Heekyoung Cho is a student of modern Korean literature and culture. Her dissertation explores Korean intellectuals’ literary appropriation of Russian prose via Japanese mediation in the early twentieth century. It shows that colonized Korean intellectuals translated and adapted with all the ingenuity of authors, to build a form of modern literature that would respond to their society’s historical situation. Her areas of interest include translation and the formation of national literature, modern Korean literature and its historiography, and Korean-Japanese-Russian cultural relations. During her residence at Yale, she expanded her dissertation into a book manuscript, and taught the course “Translation and Modern Literature in East Asia.”
Justin Jesty is a cultural historian of postwar Japan. He focuses on the period from 1945 to around 1960, investigating how practices of small group cultural production intersected with progressive social movements. His dissertation “Arts of Engagement,” studies recognized artists as well as amateur producers to show how creativity and expression were, both practically and theoretically, integral elements in building democratic subjectivity. The case studies comprising the dissertation are reportage art, the modernist education movement Creative Aesthetic Education (sōzō biiku), and the regional avant-garde group Kyushu-ha. During his time at Yale, Justin developed his project into a book manuscript which included an additional chapter on workplace art circles. He also taught a course on “Documentary, History, and Social Movements in Postwar Japan.”
Toby Lincoln is a historian of modern China. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford University in the Spring of 2009. Entitled, Urbanizing Wuxi: Everyday Life of Everyday People in Early 20th Century China, it explored how the development of cities, towns and villages in the lower Yangzi delta brought the experiences of industrial modernity to farmers and workers. At Yale, he concentrated on expanding the scope of his dissertation by exploring the impact of the Second Sino-Japanese War on Wuxi. By explaining how urban development was not just a linear process, his research provided a more nuanced picture of the expansion of industrial modernity into China. Additionally, Toby worked on two articles for publication, one of which “Fleeing from Firestorms: the Role of Native Place Societies in the Evacuation of Shanghai in 1937,” was published in the Special Issue of Urban History in 2011. He taught a course in the spring semester, entitled “Urbanization in China, 1850 – 2010.” This course explored the various meanings that the city has acquired in China in the modern period, and described how places like Beijing and Shanghai have become part of a global network of urban spaces, and integrated China into the 21st century world.