Faculty

Andrew Plaks

Andrew Plaks

Adjunct Professor
Office: 410A
Office Hours: WF 9:00-10:00
Email: ap3606@columbia.edu

Educational Background

AB: Princeton University (’67)
PhD: Princeton University (’73)

Research Interests

Chinese and Japanese Classical Literature

Selected Publications

Pu Andi Zixuanji (Collected Works of Andrew Plaks). Beijing: Sanlian shuju (2011)

“Zheng Xuan’s Commentary on the Zhouli,” in Statecraft and Classical Learning: the Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Martin Kern (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

“Why the Chinese Gods Don’t Suffer?,” in Studies in Chinese Language and Culture: Festschrift in Honor of Christoph Harbsmeier (2006).

“Xin as the Seat of the Emotions in Confucian Self-cultivation,” in Love, Hatred, and Other Passions, ed. Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp.113-25.

“Completeness and Partiality in Traditional Commentaries on Honglou meng,” Tamkang Review (XXXVI:1-2), Fall-Winter 2005. pp. 117-35

“Xin as the Seat of the Emotions in Confucian Self-cultivation,” in Love, Hatred, and Other Passions, ed. Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp.113-25.

The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean. London: Penguin Classics (2003)

Filed Under: Adjunct

Leta Hong Fincher

Leta Hong Fincher

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Office Hours: By appointment only
Email: lh2793@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Harvard University
MA: Stanford University
PhD: Tsinghua University

Research Interests

Leta Hong Fincher has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Dissent Magazine and others on the subject of women and feminism in China. She won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for her China reporting.

Leta’s first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed 2014), was named one of the top 5 China books of 2014 by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile, one of the best foreign policy books in 2014 by FP Interrupted and one of the best Asian books of 2014 by Asia House. In 2018, Leftover Women was named on the New York Times list of recommended books on China. Her second book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso 2018), was named one of the best books of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Interrupted, Bitch Media and Autostraddle. The newly released, 10th anniversary edition of Leta’s book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, was named one of the five best books to understand modern China by The Guardian in 2024 and one of the best books of 2023 by China Books Review.

http://www.letahongfincher.com

Named by the Telegraph as an “awesome woman to follow on Twitter,” you may follow Dr. Hong Fincher @letahong.

Selected Publications
Author, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, 10th Anniversary Edition (Bloomsbury 2023)

“What’s #MeToo in China All About?” in The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations (Harvard University Press, 2022)

Author, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso 2018)

by

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)