CEAS Postdoctoral Associates Lecture Series
TBD Rio Katayama completed her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of Southern California. Her dissertation explores the multi-layered (de)construction of Japan-ness and its relations to affective bodily responses that is elicited through the depiction of continuous nuclear trauma in Japanese audio-visual media. She has previously published her more social science-focused project “Idols, Celebrities, and Fans at the Time of Post-Catastrophe” in Celebrity Studies. Rio holds her BA in Literature from Waseda University and an MA in Japanese Pedagogy from Indiana University,...
TBD Carolyn Wargula is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Bucknell University specializing in Japanese Buddhist art. At Yale, she will write her forthcoming book project, Embodied Embroideries: Gender, Agency, and the Body in Japanese Buddhism, which examines the mortuary practice of hair embroidery from the late twelfth- to the seventeenth centuries. She considers how this medium appealed particularly to women as a means to achieve enlightenment and to circumnavigate doctrinal teachings concerning the impurities of the female body. Carolyn was born in Japan and grew up in Okinawa and...
TBD Meghan Howard Masang’s research interests center on the Tibetan adoption and assimilation of Buddhism. She holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2023), and an A.B. in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies from Harvard University (2004). Her dissertation examines the translation career of Wu Facheng 吳法成/Go Chödrup འགོ་ཆོས་གྲུབ་ (d. 864), an influential scholiast and translator of Buddhist scriptures from Chinese to Tibetan and vice versa based in the important Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang. Prior to graduate school, her work as a Tibetan translator and...
TBD Jonathan C. Feuer earned his Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures from UCLA in 2023. His dissertation was entitled “The South Korean Buddhist Military Chaplaincy: Buddhist Militarism, Violence, and Religious Freedom.” His research interests include Buddhist modernity, religion and violence, and religion and the Cold War. He is a previous recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and ACLS Ho Foundation fellowship. Jonathan received his B.A. in English from Manhattan College and his M.A. in Religion from Rutgers University.
TBD Gyatso Marnyi is a historian of empires and frontiers in East Asia. Combining textual sources with ethnographic fieldwork, his research focuses on the interaction and exchange between China and Inner Asia from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book project that examines the dispossession of Tibetans, the displacement of Chinese, and the segregation of Muslims along with China’s transition from empire to nation-state in the Northwest between 1862 and 1962. He is also editing a book that explores how different ethnic groups along the rivers of the...
TBD Dilrabo Tosheva is an historian and architectural historian specializing in the artistic production of pre-modern Central Asia, Turkic, and Persian cultural spheres. At Yale, she will write her forthcoming book project, En Route to the Taj Mahal: Transformation of Royal Identity and Architecture under the Qarakhanids in Pre-Mongol Central Asia. Dilrabo’s educational background is interdisciplinary, involving training in a diverse array of schools and departments across several continents and countries. She completed her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in History at Bukhara State...
The existing literature on propaganda in authoritarian systems is largely focused on top-down propaganda strategies, such as whether propaganda persuades or intimidates, and how effective different sources of propaganda and types of propaganda content are. This research instead examines propaganda from the bottom-up perspective, looking into how the unique traits of those who are exposed to propaganda influence its effectiveness. Primarily this literature examines demographics like education levels, family backgrounds, political awareness, and whether the individual lives in an urban or rural...
Globalization and massive transnational movements have profoundly challenged people’s nation-based identities. This, in turn, has encouraged scholars to re-examine the idea of citizenship. Historians in particular have concerned themselves with how people in different times and places defined their communities and their relationships with the state. This talk presents a case study from the early Tang empire of China. At its largest extent, the Tang’s territory spanned the Korean peninsula to present-day Afghanistan, governing a large multi-ethnic population. It also attracted many foreigners...
The cultural phenomenon known as Korean Wave (Hallyu) has flourished on the Chinese mainland since the 1990s, both officially and unofficially, despite looming political conflicts and cultural boycotts. Although the term Hallyu was initially coined in the Chinese context and the phenomenon has reshaped the contours of Chinese pop culture, the Sino-Korean entanglements in screen media have received little attention in English-language scholarship. Tian Li’s research theories the (re)localization of Korean screen culture in China through the concept of what she terms screen-capitalism—a system...
