Komei Sakai

Field: Japanese Religion
Advisor: D. Max Moerman
Email: ks2602@columbia.edu

Komei Sakai is a doctoral student of pre-modern Japanese religion. He received his B.A. (2013) in East Asian Studies from New York University. His primary research interest is in the religious iconography of Japanese arms and armor from the Kamakura period, with an emphasis on the engraving on sword blades related to the worship of Fudō Myō-ō. He believes that his research will be able to provide a new perspective in the understanding of the samurais’ religious beliefs. He is also interested in the exchange of swords in pre-modern Japan and China.

Qichen (Barton) Qian

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisors: Gray Tuttle and Zhaohua Yang
Email: qq2109@columbia.edu

Qichen (Barton) Qian is a doctoral student of Sino-Tibetan history and esoteric Buddhism from the 17th to 20th centuries. His research incorporates military and economic history of the Tibetan Ganden Podrang regime (1642–1959) and the Qing empire (1644–1912), as well as violence in Buddhism and material culture of firearms. Barton received his B.A. in Political Science/Math with a minor in Economics from Emory University and his M.A. in Tibetan and Chinese history from Columbia University.

Dan Nguyen

Field: Early-Modern Vietnamese History
Advisor: John Phan
Email: dtn2123@columbia.edu

Dan Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate on the History-East Asia track. His work focuses on the post-Ming Chinese diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Vietnamese states of Tonkin and Cochinchina. His dissertation focuses on the formation and collapse of indigenous Cochinchinese elite clans during the pre-imperial Nguyen period (c.1558-1786), and their subsequent replacement with the hybrid Sino-Vietnamese elite normative of the Nguyen dynasty proper (1802-1945). His interests include middle period and late imperial Confucianism across East Asia, the intellectual history of civilization (hua) and barbarism (yi) within the Confucian tradition, Literary Sinitic prose and poetry in Vietnam, and the influence of Chinese peoples and institutions on state and identity formation in early modern Southeast Asia.

Prior to joining the EALAC department, Dan received a B.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Music from the University of Houston.