2020-2021 Visiting Faculty & Scholars

Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Environmental Humanities of East Asia

Mark Frank is an environmental historian of China and the world. He recently finished his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has taught at the University of Illinois and Wesley College. At Yale he worked towards completing his manuscript, “Chinese Colonialism: The Ecology of Assimilation in Republican China and Beyond,” which chronicles the relationship between agrarianism and colonialism along China’s ethnically diverse frontiers between the fall of the Qing empire and the rise of the People’s Republic. This project draws on roughly two years of archival research in mainland China and Taiwan and has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Mark has begun work on a second book project that examines China’s relationship with the atmosphere from the late imperial era through the early twenty-first century. To date, he is the author of three historical articles on Chinese yak improvement schemes, high-altitude crop experiments, and sedentary-nomadic relations in eastern Tibet during the early twentieth century.

Institute of Sacred Music Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in East Asian Studies

Bo kyung Blenda Im is a 2012 ISM/YDS graduate (M.A.R. in religion and music) who received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in fall 2019 from the University of Pennsylvania. During the spring 2020 semester, she returned to YDS and the ISM as a lecturer in ethnomusicology. Her ethnographic project “Transpacific Modernity and the Challenge of Belonging: Negotiating Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul” centralizes Korean Christians’ engagements with black gospel and contemporary worship music. Holding the analytics of race, music, and religion in productive tension, she draws attention to the ways in which Korean and Korean diasporic Christians, in their articulations of selfhood and community, navigate and radically contest the normative conditions of transpacific modernity.

Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

Floris van Swet is a historian of early-modern Japan whose work broadly focusses on the interactions between institutional and everyday understandings of status and identity.  He grew up in the Netherlands before moving to the UK where he received his BSc from the University of Surrey, BA from the University of Sheffield and MA from SOAS, University of London. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation, “Finding a Place: Rōnin in the Tokugawa Period” explores the fate of rōnin, the so-called masterless samurai. This works shows that rōnin were in fact often neither ‘masterless’ nor ‘samurai’ and in doing so complicates our understanding of social status and the governance in the early Tokugawa Japan.

During his time at Yale, he worked as Postdoctoral Associate on the CEAS Digital Tokugawa Lab team.

Visiting Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in East Asian Studies

Ria Chae’s research deals with the Cold War in East Asia, focusing on the history of inter-Korean relations and nation-building on the Korean Peninsula. Her current book project tentatively titled “The Making of a Cold War in Korea” explores questions of agency and character of the Korean conflict from the Korean War to the contemporary period.

Chae previously was the Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2019-2020), Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University (2017–2019), Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (2016), Lecturer at Seoul National University and Dankook University, Korea (2013–2016), and Junior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC (2011–2012).

Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Werner Stangl has no background in Japanese history nor Japanese language. Having worked for over a decade as a historian of colonial Spanish America, he developed his interest in various aspects of digital humanities, such as digital scholarly editions and particularly GIS. Beyond his own scholarly research, he has worked for years as a copyeditor of a scholarly journal (Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas) and as a copyeditor and cartographer for several monographs.

From 2015 to April 2019, he built the HGIS de las Indias, an interactive website that reconstructs the changing administrative divisions and settlement patterns of the Spanish Empire in the Americas from 1701 to 1808.

Postgraduate Associate in East Asian Studies

Yuki Hoshino

Assistant in Research in East Asian Studies

Ingrid Barnes is a linguist with particular interests in Ancient Greek and Hittite, but is also comfortable working in Japanese. She is currently finishing her MA in Digital Tools for Premodern Studies at Tufts University. While at Yale, Ingrid was part of the Digital Tokugawa Lab, a group of scholars working on digital humanities projects with a focus on pre-modern Japan.

People type: 
Visiting Faculty & Scholars

Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Kyung-soo Chun Areas of interest: Environmental Issues; Culture Theory; History of Anthropology; Colonialism and War

Yi Liu Capital Normal University; Areas of interest: History of Daoism and the Daoist Scriptures; Dunhuang Studies; Medieval History of Religion

Visiting Associate Professor in East Asian Studies

Yoshitaka Yamamoto 山本嘉孝 is Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) and at SOKENDAI, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies. He specializes in Edo and Meiji (17th- to 19th-century) Japanese literature and cultural history, with a focus on Literary Sinitic prose and poetry by Japanese-speaking authors and a broader interest in the spread of Sinitic texts and cultural practices across Northeast Asia. He is the author of Shibun to keisei: bakufu jushin no jūhasseiki 詩文と経世:幕府儒臣の十八世紀 (The University of Nagoya Press, 2021).

Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) is an award-winning Chinese speculative fiction author, translator, creative producer, and curator. He is honorary president of the Chinese Science Fiction Writers Association, Culture Leader of World Economic Forum (2018/2019), Asia 21 Society Young Leader (2021), and has a seat on the Xprize  Foundation Science Fiction Advisory Council. His works include the novel Waste Tide and, co-authored with Kai-Fu Lee, the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. He currently lives in Shanghai.

Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies

Jinghua Lin Capital Normal University; Areas of interest: Comparative Literature; Literary Theory; Russian Literature and History in China

Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

Fan Xia Areas of interest: Economics of Environment and Health; Air Pollution and Traffic; Renewable Energy; Applied Econometrics

Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Reinier H. Hesselink teaches the history and culture of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times at the University of Northern Iowa. His specialty is the cross-fertilization of Japanese sources with information derived from the writings of Europeans visiting the islands between the 16th and 19th centuries, allowing for a new and multi-dimensional description of Japan’s early modern past. He enjoys taking a written document, a painting, a map, or a household object like a screen to analyze and elucidate their contexts, geneses, as well as their contemporary and subsequent meanings. He taught two seminars on the history of the city of Nagasaki: in the fall of 2022 a seminar on The Beginnings of Nagasaki (1560-1640), and in the spring of 2023 a seminar on The Dutch in Japan (1600-1868).

Christine Marran specializes in the fields of environmental humanities, critical theory, and gender studies. She is Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Co-Convener of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Minnesota. 

