2016-2017 Williams Prize Award Winners

May 22, 2017

Max Goldberg (Pierson ‘17), Ryan Hintzman (Silliman ’17) and Claire Williamson (Jonathan Edwards ‘17) were three of four winners of the 2017 Williams Prize in East Asian Studies.  Max, for his essay submitted to the Ethics, Politics, & Economics Program, Enclave of Ingenuity: The Plan and Promise of the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, Ryan for his essay submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature, ​Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric, and Claire for her essay submitted to the East Asian Studies Program, A Coffee-Scented Space: Historical, Cultural, and Social Impacts of the Japanese Kissaten.

The Council on East Asian Studies had a chance to catch up with Max, Ryan, and Claire shortly before graduation and they kindly answered a few of our questions about their essays.


Max Goldberg

To begin, could you please provide an abstract or brief summary of your essay entitled Enclave of Ingenuity: The Plan and Promise of the Beijing Intellectual Property Court?

Generally speaking, intellectual property (IP) protection in China is weak.  Nevertheless, the court system for IP has served not only as a model for relatively effective IP enforcement, but also as a proving ground for innovative legal procedures.  This judicial experimentation finds its current form in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court (BJIPC), a new institution founded with the purpose of advancing both intellectual property protection and, more broadly, the Rule of Law in China.  So far, the court has devised several new measures that significantly differentiate it from China’s court system.  While the BJIPC represents a step forward for an already above-average area of Chinese law, its real significance remains to be seen due to a developing understanding of how the reforms will impact the economy and encounter political obstacles if implemented on a broader scale.  Still, because the BJIPC provides a functional model for legal capacity-building within China’s IP infrastructure, it holds tremendous promise for increasing consistency and openness in China’s legal system.

How did you first get interested in your topic of research? 

My interest in Chinese law has a rather strange story behind it.  I’ve had a longstanding interest in Chinese language (since I was 13 or so), but my interest in law didn’t really solidify until my second year at Yale.  Originally, my goal was to do a tutorial in “Legal Chinese” simply to “keep up” my skills.  But my plans were foiled: no department would approve my proposal.  After scores of unsuccessful meetings, I sat down with Edward Kamens (then the DUS of East Asian Languages & Literatures), who told me that a visiting professor from Duke (Taisu Zhang, who was subsequently hired by YLS) was teaching a law school course called “Chinese Law and Society.”  Even though it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I enrolled and fell in love with the study of Chinese law.  I wrote my term paper for that course on the connections between juvenile crime and internal migration in China––so you can see that, within the area of “Chinese law,” my interests are still very broad––amorphous, perhaps!

As for my topic more specifically––last September, I happened upon Jeremy Daum’s commentary on the BJIPC’s first year of operation on his blog, China Law Translate.  I started poking around for the actual cases from that strange court, and so began my research!

What would you say was the most interesting finding of your research?  Were there any surprises?

The most interesting finding for me was probably 2015 Case No. 177 (p.46-48 of the paper), which was a watershed moment in several ways, not least in terms of how the adjudication committee decided to open their deliberations in a public hearing.  2015 Case No. 1750 is a close second, though––it’s totally unheard of for dissent to be acknowledged in Chinese courts’ written opinions.

More broadly, it was amazing to actually read cases in which I could see stodgier modes of Chinese law were “giving way” to new procedures guided by the spirit of the Rule of Law.

What was the most challenging part of your research?

I join every other China scholar in one resounding cry: Databases that are glitchy, broken, incomplete, or even biased.  Throughout my research, I was constantly running into dead links, corrupted files, and missing records.  I spent an enormous amount of my time verifying documents across databases and looking into missing holes to determine whether a record was simply mission or was deliberately omitted.

What resources at Yale were the most helpful for your research?

Throughout my studies, Evelyn Ma, Yale Law School’s China librarian, has guided me like a beacon of hope in a dark, stormy sea.  She has connected me with countless resources and has taught me all sorts of tricks.  As far as inanimate entities go, the @yale.edu email address was probably the single most helpful tool in my arsenal…using it meant that Chinese practitioners and government employees actually responded to my queries, and that the owners of proprietary databases gave me free access.

Were you able to travel to Asia during your time at Yale?  If so, where and when, and what type of program?  Did you go on a Light Fellowship? 

Yes, I traveled to Asia twice (thrice if Russia counts as Asia).  For the summer after Freshman year (2014), I got a Light Fellowship to attend Harvard Beijing Academy at Beijing Language and Culture University.  I found the academic program to be extremely boring, but setting it aside gave me an opportunity to conduct an independent research project on perceptions of income inequality and to moonlight as a bartender in a Beijing nightclub (where I learned a lot of good Chinese).

