CURRENT ASGC GRADUATE STUDENTS
Keith Clark is a doctoral student in the History Department, studying modern China. He is particularly interested in how Chiang Kai-shek’s and Mao Zedong’s competing governments constructed their relations, nursed their conflicting worldviews, and confronted the wider world after so many years of conflict and Western encroachment in China. He wants to know how two governments with a shared history approached each other and the world during the post-war period and how that influenced their historical trajectories.
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Dong Zhang is a graduate student at department of political science. His research interests include political economy in developing countries, Chinese elite politics and party systems. His previous work primarily examines the historical origins of political institutions in China and how political power structure affects economic decentralization and long-run economic growth. He is planning to explore the evolution of business strategies and formation of interest groups in China.
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Gao Menglu is a doctoral student in CLS (Comparative Literary Studies) and English whose research interests include late 19th- and early 20th-century British/Chinese literature, science and literature, visual culture and media, translation, and theatrical adaptation. She is currently interested in how the representations of hearing and seeing in Victorian and Modernist literary texts mediate the problems of materiality, embodiment and affect.
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Guo Xinran‘s focus is on modern/contemporary Chinese art, especially contemporary art in China during the 80s and the early 90s. She is intrigued to know how, in the 80s and 90s, Chinese artists took up the framework of, as well as responded to, Western modern/contemporary art. Their active conceptualization of Chinese art in this period, as she sees it, holds much significance for later developments of contemporary art in China and reveals important dynamics of the global art world. As a parallel focus, she is also interested in experiments and discussions of “modern art” and “Chinese art” during the Republican period.
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(Lois) Lu Hao is a first year doctoral student studying Asian history, with a focus on East Asia and China. She is interested in the cultural and social transformation in China at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in Chinese women’s experience with an increasingly multi-cultural environment as well as their response to the socio-political movements of their time. Before coming to Northwestern, Lois earned her BA in History at Agnes Scott College, GA.
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Nisheeta Jagtiani is a doctoral student in Buddhist Studies. She studies the non-sectarian ideal (Ris med) that gained popularity in East Tibet (Khams) in the 19th century. Through studying the lives of the founders of the Ris med ideal, she examines the closely intertwined relationship between religion, politics and the creation of authoritative figures in Tibet. Nisheeta graduated from the University of Chicago with an M.A. from the Divinity School. Her advisor is Sarah Jacoby.
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Kareem Khubchandani is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies writing a dissertation titled “Ishtyle: Queer Nightlife Performance in India and the South Asian Diaspora.” His project examines LGBT South Asians in professional classes who, despite their transnational mobility, are constrained by legal, social, and moral policing. He examines the ways in which performances in nightclubs refuse these expectations of respectability, and allow his interlocutors to rehearse alternative ethical relationships to themselves, to their communities, and to governmental structures. He is a performance artist and has worked with Rasaka Theater, Serendipity Theater, and Northwestern’s competitive Bollywood dance group A.NU.Bhav. You can find him on Twitter [@KareemPuff], Tumblr [Diary Of An Item Girl], YouTube [KKhubcha], or Facebook [DesiDragQueen].
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Rachel Levy is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History. Her research concerns the Buddhist art of South Asia and the Himalayas, with a particular focus on figural representation and relationship between artistic form and religious function. Her previous work examined portraits of Tibetan Buddhist teachers made prior to the nineteenth-century. She plans to study emergent forms of Tibetan Buddhist portraiture and the ways in which they are integrated into existing systems of meaning, value and use.
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Teng Li studies late imperial and twentieth-century China. She is currently developing a dissertation topic on the transition of property law in two regions – Northeast China and Taiwan – between 1945 and 1952. She is particularly interested in how the construction of a certain legal order could help or challenge the state-building projects led by the two major parties in China then, and how these transitions shaped the legal culture of local societies. In addition, she has written about ramifications the modern penal code Republic of China enacted in the late 1920s brought to gender and family relations. She holds a law degree from Tsinghua University, China and also enrolls in Northwestern University School of Law as a JD/Phd student.
