2008- 2009 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES

Elif Akcetin is a historian of late imperial China. She received her Ph.D. in the summer of 2007 from the Department of History at the University of Washington. Her interests include the history of the frontier, corruption and material culture in the Qing dynasty, and comparative history of empires. She is currently preparing her dissertation for publication, Corruption at the Frontier: The Gansu Fraud Scandal, and is working on two articles, "The Frontier World in Wang Jingqi’s Dushutang xizheng suibi" and "The Qing and Ottoman Empires: The Search for an Early Modern." She has presented papers at the annual conferences organized by the Middle Eastern Studies Association and the Association for Asian Studies. She has taught courses on Chinese civilization at the University of Washington and Bogazici University. In the spring of 2009, she taught a course at Yale entitled "History and Memory in East Asia."

Ellie Choi is an intellectual historian of modern Korea during the Japanese empire. Her dissertation (Ph.D., Harvard 2008), “Space and the Historical Imagination: Yi Kwangsu’s Vision of Choson during the Japanese Empire,” explored the intersection of space, travel, and nationalist discourse as they relate to issues of multiple temporalities and nationalist historical production. She is particularly interested in complicating “Korean uniqueness” within a larger multi-ethnic Japanese empire after 1939, and its transference to the colonial fascism debate. Her research and teaching interests include history writing, cultural nationalism, contested spatialities, collaboration, invented traditions, travel, and urban culture. At Yale, she taught a fall course, “History and Tradition in Modern Korea,” and worked towards a book manuscript on spatial practices, exilic nationalism, and post-WWI liberalist discourse during the period of the Korean Provisional Government’s residence in the Shanghai French Quarter.

George Clonos (Georgios Klonos) received his undergraduate degree in Japanese from Stanford University and a Master’s degree in Oriental Religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the United Kingdom. His Ph.D. dissertation (Stanford) was on Mount Omine and the Shugendo tradition of mountain asceticism in the Tokugawa period. A chapter related to this topic will appear in the book Japanese Religious Landscape (edited by Matsuoka Hideaki; Berghahn Press, forthcoming). Apart from Shugendo, his research interests include sacred landscapes, ascetic practice, Esoteric Buddhism, and Edo-period religion. While at Yale, he revised his dissertation for publication and worked on journal articles related to Edo-period religion. He taught a course entitled “Sacred Space in Japanese Religions” in the spring of 2009.

Helen (Huiwen) Zhang is a scholar of comparative literature, cultural hermeneutics, and the aesthetics of translation. She graduated from the first experimental Humanities Program in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University before continuing to pursue a Master of Arts in Modern Chinese Literature. From 2002 to 2008, she received three research grants from Germany, studied in Sinology and German Literature and Thought, and took part in various interdisciplinary programs such as “Exchanges of Knowledge between China and the West” and “Cultural Hermeneutics: Reflections of Difference and Trans-difference.” Her dissertation in German, “Kulturtransfer über Epochen und Kontinente: Feng Zhis Roman ‘Wu Zixu’ als Begegnung von Antike und Moderne, China und Europa,” (“Cultural Transfer across Epochs and Continents: Feng Zhi’s Novel ‘Wu Zixu’ as an Encounter between Ancient and Modern Times, China and Europe,”) examined one of the most distinctive phenomena in the history of modern Chinese literature: the ambivalence of 1940s intellectuals towards Chinese and European ‘traditions’ as well as the subtle process of mutual ‘molding’ of Eastern and Western thoughts and styles in cultural transfer. While at Yale, she will revise her dissertation for publication and work on another research project, “A Cycle of Supermen (Übermenschen): Linking Goethe, Nietzsche, Richard Wilhelm, Daoist Thinkers and Modern Chinese Intellectuals,” which intends to illuminate the ‘eternal return’ of the concept ‘Übermensch’ in intra- / trans-cultural dialogues and to emphasize the importance of such topics. In spring 2009, she taught a course on “Cross-Cultural Eccentricities: How Modern Chinese and European Intellectuals Read Each Others' Works.”

2007-2008 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES

Aglaia De Angeli received her undergraduate degree in Chinese language and literature in 2000 from the University of Venice in Italy. With a very motivated interest in Chinese Republican history, she completed her Ph.D. on "Women and Crime in Shanghai, 1912-1949" at the University of Lyon in France in 2007. Her areas of specialty are Republican law history and she has been conducting research projects on "Virtual Shanghai" and "Chinese Torture." In the spring 2008, she will teach an undergraduate course on "Republican China: An Overview of A Transition Period, 1912-1949."

Charles Kim (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a historian of twentieth-century Korean culture and society. In his recent dissertation, he explores the cultural origins of South Korea’s April Revolution (1960). His research and teaching interests include nationalist discourse, cross-cultural perceptions, social relations, and historical methodology. While at Yale, he will expand his dissertation and teach a course in the spring semester titled “Across Empires and Borders: A Cultural History of Modern Korea and Japan.”

