Happy Mid-Autumn Festival to our EALAC community!
On September 24, EALAC students and faculty gathered for our Undergraduate Welcome Back & Mid-Autumn Celebration. The evening was an opportunity for new and returning undergraduate students to connect and celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Thank you to everyone who joined us and helped make the celebration a wonderful start to the academic year! Check out some photos from the event below.
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).
Please join us in welcoming Professor Yi to the department!
John Phan, associate professor of Vietnamese Humanities, discusses his research on the history and development of the Vietnamese language in a Columbia News feature. In the interview, Phan shares insights from his book, Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese and the Origins of the Vietnamese Language, which uncovers the history of Annamese Middle Chinese and its role in the formation of modern Vietnamese.
Phan’s research was also recently mentioned by President Jennifer L. Mnookin in her welcome message for the 2026-27 academic year.
Read the full Columbia News feature.
