Lecturer

Palden Gyal

Palden Gyal

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

Office: Heyman Center B204
Office Hours: F 1:00- 3:00pm
Email:  palden.gyal@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: History-East Asia, Columbia University
MA: Buddhist Studies, Harvard University
BA: Philosophy, Duke University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Intro to East Asian Civilization: China
HSEA GU4762 Rethinking Modern China Through its Borderlands
HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China I

Research Interests

My primary project is a book manuscript developed from my dissertation: Mapping Power at Empire’s Edge: Statecraft and Sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, 1700–1950. The book reconceptualizes the Sino-Tibetan borderlands as active spaces of political negotiation rather than passive peripheries shaped by imperial design. It looks at how eastern Tibetan polities, especially the princely states of Gyalrong, shaped Qing imperial expansion and governance through political, economic, and religious agency from the early eighteenth century onward. Drawing on Tibetan- and Chinese-language archives, it centers local actors to offer a fresh perspective on empire and frontier governance in Inner and East Asian history. 

Alongside this, I am developing two further research projects: one on revolutionary politics and memory in twentieth-century Eastern Tibet, and another on the longue-durée environmental and climate history of premodern Tibet. Both build on preliminary research already conducted.

Selected Publications

“The Meu Kingdom: Unravelling the history of a Tibetan polity in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, 1700–1930,” Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 55 (2024) 

“The Sociopolitical Impact of a Natural Disaster: The Snow Disaster of the Earth-Rat Year (1828) in Northwestern Tibet,” Climates and Cultures in History (2024) 

“The Lament of an Old Man.” In Longing to Awaken: Buddhist Devotion in Tibetan Poetry and Song, edited by Holly Gayley and Dominique Townsend (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024)

“The Role of Pain in Buddhism: The Conquest of Suffering,” co-authored with Owen Flanagan, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, edited by Jennifer Corns (London: Routledge, 2017). 

Gavin Healy

Gavin Healy

Office hours: Wednesday 1:00pm-3:00pm, Thursday 3:00pm-4:00pm;
624 Kent Hall
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

HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China I
EAAS GU4625 Beyond the Bamboo Curtain: Socialist China in the World
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

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.