Modern

Lu Kou

Lu Kou

Assistant Professor

Office: 412 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave for Fall 2026

Email: lk2950@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Peking University (2010)
MA: Harvard University (2012)
PhD: Harvard University (2018)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3935 The Fantastic in Pre-Modern China
EAAS GU4031 History of Chinese Literature
EAAS GU4534 Medieval Travel Writing
CHNS GR6107 Readings in Chinese Scholarship
CHNS GR6510 Chinese Bibliography
EAAS GR8042 Classical Chinese Poetry
EAAS GR8029 Historiography in Early Medieval China

Research Interests

As a medievalist and a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, Lu Kou’s research interests include medieval Chinese literature and culture, poetry and poetics, historiography, and comparative studies of China’s Middle Period and medieval Europe. He is currently at work on two book projects: War of Words: Contesting Discourses of Legitimacy in Early Medieval China, which examines the “discursive battles” fought among rival states in China’s early medieval period and investigates how rhetoric constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity; and (tentatively titled) Locked Seal, Heart of Poetry: Bureaucracy and the Representation of Work in Medieval Chinese Poetry, 400-900 CE, which studies the dialectic between poetry and bureaucratic systems, between the lyrical and quotidian renderings of “work” in medieval poetry. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was Assistant Professor of Chinese at Bard College (2019-2022) and Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College (2018-2019).

Selected Publications

“As If Heaven Was Warning: Omens and Interpretations in Shen Yue’s Song shu 宋書.” Journal of American Oriental Society 145.2 (2025): 285–308.

“间谍、越境、修辞：南北朝跨境交流中的“言”和“志” ([Spies, Border-crossing, and Rhetoric: “Words” and “Intent” during Early Medieval Interstate Contacts]). Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究 (Literature and Arts Studies), vol. 383.1 (2024): 45–61.

“The Poetics and Politics of Space: Writing Imperial Visits of Private Estates in Early Tang Court Poetry.” The Nanyang Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture. 2023. Special issue on “court culture.” (May, 2023): 34–63.

“Audible Empire: Musical Orthodoxy and Spectacle in the Sui Dynasty.” Early Medieval China, vol. 28 (2022): pp. 73-96.

“Epistolary Exchange and Psychological Warfare: Tuoba Tao’s 拓跋燾 (408–452, r. 423–452) Letters to his Southern Audience.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 7.1 (2020): pp. 34-59.

[Chinese version:] “Shuxin zhong de junwang xingxiang yu xinli zhan: Tuoba Tao (408–452, r. 423–452) de guoshu he ta de nanfang duzhe” 書信中的君王形象與心理戰：拓跋燾（408–452）的國書和他的南方讀者. Lingnan xuebao 嶺南學報, 13 (2020): pp. 51-72.

Theodore Hughes

Theodore Hughes

Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities

Office: 618 Kent Hall
Office Hours: WR 3:00 pm-4:00pm
Phone: (212) 854-8545
Email: th2150@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of California, San Diego (’90)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’97)
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’02)

Classes Taught

EAAS 3215 Korean Literature and Film
EAAS 3217 Korean Popular Cinema
EAAS 4124 South Korean Film as History
EAAS 4160 Cultures in Colonial Korea

Research Interests

Theodore Hughes received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include visual culture, film, literature, and history. He works across disciplines, with a particular interest in intermediality—the relations between visual and verbal forms of cultural production. He is the author of Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War (Columbia University Press, 2026) and Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book in Korean studies in the year of its publication. Co-edited works include Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art (special issue of Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); and Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), a finalist for the Daesan Literary Translation Prize. He is the translator of Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee Ho-Chul (EastBridge, 2004; reissued under EastBridge imprint at Camphor Press, 2017). He is currently working on a project that approaches the Korean mystery novel as a form of historiography.

Selected Publications

Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War (Columbia University Press, 2026)

Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (co-editor, Cornell, 2013)

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia, 2012)

Nicholas Bartlett

Nicholas Bartlett

Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese
Culture and Society, Barnard College

Office: 321-A Milbank Hall Barnard College
Office Hours: W 10-11 AM/R 1:15-2:15 PM, calendly.com/nickbartlett
Phone: (212) 854-2125
Email: nbartlet@barnard.edu

Educational Background

BA: Pomona College
MIA: Columbia University
PhD: University of California, Berkeley

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3844 Culture, Mental Health and Healing in East Asia

EAAS GU4236 China’s Long 1980s (with Prof. Ying Qian)

EAAS GU4840 China and the Politics of Desire

FYS BBC1740 Approaching Trauma

Research Interests

Addiction and recovery, labor, civil society, psychoanalysis, groups and authority

Nicholas Bartlett is an anthropologist of China with training in medical anthropology and psychoanalysis. His first book, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China (University of California and Columbia Weatherhead 2020), offers a phenomenological account of long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction in a tin mining city. His current research explores the introduction of group relations conferences to China. In events designed to provoke phantasy and conflict, everything from geopolitical tensions to intimate dreams is made available for attendees to connect, critique, and reflect upon. Fieldwork in staff and member roles at conferences and in visits to workplaces explores how the negotiation of meanings in and around GRCs contributes to imagining authority and collective life in contemporary China and beyond.

He did his undergraduate degree at Pomona College and studied and worked in international public health before completing his PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and UCSF. Prior to coming to Barnard, he taught anthropology courses at USC and UCLA and was a research analyst candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.

Selected Publications

Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China. University of California Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series, 2020.

“The Ones Who Struck Out: Entrepreneurialism, Heroin Addiction, and Historical Obsolescence in Reform Era China,” positions: asia critique 26.3 (2018).

“Idling in Mao’s Shadow: Heroin Addiction and the Contested Therapeutic Value of Socialist Traditions of Laboring,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2018) 42.1.