During the next summer (2015), I was in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia on a Perlroth Prize Fellowship, studying Russian literature and culture at St. Petersburg State University and assisting LGBT refugees in their emigration process.

Last summer (2016), I was in San Francisco and Hong Kong as both a Liman Fellow and a Grand Strategy Fellow, doing U.S.-China judicial exchange work and diplomatic consulting on a variety of issues, ranging from girls in prison to espionage sentencing.

How important would you say your language study at Yale was to your research?

My knowledge of Chinese was critical to this project (all of the BJIPC documents that I read were in Mandarin).  I am especially grateful to my High School Chinese teacher, Xiaorong Li, without whom I would not know Mandarin.  My college professor, Wei Su, was extremely dedicated to making sure that I was able to study legal Chinese, and without him I might have never begun studying Chinese Law.  I am also indebted to my Fields partners, who helped me keep myself literate and are just finishing up their JSDs at Yale Law School!

When you had some downtime on campus, what did you like to do for fun?  Any particular interests or hobbies related to East Asia?

Well, almost every day, I can be found on the lifting floor of Payne Whitney gym with my headphones in.  If you listen closely, you’ll hear me as I discordantly sing along to China’s finest “Drool Music” (口水歌)––sappy love ballads.

What advice would you offer to rising seniors about how to tackle their senior theses?

As early as possible before you “must” begin your thesis, take some time for “intellectual puttering”––wander serendipitously through the stacks, make use of Wikipedia’s “random article” function, ask bizarre questions of your professors and peers.  Eventually, something vaguely academic will come out and grab you––write about that!

What will you be doing after graduation?

This summer, I’m traveling and taking it easy.  From August 2017 to June 2018, I’ll be a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  After that, I’ll be returning to Yale for law school.


Ryan Hintzman

To begin, could you please provide an abstract or brief summary of your essay entitled Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric

My thesis is a broadly humanistic project of literary criticism that aims to articulate and deploy a method of reading lyric poems from premodern East Asia with and against poems from the Romantic and post-Romantic lyrical tradition in English.  I read poems from the Man’yōshū and English poems by Crane, Stevens, Keats, and Yeats.  I argue that lyric poems are dependent on a toggle-switch between figurative and literal reading, between reading the lyric poem as a meaningful object that can stand in for the poet’s voice, hand, or subjective experience and seeing the poem as a configuration of letters, ink, and paper fibers.  A lyric poem is always a thing in the world, and I ask why and how we read lyrics as possessing depth and as being more than a material surface.  This double possibility of endowing or charging objects with figurative meaning and of falling away from lyric’s illusions and seeing the world in a prosaic, non-figurative manner, is, I argue, central to recent theoretical work on the lyric and a structure internal to lyric poetry itself.  I read poems written on gravestones, on paintings, in water, and in manuscript form, and I argue that lyric cannot be read without close attention to the lyric as material object.  My research seeks to contribute to an ongoing and timely conversation about the possibility and usefulness of lyric as a critical concept or tool, and to extend or disrupt the critical conversation on lyric by centering the material qualities of the lyric and by introducing premodern, non-Romantic, non-Western poems as central to my argument.   

In navigating between pressing theoretical and ethical imperatives to make and test comparisons across languages and periods and the need to produce close, philologically-sensitive readings of poems, I develop and explore a comparative method of reading while practicing a practical criticism that discovers new openings in familiar poems and introduces careful readings of Japanese poems into a critical conversation about lyric in which non-Western poems have been largely absent.  I leverage non-Romantic, non-Western poems in part to defend and refine notions of the lyric that have been most clearly articulated by critics working on Romantic and post-Romantic poetry.  The lyric, I argue, is not simply a creation of the Romantic period or of professional literary criticism, but can be a useful concept for figuring out what poems do and how.

How did you first get interested in your topic of research?

My thesis grew out of three dominant strands of my coursework at Yale: premodern Japanese literature, Romantic and post-Romantic English poetry, and literary theory.  The core of the thesis began in the spring of my junior year in a research seminar led by Professor Edward Kamens, and continued into the summer, when I did a few months of research on the poetry of the Man’yōshū (an eighth-century Japanese anthology).  When I got back to Yale, the thesis gradually grew into a more comparative and theoretical project.

What would you say was the most interesting finding of your research?  Were there any surprises?

I remember one summer afternoon in Kyoto: I was reading a particularly intricate essay on calligraphy, Daoism, and Ōtomo no Tabito, replete with quotations from classical Chinese and written in an opaque style, when I had something of an “aha!” moment in which at least some of the pieces of the puzzle “clicked” and I figured out what the author was actually talking about.  It seems minor, but I was so excited that I called a few of my friends back in the States to explain these very cool things I had just figured out.  It must’ve been around midnight for them, but they were kind enough to listen.

