Jinhee Choi 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. She completed 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 revised his dissertation for publication and worked on several articles that moved beyond Beijing to explore the formation of a nationwide community of lay Buddhists in China. In spring 2007, he taught a course on “Religion and Globalization in East Asia.”