Through a new materialist approach, Marran’s work addresses how those in area studies can more deliberately contend with the more-than-human world in this age of rising seas. In her analysis of animal and plant life, archipelagoes and climate in narrative and moving images, Marran offers strategies for reading and interpreting more-than-human elements in the work of activist-writers and filmmakers in the Japanese archipelago. Selected works include Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Age, “Planetarity” in boundary 2; “Literature Without Us,” in Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective: Between Sea and Sky; “Animal Stranger in a Tokyo Canal” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power and other works. 

At Yale, Professor Marran continued her work in the environmental humanities. She dug into the new Noriaki Tsuchimoto Papers archive at Yale to expand her work on the prolific documentarian’s films, paying particular attention to the role of photography, seas, and toxins in his films; she completed an essay on the conservationist technology of trap cameras; and she continued her work on a longer project of translation and critique, “Fukushima Diaries.”

Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies

Professor Xu Guoqi was born in China and taught both in Asia and the USA before joining the University of Hong Kong’s History Department. He writes and has published widely in both Chinese and English on various topics.

Professor Xu is a leading authority of international history of modern China. His peers in Society of Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) recently honored him with the 2008 academic excellence award. His most recent book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, published by Harvard University Press in spring 2008, was chosen by International Society of Olympic Historians as the best book of 2008. The same book also received rave reviews from Washington Post, [London] Times, Irish Times, New York Review of Books, South China Morning Post, Toronto Star, Journal of Asian Studies, among many others. The Phoenix Television (Hong Kong) devoted two whole episodes of its book program to focus on this book, a rare treatment for any authors. His ideas and comments have been frequently sought by media such as Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, the South China Morning Post. His invited articles appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, and other places. Professor Xu’s research has attracted worldwide attention and his research profiles and interviews appeared in both the United States and China. Most recently two long interviews of him regarding his research on Chinese laborers in France during the First World War and the May Fourth Movement were published respectively in 2009 from China in China Archives’ February issue (中国档案) and the July issue of Xi Hu Zazhi (西湖杂志), a popular literary journal.

Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Qiong Chen (Shandong University)

Sumitomo Postdoctoral Associate in Japanese Studies

Anne Aronsson is an anthropologist of Japan and obtained her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Yale University. She was a postdoctoral fellow with a Suslowa-Postdoc-Fellowship grant at the University of Zurich in Switzerland where she taught a seminar course “Global Processes in East Asia.” At Yale she continued her work on her postdoctoral project on elder care in Japan and the use of robotic care devices, with a focus on social robots and emerging emotional technologies as well as teach in the Department of Anthropology; “Anthropology of Japan: Continuity and Change” (fall 2022), “Cultures and Markets: Asia Connected in Time and Space” (spring 2022), and “Culture, History, Power, and Representation” (fall 2022). Anne has authored several publications, including “Social Robots in Elderly Care: The Turn Toward Machines in Contemporary Japan,” in the special issue “Relations, Entanglements, and Enmeshments of Humans and Things: A Materiality Perspective” in Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology; “Conceptualizing Robotic Agency: Social Robots in Elder Care in Contemporary Japan” and introductory chapter in the special issue “Finding Agency in Nonhumans” published in Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism; “Multispecies Entanglements in the Virosphere: Rethinking the Anthropocene in Light of the 2019 Coronavirus Outbreak,” co-authored with Fynn and published in The Anthropocene Review; and her monograph Career Women in Contemporary Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives published with Routledge Contemporary Japan Series.

Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

Before joining Yale, Tian Li was a Korea Foundation-Korea Institute postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Harvard University, and a lecturer on Asian screen culture at Stanford University. She was also awarded the Yvette and William Kirby Centennial in Chinese studies by the American Council of Learned Societies. Her teaching has earned a Teaching Excellence award from the Office of Undergraduate Education, Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in Korean and Chinese film, media, and cultural studies. Her articles appear in such journals as Telos, China Perspectives, and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Her current book project Screen-capitalism: Transnational Korean Screen Culture in Postsocialist China investigates the shifting paradigms of cultural dynamics within Korean and Chinese screen media, at their intersection with affect, aesthetic, gender, and ideology.

Sumitomo Visiting Professor Emeritus in East Asian Studies

James Dobbins, Fairchild Professor Emeritus of Religion and East Asian Studies, Oberlin College

Suzanne Gay, Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies, Oberlin College

Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in East Asian Studies

Antonello Palumbo researches the religious, social and political history of premodern China in its connections to the Old World system. Buddhism and Taoism have long been among his key interests. He has studied in China (Peking University), Italy (where he holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the former Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples) and Japan (Kyoto University). From 2005 to 2020 he was first Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Religions of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of An Early Chinese Commentary on the Ekottarika-āgama: The Fenbie gongde lun 分別功德論 and the History of the Translation of the Zengyi ahan jing 增一阿含經 (Taipei: Fagu Wenhua, 2013) and of many articles and essays. His current research focuses on the parallel formation of translocal religious communities and imperial polities in China during the first millennium of the Common Era. His work in progress includes two book manuscripts in preparation, respectively on the nationalization of Buddhism in mid-Tang religious policies and on the early history of Heavenly Master Taoism, as well as a number of studies on the early history of Buddhism in China.

Japan Foundation CGP Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in East Asian Studies

Gento Kato is a political scientist of information, voting, and public opinion. His specialties are in political behavior under Japanese and American contexts, political psychology, formal modeling, experiments, and quantitative methodologies. His recent works particularly explore the mechanism of voter decision-making under low information. For example, his Ph.D. dissertation chapter, “When Strategic Uninformed Abstention Improves Accountability,” utilizes a formal model to suggest the need for careful assessment of the connection between political information and voter competence. It reveals that, depending on the information environment in elections, uninformed voting can be effective in inducing democratically “good” outcomes. His other recent works use survey experiments on Japanese voters to assess the role of information environments in explaining policy attitudes formation.

Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies

Graeme R. Reynolds specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Korea focusing on the production and circulation of knowledge, the history of the book, and historiography. His monograph investigates the Chosŏn-era (1392–1910) production, circulation, reception of the History of Koryŏ and the Essentials of Koryŏ History, two court histories on the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), by examining ownership seals and marginalia on extant copies. He also maintains interests in print and manuscript culture, printing technology, practices of reading, and archives. His second project will examine the ideologies and economies of movable type and woodblock in early modern Korea as part of a larger history of the reception of printing technologies.  He received a B.A. in Asian Area Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2008, an M.A. in Korean History from the Academy of Korean Studies in 2013, and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2021.  

Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Environmental Humanities of East Asia

Mark Frank is an environmental historian of China and the world. He recently finished his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has taught at the University of Illinois and Wesley College. At Yale he worked towards completing his manuscript, “Chinese Colonialism: The Ecology of Assimilation in Republican China and Beyond,” which chronicles the relationship between agrarianism and colonialism along China’s ethnically diverse frontiers between the fall of the Qing empire and the rise of the People’s Republic. This project draws on roughly two years of archival research in mainland China and Taiwan and has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Mark has begun work on a second book project that examines China’s relationship with the atmosphere from the late imperial era through the early twenty-first century. To date, he is the author of three historical articles on Chinese yak improvement schemes, high-altitude crop experiments, and sedentary-nomadic relations in eastern Tibet during the early twentieth century.

Institute of Sacred Music Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in East Asian Studies

Bo kyung Blenda Im is a 2012 ISM/YDS graduate (M.A.R. in religion and music) who received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in fall 2019 from the University of Pennsylvania. During the spring 2020 semester, she returned to YDS and the ISM as a lecturer in ethnomusicology. Her ethnographic project “Transpacific Modernity and the Challenge of Belonging: Negotiating Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul” centralizes Korean Christians’ engagements with black gospel and contemporary worship music. Holding the analytics of race, music, and religion in productive tension, she draws attention to the ways in which Korean and Korean diasporic Christians, in their articulations of selfhood and community, navigate and radically contest the normative conditions of transpacific modernity.

Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

Floris van Swet is a historian of early-modern Japan whose work broadly focusses on the interactions between institutional and everyday understandings of status and identity.  He grew up in the Netherlands before moving to the UK where he received his BSc from the University of Surrey, BA from the University of Sheffield and MA from SOAS, University of London. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation, “Finding a Place: Rōnin in the Tokugawa Period” explores the fate of rōnin, the so-called masterless samurai. This works shows that rōnin were in fact often neither ‘masterless’ nor ‘samurai’ and in doing so complicates our understanding of social status and the governance in the early Tokugawa Japan.

During his time at Yale, he worked as Postdoctoral Associate on the CEAS Digital Tokugawa Lab team.

Visiting Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in East Asian Studies

Ria Chae’s research deals with the Cold War in East Asia, focusing on the history of inter-Korean relations and nation-building on the Korean Peninsula. Her current book project tentatively titled “The Making of a Cold War in Korea” explores questions of agency and character of the Korean conflict from the Korean War to the contemporary period.

Chae previously was the Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2019-2020), Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University (2017–2019), Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (2016), Lecturer at Seoul National University and Dankook University, Korea (2013–2016), and Junior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC (2011–2012).

Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Werner Stangl has no background in Japanese history nor Japanese language. Having worked for over a decade as a historian of colonial Spanish America, he developed his interest in various aspects of digital humanities, such as digital scholarly editions and particularly GIS. Beyond his own scholarly research, he has worked for years as a copyeditor of a scholarly journal (Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas) and as a copyeditor and cartographer for several monographs.

From 2015 to April 2019, he built the HGIS de las Indias, an interactive website that reconstructs the changing administrative divisions and settlement patterns of the Spanish Empire in the Americas from 1701 to 1808.

Postgraduate Associate in East Asian Studies

Yuki Hoshino

Assistant in Research in East Asian Studies

Ingrid Barnes is a linguist with particular interests in Ancient Greek and Hittite, but is also comfortable working in Japanese. She is currently finishing her MA in Digital Tools for Premodern Studies at Tufts University. While at Yale, Ingrid was part of the Digital Tokugawa Lab, a group of scholars working on digital humanities projects with a focus on pre-modern Japan.

Visiting Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies

Jeongsoo Shin received his Ph.D in pre-modern Korean and Chinese literature from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2011. He studies garden culture in Korea and China, and is currently focused on miniature rocks, an aesthetic object appreciated among literati. With an eye to national borders, regional identity, and modes of circulation, Professor Shin scrutinizes the emergence of Korean connoisseurship of rocks, which culminated in the nineteenth century as a result of the interaction between indigenous Korean culture and Chinese influence. His research contributes to an understanding of Sino-Korean cultural exchange, East Asian material culture, the relationship between man and natural objects, and man in the realm of nature.

Visiting Senior Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Professor Luke Roberts teaches history of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times at UC Santa Barbara. He enjoys teaching and uses many visual and literary documents to help integrate social and cultural history with the economic and political. Professor Roberts likes to get students to think creatively about doing history. His research mostly focuses on the period between the late 1500’s and the late 1800’s, and his graduate teaching focuses on history during this period.

Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Amartuvshin Chunag

Tristan Grunow’s book manuscript, Empire by Design: Tokyo and the Building of Japanese Modernity, charts the respacing of the built environment of Tokyo under the process of Japanese state-formation and empire-building.  His most recent publication is “Paving Power: Western Urban Planning and Imperial Space from the Streets of Meiji Tokyo to Colonial Seoul” published in the Journal of Urban History in 2016.  Other publications include “Trains, Modernity, and State-Formation in Meiji Japan” and “A Re-examination of the ‘Shock of Hiroshima’: The Japanese Bomb Projects and the Surrender Decision.”

In 2017-2018, Grunow organized and hosted the UBC Meiji at 150 Project with the collaboration of colleagues in the Centre for Japanese Research, Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. As part of this project he co-curated, edited, and constructed the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource, compiling over a dozen visual essays by scholars from Japan and North America highlighting digitized materials related to Japanese history at UBC.  He also hosts and produces the ongoing Meiji at 150 Podcast, featuring interviews with prominent scholars of Japanese history, literature, and cultural studies from around the globe.

