibetan History Reader (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

Tomi Suzuki

Tomi Suzuki

Professor of Japanese Literature, Faculty Curriculum Advisor

Office: 410 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave 2026-27
Phone: (212) 854-5034
Email: ts202@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of Tokyo (’74)
MA: University of Tokyo (’77)
PhD: Yale University (’88)

Classes Taught

AHUM UN3830: Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008: Readings in Classical Japanese: from Heian to Meiji
EAAS GU4810: Women and Literary Culture in Japan: from 10th century to the present
JPNS GR8020: Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Modern Japanese literature, especially 19th-and 20th-century narrative fiction and criticism in a comparative and transnational perspective; literary and cultural theory, particularly theory of narrative, genre and gender, modernism and modernity, translation and adaptation; intellectual history of modern Japan; linguistic thought and language education in 19th-and 20th-century Japan; history of reading, issues of canon formation and literary histories.

Professor Suzuki joined the department at Columbia University in 1996. She has published extensively in both the English and Japanese languages. Currently, Tomi Suzuki is completing a book entitled Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s, which investigates the formation of the literary field from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period in relationship to the process of nation building, gender construction, journalism, language reform and education. It explores the modernist construction and questioning of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions in a transnational context. She co-edited The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature. She is now co-editing a volume entitled Rethinking Authorship in Comparative and Historical Perspectives: Transmission, Ownership, and Collectivity (forthcoming). The Japanese edition was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2021.

Selected Publications

Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s (forthcoming).

Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1996 [Japanese translation, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000; Korean translation, Seoul: Saengak-ui-namu Publishing, 2004]

What is an Author?: Transmission, Ownership, and Collectivity (<Sakusha> to wa nani ka: keishō,senyū, kyōdōsei), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2021 (co-editor)

Cambridge History of Japanese Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2016 (co-editor)

Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan (Bilingual Edition), Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2012 (co-editor)

Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, Stanford University Press, 2000 (co-editor)

Sôzôsareta koten: kanon keisei, kokumin kokka, nihon bungaku (Invented Classics: Canon Formation, Nation-State, and Japanese Literature), Tokyo: Shin’yôsha, 1999 (co-editor) [Korean translation, Seoul: Somyong Publishing Co, 2002; Chinese translation, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2021]