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Youjia Li is a doctoral student at the Department of history. She is interested in the history of modern treaty ports, migrations (especially the migrant sex workers) in modern Japan and China, and related issues about extraterritoriality, female agency and modernity. She would like to explore a novel assessment of prostitution, treaty ports, and transnational connections that would resonate with scholars from a variety of fields. She is also interested in social history of pre-modern Japan. She has deferred admission to the Fall of 2014.
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Alexandra De Leon is doctoral student in History, focusing on 20th century Japan and memory of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. She is particularly interested in the representations of war memory in art and visual mediums. Her previous work explored the role of nuclear power in Japanese culture and the responses of Japanese artists to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in comparison with those of the Fukushima nuclear crisis. After finishing her bachelor’s, she worked as an Assistant Language Teacher in Nagasaki, Japan for two years before beginning her graduate studies at Northwestern.
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Andre Nickow is a doctoral student in Sociology. His research interests center around development, and especially the intersection of development, social movements, and organization studies. So far, he has carried out fieldwork primarily in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan state in Northern India, but plans to continue research on a variety of locations across South Asia.
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Darcie Price-Wallace is a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies. She studies different forms of female monasticism and renunciation in contemporary South Asia. Her research examines the relationship between communities of such women and the social environments in which those communities exist, and the way in which these communities are influenced by and accept or reject the nexus of cultural traditions of which they are a part.
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Matthew Richardson is a doctoral student in the Musicology department who specializes in 20th century Japanese electronic music, primarily
electro-pop and experimental genres. His research focuses on how
electronic music and its attendant visual culture and performative
practices function as an arena for constructing Japanese identities
and allow performers to engage with the West’s perceptions of Japan. He is
currently working on composer Tomita Isao’s work from the 1970s and
the contemporary electro-pop group Perfume. His secondary research area
focuses on Japanese iconography of Western music in the Late Edo
Period.
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Taylor Rogers is from Chapel Hill, NC. She is a PhD Student in Philosophy at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of philosophy, and especially Kant and Classical Indian Philosophy. She also has interests in aesthetics, feminism, and ethics more broadly. When not doing philosophy, she loves to play music, practice yoga, and hike mountains!
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Yixue Shao is a PhD student in the Political Science department in Northwestern University. Born and raised in China, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts with double majors in Politics and Economics, and studied PPE at the University of Oxford during her third year in college. She is interested in Politics of China, political economy, and US-China relations.
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Xin Sun is a PhD candidate of Political Science at Northwestern University, where he was also a graduate fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. His research interests include comparative politics, political economy, Chinese politics and research methodology. He is now working on his dissertation, which focuses on land politics in China and analyzes how elite bargaining and clientelism between state officials and business actors affect a variety of policy outcomes, including land quota allocation, the enforcement of land regulations, and local officials’ land use behaviors. In addition, he also works on topics including village elections and local governance in China. For more information, please visit his website https://sites.google.com/site/xinsunshomepage/
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Emilie Takayama’s research focuses on the intersection between the history of the body and economic sociology within the Japanese Empire. She is particularly interested in the process through which new consumer needs are created through the conscious institutionalization of modern body ideals and associated practices. Emilie’s dissertation traces the history of the modern Japanese beauty industry in the early twentieth century. She examines how the interaction between entrepreneurs and urban middle-class consumers in Japan and its colonies legitimized new body ideals, which in turn promoted modern beauty products and services such as cosmetics and aesthetic surgery.
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Yang Guangshuo is a doctoral student in History. Previously trained in social theory at Wesleyan University with a background in Chinese philosophy, his primary research interests now lie at the intersection of knowledge, identity, and sexuality in late imperial and modern China. He is also interested in the theory of history and historiography, with a focus on developing a method in the comparative study of sexual minority communities and their historical memory.
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A graduate student in Art History, Yang Xiao studies the transformation of Chinese elite art (especially in the genre of ‘figure painting’) and the Republican state since the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1949). Several issues surrounding the artistic transformation and the art-politics-interaction will be addressed in her dissertation: the centrality and meaning of transnationalism in the nationalist cultural imagery making, and the issues of patriarchy and internal Orientalism as revealed by both visual representation and governmental critical reception of the artworks created by Han male elite artists since the War. Her other research interests include the appropriation of Buddhist philosophy and visual traditions in modern/contemporary Chinese art, local photographic practice and identity formation in Taiwan since the Japanese colonial period.
