Modern

John Phan

John Phan

Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities

Office: 620 Kent Hall

Office Hours: Thursdays, 2-4pm

Phone: (212) 854-5744
Email: jp3720@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Saint Olaf College (’02)
MA: Columbia University (’05)
PhD: Cornell University (’12)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1367 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Vietnam
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS 8630 Braided Languages: Diglossia and Cosmopolitanism in Premodern Vietnam
EAAS GU4412 History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia
EAAS UN3710 Fiction & Film in the Making of Modern Vietnams
HSEA GR6300 Vietnamese Studies: Historiography & Methodology

Research Interests

Language as an historical record, Language ethics through time, Translation, Vietnamese
Writing Systems and Vernacular Scripts, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Contact
between China and Vietnam


John Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken
language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political
realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues
of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnames Language,
focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is forthcoming from Harvard
Asia Center Press. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern
Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary
Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical
regionalization of that period. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad
issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical
issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple
languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and
of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically
diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.

For a complete list of publications, please visit his personal website.

Selected Publications
“Sesquisyllabicity,  Chữ Nôm, and the Early Modern embrace of vernacular writing in Vietnam.” In Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Online First advance version (2020), pp. 1-14.
“Vietnamese Lexicographic Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019). Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, pp. 356-365.
“The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic,” Journal of World Literature (2016)

“Rebooting the Vernacular in 17th Century Vietnam,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919 (Brill, 2014)

“Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2013)

Lydia H. Liu

Lydia Liu

Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities

Office: 406 Kent Hall
Office Hours: Wed 2pm-4pm
Phone: (212) 854-5631
Email: ll2410@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Northwestern Normal University
MA: Shangdong University
PhD: Harvard University

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3927 China in the Modern World
EAAS G8035 Lu Xun and Modern China
CPLS GR6100 Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society
CLEA 6120GR Race and Empire in the Asia Pacific

EAASGR6712 The Chinese Avant-Garde: A Political History

Research Interests

Modern Chinese literature and comparative literature, media studies, philosophy of language, and critical translation theory.

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research centers on modern China, cross-cultural exchange, and global transformation in modern history, with a focus on the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries and on the evolution of writing, textuality, and media technology.

Professor Liu teaches courses on modern Chinese literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and offers graduate courses on comparative literature, critical translation theory, and digital media at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard UP, 2004); and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, Translated Modernity (Stanford UP, 1995). Her other books include Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, Duke, 1999); an edited volume in Chinese called The Global Order and the Standard of Civilization (Beijing Sanlian, 2016) which appeared in Korean edition translated by Tae-Geun Cha (Gyoyudang Press) in 2022. Her co-edited volume The Birth of Chinese Feminism with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko (Columbia UP, 2013) is on the New York Public Library’s list of Essential Reads on Feminism.

More recently, Professor Liu has published the following articles/book chapters: “Wittgenstein in the Machine” in Critical Inquiry (Spring 2021); “The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime” in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2021); “Das Digitale in der psychischen Maschine “in Technosphäre (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019); “Die Erfindung des Freud’schen Roboters,” Springerin, no.4 (2019), and “The Gift of a Living Past” in Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford UP, 2018); “The Battleground of Translation: Making Equal in a Global Structure of Inequality,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 38 (2018).

As a creative writer, she published The Nesbit Code in Chinese with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong that won the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award.

Professor Liu was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997–1998) and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004–2005); a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). In 2021, she was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences under the auspices UNESCO.

Selected Publications

The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard, 2004)

Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, Duke, 1999)

Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (Stanford, 1995)

The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism (co-author with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, Columbia, 2013)

Eugenia Lean

Eugenia Lean

Professor of Chinese History, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs

Office: 609 Kent
Office Hours: T 1:00 pm- 3:00 pm
Phone: (212) 854-1742
Email: eyl2006@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Stanford University (’90)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’96)
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’01)

Classes Taught

GU4882 History of Modern China

Research Interests

Modern Chinese History, History of Science and Technology, Gender Studies, History of Affect

Eugenia Lean, professor (EALAC), received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry, mass media, consumer culture, affect studies and gender, as well as law and urban society. She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia. She is the author of Public Passions: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (UC Press, 2007) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10541.html, which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, given by the American Historical Association.

Professor Lean’s second book, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press, 2020) https://cup.columbia.edu/book/vernacular-industrialism-in-china/9780231193481, examines the manufacturing, commercial and cultural activities of maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940). It illustrates how lettered men of early twentieth century China engaged in “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues that drew on the process of experimentation with both local and global practices of manufacturing and was marked by heterogeneous, often ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. See the New Books Network for a recent podcast. A third book project focuses on China’s involvement in shaping twentieth-century global regimes of intellectual property rights from trademark infringement to patenting science. It investigates the local vibrant cultures of copying and authenticating in China, as well as enquires into how China emerged as the “quintessential copycat” in the modern world.

She was featured in “Top Young Historians,” History News Network (fall 2008) and received the 2013-2014 Faculty Mentoring Award for faculty in Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She received an Institute for Advanced Studies fellowship and a National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship for 2017-2018.

Please see her website for more information.

Selected Publications:

Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), https://cup.columbia.edu/book/vernacular-industrialism-in-china/9780231193481.

Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10541.html.

施剑翘复仇案-民国时期公众同情的兴起与影响 [Shi Jianqiao fuchou an – Minguo shiqi gongzhong tongqing de xingqi yu yingxiang] (Jiangsu Renmin Press, 2011), http://book.douban.com/subject/6397072/.

Rieppel, Lukas, Eugenia Lean and Deringer, William. 2018. “Introduction to Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories.” In “Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories.” Eds. Lukas Rieppel, William Deringer, and Eugenia Lean. Osiris. 33, no. 1 (2018): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cfjh-f461

“The Making of a Chinese Copycat: Trademarks and Recipes in Early Twentieth-Century Global Science and Capitalism.” In “Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories.” Eds. Lukas Rieppel, William Deringer, and Eugenia Lean. Osiris. 33, no. 1 (2018): 271-293. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cwbv-5k05

“Recipes for Men: Manufacturing Make-up and the Politics of Production in 1910s China.” In Osiris Special issue on “Masculinities in Science/Sciences of Masculinity.” Eds. Erika Milam and Robert Nye. 30.1 (Fall 2015): 134-157. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hg3a-t323

“The Butterfly Mark: Chen Diexian, His Brand, and Cultural Entrepreneurism in Republican China.” In The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65. (University of British Columbia Press, 2015).

“Proofreading Science: Editing and Experimentation in Manuals by a 1930s’ Industrialist.” In Science and Technology in Republican China (Brill, 2014).