2006-2007 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES

Jinhee Choi has earned two Ph.D.s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one in Philosophy and the other in Film Studies. Her areas of specialty are film aesthetics and East Asian cinema. Her primary research focuses on how local filmmakers adopt and transform generic and stylistic norms in order to appeal to popular imagination. She examines the extent to which genres such as gangster cinema, swordplay films, romantic comedies, and blockbusters have registered the political, social, and cultural changes within the East Asian region. She is the co-editor of Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (2005, Blackwell) with Noël Carroll and her articles on the philosophy and aesthetics of film have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Postscript, Asian Cinema, Film Studies: An International Review, and Film-Philosophy. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript on contemporary Korean cinema.

Nicole Cohen is a historian of modern Japan and Korea. She graduated as an East Asian Studies and History double-major from Dartmouth College before pursuing a Master of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures and a Doctorate in History at Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Children of Empire: Growing up Japanese in Colonial Seoul, 1880-1946,” examined the relationship between the Japanese homeland and its colonies, as well as the violent remapping of boundaries, identity, and notions of national belonging in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. Her research and teaching interests include social history, colonialism and imperialism, gender, space, and everyday life. In the fall of 2006 she taught an undergraduate course on the intertwining histories of Japan and Korea from early times to the present.

Gareth Fisher (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is an anthropologist specializing in the revival of lay Buddhism in mainland China. His dissertation, “Universal Rescue: Re-making post-Mao China in a Beijing Temple” explores how Buddhist practitioners in Beijing used temple space to form new moral discourses in response to the rapid cultural change accompanying urban China’s continuing process of globalization. While at Yale, he will be revising his dissertation for publication and working on several other articles that move beyond Beijing to explore the formation of a nationwide community of lay Buddhists in China. In the spring 2007, he taught a course on “Religion and Globalization in East Asia.”

2005-2006 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES

Christopher Gerteis (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is a historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan with subspecialties in the histories of Modern China, East Asia, and the Modern World. Dr. Gerteis is recipient of several research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Japanese Ministry of Education, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. While at CEAS he is revising for publication his book, entitled "'We Should Build Family Unions': Gender, Nation, and the Radical Unions of Postwar Japan," which examines how the social status of wage-earning Japanese women was eroded in part by national union leaders who refused to let go of their belief that women should play a subordinate role in Japan's postwar democracy. Several book-chapters and journal articles are pending publication.

Yifan Zhang came to the United States after earning a B.A. (1994) and a M.A. in economics (1997) at Renmin University in China. He completed his Ph.D. in the summer of 2005 at the Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, writing a dissertation titled "Essays on Vertical Specialization, Competition and Industry Dynamics in China's Manufacturing Sector." While at Yale University as a Postdoctoral Associate, Dr. Zhang will conduct research for his project "Compensating the Losers: The Political Economy of Trade Liberalization in Post-WTO China." In Spring 2006, he will teach a course titled "Economic Growth in East Asia."

2004-2005 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES

William Burton completed his Ph.D. in the summer of 2002 at the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, writing a dissertation titled “In a Perfect World: Utopias in Modern Japanese Literature.” Since that time, he has been teaching courses in Japanese literature, film, and popular culture at Tufts University, including seminars on the role of fantasy in each of these spheres. In his research as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale, he is writing a book that focuses on dystopias and the dystopic in modern Japanese literature and culture, tentatively titled “Dark Worlds: The Dystopian Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature.”

Joy Kim received undergraduate and graduate training at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, respectively. As a historian of early modern Korea, her primary focus of scholarship is historiography, and cultural and intellectual history of Choson Korea. Her dissertation titled, “Representing Slavery: Class and Status in Late Choson Korea,” examined the historical problem of slavery and hereditary social distinction during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Gray Tuttle (Ph.D. Harvard) studies the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet's relations with the China-based empires of the Yuan, Ming and Qing. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in these historical relations is central to all this research. For the modern period, in his forthcoming Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, March 2005) he examines the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the territory of the former Qing empire as the Chinese nation-state. Instead, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to keep Tibetan regions (one quarter of China's current territory). His current research project focuses on the support that Tibetan Buddhist institutions have received from the governments of China from the 17th to 20th century and how this support, along with economic growth in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, has fueled expansion and renewal of these institutions into the contemporary period. Other long term writing projects include co-editing Sources of Tibetan Tradition for the series Introduction to Asian Civilizations and co-writing Tibet: History, Society, and Culture.

2003-2004 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES
Elyssa Faison
Susie Jie Young Kim
J. Dale Wilson

2002-2003 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES
Carl Saxer
Jiwon Shin
Nancy Stalker
Eileen Walsh
Melissa Wender

2001-2002 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES
Joshua Goldstein
Joanne Izbicki
Hirokazu Miyazaki
Katherine Rupp
Carl Saxer

2000-2001 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES
Jin Cyhn
Sara Davis
Katherine Rupp

1999-2000 POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATES
Charles Cabell
Daisy Ng
Eugene Park