Dr. Xing Zhang is Associate Professor and Head of the Section of South Asian Culture at the Department of South Asian Studies and Research Center of Eastern Literature, Peking University, China. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in Germany and Visiting Professor and Researcher at Université de Montréal, in Canada. Her research focuses on South Asian culture, Indian languages and literature, and intercultural studies. Her research and fieldwork have been supported by grants and fellowships from Germany, Singapore, and Canada. She also served as a member of several research projects supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China. She has published a number of articles in SSCI and CSSCI journals, and is the author of two English monographs published in Germany and Singapore. At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, she will be working on the changing cosmology and knowledge of tigers among Buddhist communities in South and East Asia.

Japan Foundation CGP Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

Garrett Bredell specializes in Comparative Politics with an emphasis on Parliamentary systems, voter behavior and democratic institutions. His current research examines the electoral and legislative costs of party switching, using Japan as a primary case study. 

Scott Wilbur was the 2018 Banque de France Chair at the Center for French-Japanese Advanced Studies of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He holds a Ph.D. in political science and international relations from USC. His dissertation analyzes the political economy of zombie firms, unprofitable businesses supported by financial relief. More broadly, Dr. Wilbur’s research examines how political institutions and politicians influence economic outcomes, with a regional focus on Japan. His research has been funded by a Fulbright grant. While at Yale, Dr. Wilbur taught the course “Politics and Economics in Japan” during the spring 2019 term.

Postdoctoral Associate in the Environmental Humanities of East Asia

Tomo (Tomonori) Sugimoto is a sociocultural anthropologist who recently completed his PhD in anthropology at Stanford University.

While serving as a postdoctoral associate in the Environmental Humanities of East Asia at Yale University, Tomo worked on his first book manuscript provisionally entitled, The Indigenous Right to the Settler Colonial City? Land, Nature, and Housing in Taipei. Invigorated by the recent rise of indigenous rights discourse in Taiwan, urbanized indigenous Austronesian people (yuanzhumin) have increasingly asserted rights to Taipei’s public lands as sites of foraging, fishing, hunting, and dwelling over the last several decades. The Han settler-dominated state has curtailed such distinct native claims to the city, violently displacing indigenous people from their communities and relocating them into public housing. Based on long-term ethnographic research in indigenous communities built on Taipei’s riverbanks and hillsides as well as their relocation sites, Sugimoto’s book will explore how, in the age of multiculturalism and green urbanism, certain native claims to Taipei’s land, environments, and infrastructure are celebrated, while others are criminalized and regulated. Articles based on this research have been published in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, Gastronomica: Journal of Critical Food Studies, and City & Society.

Prior to finishing his PhD in 2019, Tomo acquired his MA in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego in 2013 and his BA in social science from the University of Tokyo in 2011. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Toyota Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies/the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies

Hiroshi Fujimoto

Visiting Associate Professor in East Asian Studies

Dr. Ayelet Zohar is a Senior Lecturer at the History of Art Department, Tel Aviv University, and currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the History of Art and CEAS at Yale (2018). She received her PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London (2007), followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University (2007-9), and a second Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (2011). In 2012 Dr. Zohar was a Japan Foundation Research Fellow at Hokkaidô University, followed by two research periods at Waseda University in Tokyo (2017 and 2018). Dr. Zohar holds a research grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) for her research on war memory in contemporary Japanese photography and video art (2016-2019).

Dr. Zohar’s main fields of research are the history and theory of Japanese photography; contemporary fine art photography; Historical, Meiji era photography, and its links to the traditions of ink painting; Art and visual culture in Japan; Postcolonial theory, Deleuzian studies and Trauma Studies. Dr. Zohar has published extensively on issues of Japanese photography and contemporary art in Japan, war memory in Japanese photography, gender and sexuality in contemporary Japanese art and photography. Dr. Zohar is also an expert on camouflage practices in relation to photography, and has related to issues of Foucauldian, Deleuzian and Rancierian theories in this respect. Recently, Dr. Zohar is working on a major project that has developed her own reading of photography in Japan as an opaque medium, created through performative processes. 

Dr. Zohar is a transdisciplinary artist and an independent curator. In 2005 she curated the now globally famous “PostGender” exhibition (Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa, 2005), and in 2015 her curated exhibition “Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed”  was shown at the Tel Aviv Universirty Art Gallery. She was the Head of the Museology and Critical Curatorial Studies Programme at Tel Aviv University (2016-2018).

Lecturers in East Asian Studies

Caroline Merrifield completed her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at Yale in 2018. Her research focuses on food sourcing arrangements in China within the context of China’s growing food movement. In this research, food is a crucial site for investigating problems of moral consensus-making in a time of Chinese “moral crisis.”

Kelsey Seymour received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania in June 2018. At Yale, she expanded her dissertation, “The Buddha’s Voice: Ritual Sound and Sensory Experience in Medieval Chinese Religious Practice,” and prepared it for publication. The project explores chanting practices surrounding Chinese Buddhist texts during the Six Dynasties and Tang periods, and how these sonic activities and aural experiences affected not only people’s religious lives in a ritual context, but also the larger role of chant in the lives of medieval Chinese Buddhists, both lay and monastic.

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies

Mio Shimazaki

Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies

Hao Peng

Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Harald Fuess has been Professor of History at Heidelberg University since 2009 and is one of the foremost experts on Japan in Europe. Professor Fuess currently examines the wide impact of Western industrial and mercantile capitalism on East Asian economies and cultures during the long nineteenth century. His case studies are connecting the global and the local through topics such as arms trade, treaty ports societies, consular jurisdiction, international epidemics, diplomatic disputes on trademarks, the role of the multilingual press, multinational business histories, and transcultural fusions of consumer cultures. He is also organizing a large collaborative research project with numerous colleagues in the United States, Europe and Japan. Activities include several international conferences on three continents reassessing the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japanese modernization, and global history. Several books and special journal issues are in progress on this important topic.

