Faculty

Christina Yi

Associate Professor of Japanese Literature

Office: 408 Kent Hall
Email: csy2103@columbia.edu

Educational Background:

BA: University of Virginia (’05)
MA: Columbia University (’09)
PhD: Columbia University (’13)

Classes Taught:

AHUM UN3830 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008 Readings in Classical Japanese
JPNS GR9020 Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests:

Christina Yi is a scholar of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with a research focus on issues of postcoloniality, genre and narrative theory, language politics, and cultural studies. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018), investigated how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. The research and writing of this project was funded through generous grants from the Northeast Asia Council of AAS, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), among others. Her current research project investigates the discursive formation and theoretical limits of “repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku) through an examination of fiction, essays, and memoirs on the subject of repatriation to Japan, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers. This project was funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and Japan Foundation fellowship. Professor Yi is also an active translator, and was a recipient of the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize for her translation of Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus” (Tenma).

Selected Publications:

Sole author: Imperial Testaments: Repatriation Narratives in Modern Japan (advance contract at Columbia University Press)

Co-editor: Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asia Empire (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023)

Translator: Kim Sŏkpŏm, Death of a Crow (Karasu no shi; Seoul Selection, 2022)

Co-editor: “Zainichi Literature and Film” in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019)

Sole author: Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018)

Gavin Healy

Office hours: M 10am-12 noon
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

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

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.