I was also surprised at how often I would realize that I was missing the “big point,” and my main argument must have changed ten or more times while writing.  Sometimes I would wake up from a nap and think “oh, that’s what this poem is really about.”  Living with and writing about a set of poems for a year or more was really a strange experience, and unlike any other writing I did during my undergraduate career.

What was the most challenging part of your research?

In the initial stages of my research, the most challenging thing was to find my way in the truly voluminous secondary literature on early Japanese poetry written in Japanese.  Eventually I managed to get a feel for the major scholars and major trends in the field, and found a few interesting critics that I felt I could include in the larger conversation about lyric poetry that I was trying to stage in my essay.  Later in the project, the main difficulty was to tie together the disparate arguments, readings, and texts into a coherent essay on lyric poetry. 

What resources at Yale were the most helpful for your research?

The Yale Library’s extensive Japan collection rivaled the major research libraries I used during my time in Japan.  Haruko Nakamura, the librarian for Japanese studies, helped to acquire a number of new titles from Japan that were crucial to my research.  Just as important as the library, though, has been the vibrant community of scholars of premodern Japan at Yale, which has encouraged and enabled my work on Japanese poetry and given my work an attentive and critical audience for which I am very grateful.

Were you able to travel to Asia during your time at Yale?  If so, where and when, and what type of program?  Did you go on a Light Fellowship?

After my freshman year, I spent a summer learning classical Japanese at the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies (KCJS).  Last summer, I spent three months doing research in Kyoto, funded by the Robert Lyons Danly Memorial Fellowship and the Summer in Japan Fellowship.  Just a couple of weeks after graduation, I’ll be starting a Light Fellowship in Taiwan.

How important would you say your language study at Yale was to your research?

At Yale, I took Japanese 171, which solidified my facility with classical Japanese. In my junior and senior years, I took a number of seminars with Professor Edward Kamens on topics in premodern Japanese literature.  What was particularly valuable about my training at Yale was the opportunity to combine language study and literary study in these seminars.

When you had some downtime on campus, what did you like to do for fun?  Any particular interests or hobbies related to East Asia?

I am also a cellist, and most of my non-academic activities revolved around music performance.  Many of my friends were, in one way or another, interested in East Asia, even if not in a scholarly sense.

What advice would you offer to rising seniors about how to tackle their senior theses?

My final thesis—and the argument I made with it—only bears a slight resemblance to the first prospectus I submitted.  I found it very useful to step back from my materials at regular intervals—maybe once a week— to synthesize and re-conceptualize the research I was doing.  For me, writing a thesis was a balance between allowing large-scale concepts to guide and organize my research and allowing the little details of poems and the secondary literature to point toward new ways to approach the big topic—for me, lyric poetry. 

What will you be doing after graduation?

I will be studying Chinese in Taiwan with the support of a year-long Light Fellowship.  After my time in Taiwan, I hope to enter a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature or East Asian Languages and Literatures.


Claire Williamson

To begin, could you please provide an abstract or brief summary of your essay entitled A Coffee-Scented Space: Historical, Cultural, and Social Impacts of the Japanese Kissaten?

My thesis is broadly divided into four sections.  The first is a historic overview of kissaten, their development, and the social role they played in Japanese modernism.  The second section is an in-depth analysis of three important aspects of the kissaten: its Master, its atmosphere, and its coffee.  Next I analyze the various gendered stereotypes that occur both at the leadership and customer level.  Finally, I use my demographic data to examine the generational gaps that occur between the customers at kissaten and other contemporary coffee shops. 

Through interviews and questionnaires, combined with historic research, I discovered a demographic shift in the groups that visited particular types of coffee shops.  Broadly speaking, Japan’s coffee culture is moving away from the more “traditional” shops, known as kissaten, toward the bright, trendy, “Third Wave” specialty coffee shops.  Generally, kissaten are small, dark, smoking-allowed establishments that often restrict their service to only coffee; their atmosphere is what I would describe as akin to a “coffee bar”.  Their customers were middle-aged men and women—people looking to smoke a cigarette and while away an afternoon over a cup of coffee.  There is a strong relationship between regular customers and the Master, one that is cultivated over multiple visits.  Within Japan, kissaten are viewed as historic and nostalgic spaces but generally considered unfashionable by the younger generations.  They prefer to frequent modern, photogenic cafes and specialty coffee shops.  I was able to make comparisons between the social desires of the older generations and the younger—the former came to coffee shops for social interactions with other regulars or the Master, while the latter wanted space to take time for themselves and relax away from the pressures of work and social obligation.