Chunwen Hao is the Dean of the School of History and the Director of the History Institute at Capital Normal University. He is also the Chief Editor of Dunhuangxue guoji liangluo weiyuanhui tongxun 敦煌學國際聯絡委員會通訊 (Newsletter of International Liaison Committee for Dunhuang Studies) and Dunhuang Tulufan yanjiu 敦煌吐鲁番研究 (Studies on Dunhuang and Turfan). Dr. Hao’s work focuses on the Dunhuang Manuscripts, Dunhuang Buddhism, and Chinese medieval history (3rd Century BC to 13th Century; Han to Song Dynasty). He is the Principal Investigator of a Chinese government-sponsored key project (国家社科基金重大项目). Vol 1-12 of Yingcang Dunhuang shehuilishi wenxianshilu 英藏敦煌社会历史文献释录 (The Collections of The Social and Historic Documents from Dunhuang Manuscripts in British Library) have been published in 2015 as part of the project, and the rest of the collection (30 volumes in total) will be published in different stages.

Japan Foundation CGP Visiting Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies

Seiki Tanaka is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, having joined the department in September 2015. Previously, he taught at Syracuse University and was a visiting scholar at Yale University and a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His research interests include the political economy of poverty and inequality, discrimination, redistribution, and conflicts.

Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies

Esther Lam leads the Northeast Asia Team within the Asia-Pacific Section of the United Nations Human Rights Office. Prior to her current role, she acted as the Office’s Migration Advisor and then focal point on anti-corruption, governance and human rights issues. In 2011, she established the Office’s presence on social media and led its strategic outreach on Google+, Twitter, Facebook and Storify. A journalist and researcher before joining the United Nations in 2006, Esther Lam has published extensively on human rights, United Nations and World Trade Organization issues. Among her books are China and the WTO – a Long March Toward the Rule of Law, A Practical Guide to the WTO for Human Rights Advocates (as lead author), and SARS and the WHO: An Untold Story, and her analytical pieces appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Bloomberg BNA and South China Morning Post. She studied journalism and communications in Hong Kong and international law at University of Edinburgh (LLM) and Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (PhD). She is fluent in English, Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese), and have working knowledge of French.

Yale World Fellow

DU Yang is the co-founder and chief analyst of China Philanthropist Magazine and CiMedia Group, a pioneering joint venture and an influential media source for the philanthropy industry in China. His work focuses on building partnerships and networks with global philanthropists and China’s growing philanthropy sector. As a culture “ambassador” in the philanthropy industry, he has been involved in the process of launching a platform of China’s top philanthropists and an east-west cultural program. Du has a Bachelor’s degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Bayartsetseg Jigmiddash is a lawyer with more than 15 years of professional experience in the field of rule of law and human rights. She has held senior government positions in the justice sector and has been at the forefront of Mongolia’s far-reaching reform initiatives. Currently, she is CEO and Founding Director of Veritas Consulting, an agency specializing in strategic development, management and government compliance. From 2012 to 2016, Jigmiddash served as Secretary of State of the Ministry of Justice of Mongolia, becoming the first woman appointed in this position. In this role, she oversaw the strategy, operations of the ministry and law enforcement agencies. Under her leadership, the legal policy on gender-based violence has been significantly improved, including criminalization of domestic violence. Prior to this top civil service post, she served as legal advisor to the president of Mongolia, and has been involved in the judicial reform as well as abolishment of death penalty in Mongolia. She has extensive civil society experience and pioneered an array of initiatives to promote human rights and access to justice. She also served as independent director of the state-owned commercial bank in Mongolia. She holds a masters in law (LLM) degree from Harvard Law School and graduated from the Law School of National University of Mongolia. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School.  She was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum.

Lin Kobayashi is an entrepreneur and educator who is passionate about bringing positive change to society. She founded and chairs the board of the International School of Asia, Karuizawa (ISAK), Japan’s first international boarding high school designed to nurture the next generation of transformational leaders. The establishment of ISAK is perceived to be one of the most successful social entrepreneurial projects in the recent years with strong support from both the public and private sectors.  Following the successful opening of ISAK in 2014, Kobayashi worked with the Minister and Ministry of Education on decentralization of teacher training, hiring, and evaluation, while serving on the Council for the Implementation of Education Rebuilding in Japan. She is also a member of Educational Policy Strategy Council in Nagano Prefecture, serves on the Accenture Japan Inclusion and Diversity advisory board as well as on the board of Endeavor which promotes entrepreneurship in Japan. She was selected as a Young Global Leader in 2012 by the World Economic Forum, Change-Maker of the Year 2013 by Nikkei Business, Woman of the Year 2015 by Nikkei Woman, and Management of the Year 2016 by Zaikai. She started her career at Morgan Stanley, and holds a BA in economics from the University of Tokyo and an MA in education from Stanford University. 

Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Kyung-soo Chun, was educated at Seoul National University (obtaining a B.A. in Archeology and Anthropology and an M.A. in Anthropology) and at the University of Minnesota, obtaining his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1982. Professor Chin taught at Seoul National University from 1982 until retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2014.  He is currently a Distinguished Professor as the ASEAN Research Institute at Guizhou University, China.

Professor Chun has held Visiting Professor and Scholar positions at various universities in Japan and China, including: National Museum of Ethnology at Osaka (1997-1998), Tokyo University (2004-2005), Kyushu University (summer 2006 and winter 2007), Yunnan University (winter 2008), Yamaguchi University (winter 2010), Kagoshima University (winter 2013), Okinawa International University (summer 2014) and Kanagawa University (summer 2015). He has published articles and books about ‘History of Anthropology’, ‘Korean Culture’, ‘Colonialism and War’, and ‘Ecological Anthropology’, among other topics. At present he is writing papers on John F. Embree and the Nanjing Massacre.

Ralph Thaxton​, Professor of Politics, Brandeis University

Visiting Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Tomoyasu Iiyama is an Adjunct Researcher at Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Tokyo, Japan, who has worked on northern Chinese social history during the Jin-Yuan-Ming and published Northern Local Literati: Civil Service Examination and Its Social Influence in North China, 1127-1368 (in Japanese) in 2011.

