recent-phds

Filed Under: recent-phds

Yanjie Huang

Yanjie Huang

Field: Chinese History
Advisors: Eugenia Lean & Madeleine Zelin
Email: yh2798@columbia.edu

Yanjie Huang is a doctoral candidate in modern Chinese history. His research interests center on state-society relations from late imperial to contemporary China. Based on archives, oral history, and thousands of letters from Shanghai, his dissertation, A Revolution Domesticated: Negotiating Family Life in Urban China, 1959-1984, examines how urban families negotiated their everyday life and heralded a de-politicization of the revolution under the shadow of the Maoist austerity policies in the 1960s and 1970s. He received his BA in Economics (2008) and MA in History (2015) from the National University of Singapore. His master thesis focuses on the conceptual transformation of sacrifice in late Qing and Republican China. His co-authored book, Market in State: The Political Economy of Domination in China (Cambridge, 2018), studies the conceptual foundation, historical evolution, and contemporary institutions of state-market relations in China. Before joining Columbia, he worked as a researcher in a Singapore-based think tank focused on contemporary China studies.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Chelsea Zi Wang

Chelsea Zi Wang

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: zw2159@columbia.edu

 

 

 

Chelsea Wang is a PhD candidate in Chinese history. Her research interests include communication networks, technologies of information management, and comparative models of government. Her dissertation, “Communication, Paperwork, and Administrative Efficiency in Ming China (1369-1644)” examines the Ming government’s infrastructures of information management and the bureaucratic costs that they produced. More broadly, she is interested in incorporating comparative East Asian perspectives into the study of Chinese history. Chelsea received her BA in History from the University of British Columbia and started PhD studies at Columbia in 2009. During the academic years 2013-15, she conducted dissertation research at the University of Tokyo with support of the Japanese MEXT Scholarship. Her personal academic blog can be accessed here.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Luke Thompson

Luke Thompson

Field: Japanese Religion
Advisor: Bernard Faure
Email: lnt2106@columbia.edu

 

 

 

Luke Thompson’s research focuses on Japanese Buddhism during the tenth-to-fourteenth centuries. He is particularly interested in Buddhist historiography and the way in which Japanese Buddhists have thought about Buddhist history and their own place within it. His PhD dissertation examined Japanese views of Śākyamuni during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in light of contemporaneous changes in Japanese understandings of Japan’s historical and geographical position within the Buddhist world. He is currently working on a second project focused on the rebuilding of Nara in the last decades of the twelfth century and is also teaching Buddhist Studies courses in New York State prisons through the Bard Prison Initiative’s undergraduate degree program.

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