Although I was able to identify these generational demographic shifts and preferences, I hesitate to make any sweeping conclusions about the future of the kissaten in Japan.  Certainly there is much international interest in kissaten, both in terms of their vintage style and meticulous attention to coffee.  Too, Third Wave coffee shops have adapted traditional kissaten methods of brewing coffee, such as the Nel drip, and combined them with atmospheres that are more “in vogue,” in effect creating a sort of modern-kissaten.  Indeed, one major goal of many coffee shop Masters was to bring this quality coffee to the neighborhood level in order to ensure their brewing traditions would continue.  In effect, this is how Japan’s coffee shops are adapting to the needs of their customers by creating coffee shops with welcoming spaces and quality brews.  Whether or not millennials will return to kissaten-esque spaces remains to be seen, but coffee shops fill a valuable, if differentiated, niche for men and women across generations. 

How did you first get interested in your topic of research? 

When I was interning at the Hokkoku Newspaper in Kanazawa I occasionally had lunch with some of the senior reporters.  Once, when I was eating with a male reporter at a cafe, he looked around the room and said “Claire, you suit this kind of space but I, on the other hand, am more suited to a bar.”  I was confused and intrigued by this statement because I had no idea why the thought that–because I was a woman or a foreigner I was suited to cafes?  Because he was male he was suited to bars?  From this somewhat random statement and my own confusion I decided to research Japanese coffee shops–their history and their demographic trends. 

What would you say was the most interesting finding of your research?  Were there any surprises?

The first surprise I got was the Yale connection to Japan’s coffee history.  In brief, the first coffee house in Japan was opened in the late 1800s by a man named Tei Ei-Kei who studied at Yale for two years when he was just 16.  After he returned to Japan by way of London he opened the first coffee house, a Western-style establishment called the “Kahiichakan.”  Although it didn’t stay in business terribly long it was the beginning of Japan’s deep connection to coffee.

For me, the most interesting find of my research was how a kissaten Master consciously shaped the space of their shop to either reflect their ideal space or to craft a space that customers would feel welcome in.  The level of detail that went into the furniture, decor, music, coffee, and other aesthetics was occasionally mind-boggling. 

What was the most challenging part of your research?

The most challenging part of my research was learning how to ask good questions when talking to people.  As a participant observer (meaning I both participated in the topic of my research and intensively observed others at the same time) you have to figure out how to get people to warm up to you and talk at length, even when you haven’t known them very long (or are essentially complete strangers).  Learning how to listen and ask in such a way that people feel comfortable talking with you was a skill that took many weeks to develop (and that I still haven’t perfected). 

What resources at Yale were the most helpful for your research? 

The fellowships office and the East Asian librarians.  Fellowships help you get funding for research, particularly research abroad, while the East Asian librarians are fantastic resources to help you navigate not only Yale’s library but also libraries at other institutions with sources relevant to your research. 

Were you able to travel to Asia during your time at Yale?  If so, where and when, and what type of program?  Did you go on a Light Fellowship? 

The summer between my freshman and sophomore year I went on a Light Fellowship to Japan at the Princeton in Ishikawa (PII) program.  The following summer I returned to Kanazawa (the city PII is located in) to intern as a reporter at the Hokkoku Newspaper (a regional newspaper for the prefectures of Ishikawa and Toyama).  My final summer between junior and senior years I conducted six weeks of field research on a Bates fellowship, which I highly recommend for juniors looking to conduct intensive research for their projects. 

How important would you say your language study at Yale was to your research?

Essential.  I conducted all of my fieldwork in Japanese—interviews, conducting surveys, reading books and magazine articles, etc.—and without a high level of fluency in Japanese this sort of in-person ethnographic research would not have been possible.  Even if you’re not doing on-the-ground research, without intensive language study you will be restricted to English language (or whatever your first language is) sources. 

 When you had some downtime on campus, what did you like to do for fun?  Any particular interests or hobbies related to East Asia?

I’m a member of the Yale Glee Club (YGC), the Yale Guild of Bookbinders, and work various jobs for my residential college (JE). 

What advice would you offer to rising seniors about how to tackle their senior theses?

Pick a topic you’ll like three months, six months, or even a year from when you begin research.  If you aren’t enthusiastic about your topic from the get go—aren’t interested in constantly diving into research or working your writing over and over again—you’re not going to enjoy writing your thesis. 

What will you be doing after graduation?

I’ll be moving to Japan to work for Nitori, likely in the Tokyo metro area. I’ll be starting off in retail, along with all their new hires, and from there I’ll be moved around within the company.