Postdoctoral Fellow

Yong-ha Kim

Yong-ha Kim

Tang Center Postdoctoral Research Scholar; Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Email: yk2727@columbia.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 1:50–3:50 p.m. and by appointment

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1002 Intro to Major Topics: East Asian Civilization – Making and Experiencing the State in East Asia

Yong-ha is a Tang Center Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, specializing in early Chinese history. His research focuses on the tension between early Chinese empire formation and local diversity. Yong-ha’s dissertation, “Rethinking Unification: Ideology, Standardization, and Local Accommodation in the Qin Empire (221–207 BCE),” critiques the concept of “unification” by examining how it can shroud the violence of conquest and obscure the accommodation of local diversity in the process of early Chinese empire-building. He deploys excavated texts, archaeological materials related to local administration as well as received texts to reconstruct the history of this era. He is also interested in the comparative history of ancient empires and civilizations and is building a database of ancient artifacts held in museums around the world. He is additionally engaged in translating scholarship on ancient civilizations beyond China into Korean.

Valerie J. Cranmer

Valerie J. Cranmer

Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute; Lecturer of Modern Japanese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Office:  602 Kent Hall
Office Hours: M, R 10 am-12:00 pm and by appointment
Phone Number: 602 Kent Hall
Email: vjc2122@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: University of St. Andrews, 2026
MA: Norwich University, 2021
BA: Colorado College, 2010

Classes Taught

HSEA GU4847 Modern Japan

Research Interests

Modern Japanese history, transnational and comparative history, war and society, history of East Asia, gender and the military

Valerie J. Cranmer is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Her research explores the intersections of the military and society, through interdisciplinary lens, such as popular culture and gender. Broadly, she is interested in the history of conflict and colonialism in East Asia in the modern era. She is completing a scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled Enabling Abuse: The Imperial Japanese Army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Organization and Its Place in Global Military History.

Selected Publications

“In Judgment of Unit 731: A Comparative Study of Medical War Crimes Trials After World War II.” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 30. No. 1 (2023): 32-60.

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).