The right to asylum is a hotly contested issue in the politics of rich democracies of the Global North, most of which – despite implementing various restrictive measures of deterrence – accept a significant number of asylum-seekers. A country that is part of the Global North that lies outside this pattern is South Korea, a rich Asian democracy whose compliance with international treaties on refugee protection and enactment of a domestic refugee law are at odds with the exceptionally low number of asylum-seekers it accepts. I explore this puzzling discrepancy by examining Korea’s bureaucratic...
Why are young people underrepresented in most political institutions? And does this shortage of young politicians matter for the extent to which young people’s interests are reflected in policy outcomes? Understanding the answer to these questions is especially important in advanced democracies such as Japan that confront the challenges of declining birth rates and aging populations. In these countries, politicians face soaring welfare costs and tough decisions about how to allocate scarce resources between the needs of younger working families and elderly retirees. Without the presence of...
Bureaucracy is a pillar of state building. I examine how statemakers achieve the transition from tenuous rule to consolidated rule. I argue that rulers can diversify the selection system to recruit agents who have different skill sets to solve the dual challenges of state building: coercion and compliance. While rulers appoint officials who have ideational resources to elicit compliance, they turn to officials with practical skills to respond to military challenges. I draw on archives to build an original dataset on the prefects of Qing Dynasty of Imperial China prefectural and conflict...
In the context of the unending Korean War and the continuation of national division on the Korean peninsula, it is difficult to imagine the 1950s and early 1960s beyond images of mass death, orphanhood, and poverty. Histories of the era have been dominated by military and diplomatic histories, while recent scholarship on transnational adoption have shown how both real and imagined children and women were crucial to the US-ROK relations and the US empire during the Cold War. In this talk, I centralize childhood and consumption in Cold War Korea beyond our understanding of the iconography of...
Scholars of religions have generally been more comfortable with ideas than with things… They have been particularly uncomfortable, perhaps, when people touched or rubbed or hugged or kissed things, especially when those things were themselves somewhat disconcerting—dead bodied, bits of bone or cloth, dirt or fingernails, dried blood. This uneasy itself may go a long way toward explaining why we still understand little about relics. And this lack of understanding may represent a serious gap since these bodies and bits of bone and otherwise seemingly dead matter have played a lively role in the...
This talk examines debates about the visibility and invisibility of the emperor and imperial institutions as a site for thinking about the meaning of trust (xin) in early China. I argue that these debates can be fruitfully organized around two paradigms, what I call the invisible seer paradigm and the visibly blind paradigm. These two paradigms organize many discussions, but this talk will focus on two sites: ritual and law. In both places there was a struggle to articulate the proper balance between sight and blindness revealing the ambiguity of xin in early China. Trenton Wilson is a...
The History of Koryŏ and the Essentials of Koryŏ History are two court histories on the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) compiled during the early decades of the Chosŏn (1392–1910). Written in the cosmopolitan language of Literary Sinitic, these two books became foundational texts for the Chosŏn elites to write and rewrite their past. Today, the two texts are centerpiece historical sources for the study of premodern Korea. In this talk, I examine the Chosŏn-era production, circulation, and reception of these two court histories. Based on my examination of over 100 Chosŏn-era copies of the History and...
As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots to assist with elder care. However, Japanese society increasingly experiences the phenomenon of people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines such as social robots. The introduction of social robots into the realm of elder care may be...
Communication in China has been characterized as centralized, censoring, and, with the hyper-technologized dominance in facial recognition technologies, “techno-authoritarian.” This talk presents evidence that disappeared communications and erased messages, although ubiquitous, are often not results of censorship. Records and databases produce noir stories and dystopic narratives about Chinese media cultures. These stories are incomplete because they are skewed towards stored and “verifiable” data. In this talk, I argue that the elite use storage media to preserve knowledge, but meanwhile,...
Lab-experiment and survey based studies find that intergroup threat and group identity have significant implications on the formation of political attitudes, that those factors encourage individuals to approach information with directional motivation. On the other hand, unrealistic assumptions prevent those findings to be directly generalized to the real-world context. In this study, we use novel twitter network data during rising territorial disputes in Japan to capture real-world information communication process under intergroup threat. In our data, twitter users communicate information...
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the leadership of the Republic of China attempted to mobilize Han citizens to the frontier for large-scale land reclamation projects that were supposed to assimilate indigenous ethnic groups and safeguard the borderlands against foreign encroachment. Proponents of this strategy drew inspiration from the imperial institution of tuntian (colonial fields) in formulating a modern vision of tunken, which I interpret as “agrarian colonization.” Tunken resonated with veins of Chinese nationalism that were agrarian and often anti-industrial in nature. This talk...
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