Japan Foundation CGP Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

André Asplund specializes in Japanese foreign policy and diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia. He is particularly interested in how Japan’s normative ambitions of spreading human rights and democracy fits within its international relations with non-democratic and strategic partners in ASEAN. He is currently looking at Japanese foreign aid and EU free trade agreements with Vietnam—a nation of growing strategic importance for the two self-proclaimed “civilian powers”, EU and Japan. He has previously written on the process of institutionalizing human rights in Southeast Asia through the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights and it’s something that he is still closely observing.

Lecturer in East Asian Langauges & Literatures

Angelika Koch-Low completed her Master in Japanese Studies and her Bachelor in English Literature at the University of Vienna, with periods of study at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice and Meiji University in Tokyo. Her Master’s thesis focused on the depiction of male-male same-sex desire in comic literature of the Edo period. She then studied for a Ph.D. in Japanese at the University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. thesis Sexual Healing: Sexuality, Health and the Body in Early Modern Japan (1600-1868), which she is currently preparing for publication with Cambridge University Press, explored medical views of sex as a health and disease concept in the Edo period. 

Angelika is also part of the collaborative project Timing Day and Night‘Timescapes’ in Pre-modern Japan, which explores time as a set of social practices prior to the introduction of the Western time system. In April 2015, she convened the international conference Timing Day and Night at the University of Cambridge. In September 2016, she was awarded a JSPS Fellowship at Tokyo University to pursue further research for this project in Japan. Beyond this, her academic and teaching interests extend to modern and contemporary Japan, and she co-edited a volume of research on genders and sexualities (Manga Girl Seeks Herbivore Boy: Studying Japanese Gender at Cambridge, LIT 2013).

Yale World Fellow

As co-founder and managing editor of Caixin, China’s leading business and finance media group, Wang Shuo focuses on providing high-quality news reports through leading an independent and professional standard in China. Under his leadership, the Caixin editorial team won the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University. Before Caixin, Shuo served as managing editor of Caijing, a business and finance magazine in China. Shuo is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Peking University, and a master’s degree in international public policy from Johns Hopkins University.

Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Xiqi Lu (Ph.D., Wuhan University, 1995), Professor of History at Xiamen University, studies the medieval history of South China, particularly the local society and culture, as well as the history of the ‘Boat People’ living in the southern coastal region of China. His current research works to place the southern coastal region in a broader historical context of international trade, smuggling, and migration, and explores its connection to Southeast Asia from the third century to the tenth century.

Visiting Associate Professor in East Asian Studies

Yinggang Sun is the author of Prophecy, Knowledge and Political Legitimation in Medieval China (神文時代: 讖緯、術數與中古政治研究, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, first edition, 2014; second edition, 2015, 498 pages), A History of Sui-Tang and Five Dynasties(隋唐五代史, Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2014), and around 50 published papers which mostly focus on medieval Chinese history and Buddhist studies. He co-edited with Jinhua Chen (Professor, Asian Studies, University of British Columbia) Sacred Space: Spatial Factors in Medieval Chinese Religions (Fudan University Press, 2014, 479 pages) and translated Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era by Yuri Pines (The Chinese edition published in 2013).

Professor Sun has held positions as a Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University of Taiwan and the Department of East Asian Studies of Princeton University, as well as a Visiting Fellow to the Institute of Asian Studies of Tokyo University, and to the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies (ICPBS) in Tokyo.

Visiting Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Tomoyasu Iiyama is an Adjunct Researcher at Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Tokyo, Japan, who has worked on northern Chinese social history during the Jin-Yuan-Ming and published Northern Local Literati: Civil Service Examination and Its Social Influence in North China, 1127-1368 (in Japanese) in 2011.

Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies

Nobuhiro Hiwatari (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a professor of political economy/international political economy at the Institute of Social Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He teaches at the Graduate School of Political Science as well as the Graduate School of Public Policy. He has also taught at Berkeley and Columbia and has conducted research at Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge. His research interests are the party politics of “neo-liberal” reforms at OECD countries as well as the impact of political regime heterogeneity on economic cooperation in the Asian-Pacific region. His works on these topics have appeared in academic journals as well as edited volumes.

He spent most of the academic year 2015-16 at Yale finishing a book project (titled The New Politics of Adjustment: International Economic Crisis and Partisan Competition) that examines how party competition during international recessions shapes the adoption of market-assuring reforms at OECD countries. He also taught a seminar entitled Japan’s Domestic Politics and International Relations in Spring, 2016.

Visiting Fellow for the Inter-Asia Initiative

XIE Shi received his B.A. in history from the Department of History, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and his Ph.D. in historical geography from the Center for Historical Geographic Studies at Fudan University in 2009. Elected by the committee of the Hundred Talents Program of Sun Yat-sen University, he is currently Professor of History, and supervises the Department of History’s doctoral program. He has also been selected to the National Program for Special Support of Eminent Professionals of China.  Xie also holds an appointment as Research Fellow at the Co-Centre for Historical Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong - Sun Yat-sen University, and is Executive Editor of the Journal of History and Anthropology, a publication of the Centre.

Xie specializes on social economic history and historical geography in China. His thesis was nominated for the Best 100 Ph.D. Dissertations by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2011. He has published articles at leading academic journals such as Historical Research (China), Bulletin of The Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan).  He has also conducted national research projects in his field. He has obtained substantial teaching experience in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the Sun Yat-sen University.

Visiting Research Fellows in East Asian Studies

Satoko Mita​ is a Research Fellow at Osaka City University in Japan.  Her research builds upon important new work on Japan’s status system to study “kawata” outcaste villages in the Kinai region during the early modern period. Her doctoral dissertation sought to explicate the internal social structure of a large outcaste community called Minami Ōji Village in Izumi province, while also examining its relations with commoner villages in the surrounding area.  During her time at Yale, Dr. Mita continued building on this earlier research, examining more carefully the development of leather sandal manufacturing (which was the main industry in Minami Ōji) in the 19th century using some newly uncovered documentary evidence.

Adam Craig Schwartz (PhD, University of Chicago 2013) came to Yale from NYU where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor (2013-2015) at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His interests are focused on the intersection between writing, religion, and the early development of philosophy and literature. His ability to work comparatively outside of China is a result of training in hieroglyphic Egyptian at the Oriental Institute. He is the author of “China’s first prayer” (JAOS 135.1 (2015)), 釋上博簡《容成氏》的“敃終 (Explaining the phrase ‘minzhong’ [an ideal end] in the Shanghai Museum’s Warring States bamboo manuscript Rongchengshi) (Jianbo 簡帛10 (2015)), “G-d, and perhaps a Sage, is hidden in the details: Deictic pictographs (指事文字) and a reappraisal of the primary meanings of Di 帝 (’Elohim) and Kong 孔 (Confucius’ surname)” (JAOS forthcoming), and The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions from Huayuanzhuang East (NYU Press; under contract). 

Yale World Fellow

Wallace Cheng is founder and managing director of ICTSD China, the first and only independent trade policy think tank in China. He is one of the most influential policy advisers to Chinese central government and various international institutions on global trade and Chinese economy. ICTSD is dedicated to engaging the nation to play a constructive role in shaping the future of global economic governance for sustainable development. In 2007, he established “Bridges China Dialogue” in Geneva, a prominent annual event featuring high-level conversation between ministers, negotiators, CEOs and opinion leaders. Prior to that, Wallace served as a key economist in the Shanghai Municipal Government. Currently, he co-manages a new industrial policy group, The E15 Initiative, a joint project with the World Economic Forum. He is also a board member of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development in London, a member of IMD Evian Group Working Group on Trade (Lausanne), and Adjunct Professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). Wallace co-edited two widely quoted books: From Rule Takers to Rule Makers and A Decade in the WTO, and is frequently interviewed by Chinese and international media including Xinhua, People’s Daily, Caixin, Reuters and Bloomberg. Wallace holds degrees from Fudan University and the University of Oxford.

Visiting Faculty in East Asian Studies and Anthropology

Susan Brownell received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1990, and joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri—St. Louis in the fall of 1994.  Dr. Brownell is an internationally recognized expert on Chinese sports and has done fieldwork in China, primarily in Beijing.  Her research interests are sports and body culture. In 2007-08 she was a Fulbright Senior Researcher at the Beijing Sport University, doing research on the Beijing Olympic Games.  At UMSL, she teaches Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; Ideas and Explanations in Anthropology; Senior Seminar; History, Theory and Practice of Anthropology; The Body in Culture; and Cultures of East Asia. Teaching at Yale as a Visiting Faculty in East Asian Studies and Anthropology in the Fall of 2014, she taught both “Body and Gender in China since the Late 19th Century,” which touched on the effects of social change in China on concepts of health, sports, beauty, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality; and “Cultural Performance in Modern East Asia,” which focused on the history and anthropology of organized cultural events in East Asia from the early twentieth century to the present.

Visiting Fellows in East Asian Studies

Trained as an architect, Congrong He is now an associate professor in the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University, China. Her research covers the history of Chinese architecture from ancient times to the present. She specializes in the history of traditional Chinese architecture and has published four books, five book chapters, and more than thirty articles. So far she has completed several important research projects and gathered a rich body of first-hand materials on ancient Chinese architecture. One of her books, Ten Years of Surveying and Mapping Ancient Chinese Architecture, will be granted the Excellent Academy Prize of the Third Book Awards of Chinese University Press. One of her lectures on ancient Chinese architecture was given on the Mooc (massive open online course, www.edx.org) in the fall of 2014.

Su-san Lee received her PhD in history at Brown University. She studies new Confucianism and teaches intellectual/cultural history of modern China and Taiwan at the University of Taipei. Her recent book Soul in Peace: The Intellectual Re-orientation of Private and Public Spheres in Republic China (in Chinese) deals with Chinese intellectuals’ searching for new orders in the 20th century politically, spiritually, and aesthetically. Her research at Yale, “Being Confucian Literati in Modern China: Ch’ien Mu and Chinese History Education in the 20th Century,” is part of her book project on the tension and dialog between Confucian classics and modern historiography.

Visiting Research Scholars in East Asian Studies

Henri-Paul Francfort is an archaeologist specializing on Central Asia from Proto-history to Antiquity, and is Director of Research Emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France. He is currently researching the art and archaeology of the Iron Age steppe nomads of Inner Asia in order to complete a book manuscript and articles related to unpublished artifacts discovered during the excavations of the Berel frozen kurgan Nr 11 in Atlay, Kazakhstan. This research focuses on the reciprocal processes of borrowing, transformation, and transmission of Greek and Achaemenian shapes; along with Graeco-Roman, Graeco-Bactrian, and Gandharan arts.

Timon Screech was born in Birmingham, UK, and received a B.A. (Hons.) in Oriental Studies (Japanese) at Oxford, before completing his Ph.D at Harvard in 1991. He also studied at the universities of Geneva and Gakushuin. He has taught the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, since 1991, and in 2006 became Professor of the History of Art. He is also Head of the Department of the History of Art & Archaeology, and Head of the School of Arts (SOAS-SOA). Screech is the author of some dozen books on the visual culture of the Edo period. His Ph.D was published as The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (CUP 1996) and is still in print in a second edition (Curzon, 2002). Perhaps his best-known work is Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (Reaktion, 1999; second, expanded edition, 2009). More recently, he has introduced and edited the writings of two 18th-century travelers, as, Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1775-1796 (Routledge, 2005), and Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779-1822 (Routledge, 2006). His field-defining general study, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan was published in 2012 (Reaktion Books/Hawaii University Press). His numerous writings have been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Romanian. He is currently working on the early history of the East India Company, and its role in cultural exchange.

Waka Hirokawa is an Associate Professor in History at the Tekijuku Commemoration Ceneter, Osaka University. Her work is focused on community responses to state policies targeting Hansen’s Disease in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to several articles, she is the author of Kindai Nihon no Hansen-byō Mondai to Chiiki Shakai (The Problems of Hansen’s Disease and Regional Communities in Modern Japan, 2011), and the co-translator of Ann Janetta’s The Vaccinators (Shutō Denrai, 2013). Among her current projects are studies titled Rethinking the Relationship between Poverty, Social Status and Disease in Modern Japan’s Regional Communities, and Constructing a New Archival Science Theory Based on Medical Materials.

Yale World Fellow

Shu “George” Chen is an award-winning journalist with more than a decade of reporting experience on China’s financial industry and economic reforms. He is currently the Financial Editor and Mr. Shangkong Columnist at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s premier English language newspaper. George joined the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in February 2012. In his current role, he leads a team of specialist reporters and edits the banking page for the SCMP. He also works closely with the Editor-in-Chief on the newspaper’s exclusive content and social media strategy. Based in Hong Kong but born in Shanghai, George’s writing is informed by his experiences in the Greater China region’s two financial capitals. He is the author of “Foreign Banks in China” and is currently preparing a manuscript on the interplay between Shanghai and Hong Kong for publication. George previously worked for Reuters and Dow Jones in Shanghai and Hong Kong, with numerous overseas assignments. He holds a Master’s degree in international relations and a Bachelor’s degree in economics, and is a candidate for the Doctor of Public Administration degree at the University of Hong Kong.

Inter-Asia Postdoctoral Associate

Chika Watanabe holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, where she researched Japanese aid ideologies, practices of “making persons” (hitozukuri), and the indistinction between the religious and the secular in a Japanese NGO and its projects in Burma/Myanmar. Tacking back and forth between aid work and academia, she has worked with Japanese and Burmese NGOs, and holds a Master’s Degree in Refugee Studies from Oxford University. Based on her fieldwork experiences across Japan and Burma/Myanmar, her work at Yale included advancing Inter-Asian perspectives and teaching an undergraduate seminar titled “Humanitarianism Across Asia.” While keeping an eye on Burma/Myanmar, her next major project will examine aid practices in the aftermath of the March 2011 disasters in Japan.

Rice Family Foundation Visiting Fellow

Se-Woong Koo received his Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University in 2011. He taught at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh from January 2011 to June 2012, and spent the 2012-2013 academic year as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre de Recherches sur la Corée, a division of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. He is currently working on a book project, which concerns contemporary Korean society and politics.  In the Fall of 2013, Koo taught “Korean Art and Culture” with Youn-mi Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art.  He also taught a course entitled “Religion and National Identity in Modern Korea” in Spring 2014.

Visiting Faculty in East Asian Studies and Political Science

Jeremy Wallace (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2009), Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, studies the politics of non-democracies, particularly China, as well as urbanization, development, and redistribution. He is working on a book manuscript, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Migration, and Authoritarian Resilience in China, examining how cities represent serious threats to autocratic regimes and how the Chinese Communist Party has managed its urbanization to maintain its rule.  Teaching at Yale as a Visiting Faculty in East Asian Studies and Political Science from 2012-2014, he taught “Contemporary Nondemocratic Regimes” in the Fall of 2013, and “Politics of China,” which covered the last thirty years of Chinese political history, in the Spring of 2013 and 2014.

Visiting Fellows in East Asian Studies

Kiyoshi Jinno is an Associate Professor of Japanese legal history at Musashino Gakuin Univeristy in Saitama, Japan. He is also teaching at his alma mater, Keio University. His research interests include the examination of donations to temples and shrines during the medieval period, and the history of ideas of jurists and legislators in the modern period.

Paul Spooner, CFA, has been a financial specialist in the field of commercial banking for over twenty-five years, operating throughout the United States and Asia, including with the institutions of Barclays Bank in New York City, ABN Amro Bank in Singapore, and Deloitte Touche in Beijing.  He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History from the University of Hong Kong, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University, and an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Michigan.  His academic work has focused on the development of Macau in the 20th Century, with Macau’s Revista de Cultura, among others, publishing a number of his articles.  In 2009-2010, he taught International Trade at Jinan University in Guangzhou, and from 2010 to 2012, the history of Macau, East Asian and Portugal at Universities in Macau and Hong Kong.   He is presently teaching Global Strategic Management & Finance at the University of St. Joseph’s in Macau, and is undertaking a series of projects for the Macau University of Science & Technology (MUST) related to Macau’s relationships with Brazil.

Visiting Fellow with The Todai-Yale Initiative

Takeshi Fukaya was a visiting fellow at Yale with The Todai-Yale Initiative from the Graduate School for Law and Politics, University of Tokyo, as well as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).  At Yale, he studied political science, comparative political economy, and Japanese politics with a focus on regulatory politics, including the causes and consequences of cartel stability in Japan from a comparative perspective. Before coming to Yale, Fukaya studied public administration and policy studies, finishing his dissertation on deregulation in Japan.

Visiting Korean Lector

Junghwa Lee received an Ed.M. in Education of the Korean Language as a Foreign Language from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea in 2004.  She has since been teaching Korean language, culture, and current affairs at the Korean Language Education Center of Sogang University, also in Seoul.  Lee was a Visiting Korean Lector in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale, teaching both Elementary and Intermediate level Korean during the 2013-2014 academic year. Her appointment was generously supported by a Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University Title VI Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Yale World Fellows

Daniel Shin oversees global venture capital and a private equity investment program on behalf of Korea Telecom. In addition, he is a founding member and managing director of KingsBay Capital, a Korea-U.S. cross-border venture capital firm with offices in Seoul and San Francisco. He has published several books and is a frequent speaker on subjects related to innovation and tech entrepreneurship. He came to Yale in the Fall of 2013 as both a Yale World Fellow and CEAS Affiliate.

Xingzui Wang is Vice President of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, one of the oldest and largest NGOs in China, and one of the few working outside the country. He oversees expansion of the Foundation’s international impact. Wang also sits on the board of the China Foundation Center, an organization promoting transparency, unity, and partnerships among Chinese foundations.  He came to Yale in  the Fall of 2013 as Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. S. Ng Yale World Fellow and CEAS Affiliate.