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Soo Ryon Yoon is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies, Northwestern University. Soo Ryon’s dissertation Dancing Africa, (Un)Doing Koreanness: The Circulation of “African Culture” in Contemporary South Korea (working title) investigates how South Korea’s new racial politics, multiculturalism, and nationalism are both consolidated and deconstructed through the practices, (racial and performative) appropriation, and reception of “African” performances in the contemporary global era. The Buffett Center’s Dissertation Research Award and Fulbright Graduate Study Award supported part of pre-dissertation field research from 2010 to 2013. She has served the Interdisciplinary Asian Studies Graduate Student Group and the Colloquium on Ethnicity and Diaspora as the co-chair. Before coming to Northwestern, Soo Ryon worked as a curator, translator, and research assistant for performing arts organizations in South Korea including the Seoul International Dance Festival, Seoul International Performing Arts Festival, and Korea Arts Management Service. Her short article on ethics of performance writing has appeared in Beteum (in Korean) in December 2014. _________________________________________________________________________
Yanqiu Zheng is a doctoral student of modern China in the History Department. He is generally interested in the international perspective on China’s transition to a modern nation-state from the late nineteenth century onward and am now studying how the representations of China in the United States in the twentieth century impacted China’s political modernity and Sino-American relations.
NU ASGC GRADUATES
Peter Thilly Ph.D. awarded in 2015 from the History department, with a focus on East Asia with a specialization in modern China. His dissertation is entitled “Treacherous Waters: Drug Smuggling in Modern Fujian.” It is about the relationship between a maritime community and the international drug trade, beginning with the rise of the coastal opium network in the 1830s, and ending in a flurry of narco-capitalism a century later. It is about how narcotics transformed local society in a stretch of coast in southeastern China, and how the people living there guided the evolution of the Asian market in illegal drugs.
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Shuman Chen (Jiane), Ph.D. awarded Summer 2014
Shuman Chen’s primary research is Chinese Tiantai Buddhist philosophy. Her secondary research interests include Chan/Zen Buddhism, Buddhist art, and Daoist philosophy. With a hermeneutic approach, her dissertation explores the idea of the Buddha-nature of insentient beings in the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist traditions, with a focus on the philosophy of Jingxi Zhanran in the Tang dynasty. Her dissertation also covers East Asian art with a discussion on how plants are portrayed as sages and why pagodas and relics might be considered sentient. From an environmental perspective, she also examines how to appreciate the insentient world’s Buddha-nature, hoping to increase our awareness of the mutual relationship between human beings and nature.
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Zirwat Chowdhury, Ph.D. awarded Summer 2012
Zirwat Chowdhury is a candidate in Art History specializing in late 18th- and early 19th-century British art and architecture. Her dissertation, “Anglo-Indian Encounters: British Art and Architecture, 1780-1830,” studies the British conceptualization of Indian architecture and its impact on British architectural practice.
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Liza Oliver, Ph.D. awarded Summer 2014
Liza Oliver specialized in Franco-Indic aesthetic and scientific exchange in the late 17th and 18th century. Her dissertation, “The Aesthetics of Mercantilism: Painted Textiles, Natural History and the Consumption of the French Indian Exotic (1674-1757),” focuses on the integration of the French East India Company with the indigenous painted textile industry in southeast India to illuminate how mercantilist economies restructure our narratives about cross cultural encounters in the early colonial era. The ultimate aim of her study is to explain emergent European conceptions of modernity as deeply imbedded in, and informed by, indigenous Indian knowledge of natural history and aesthetic practices.
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Munjulika Rahman, Ph.D. awarded Summer 2014
Munjulika Rahman obtained her PhD from the Department of Performance Studies. Her research interests include dance in predominantly Muslim countries, Indian classical dance, nationalism, postcolonialism, and Hindu mythology. Her dissertation explores the history and politics of dance in Bangladesh, particularly how national identity is expressed and negotiated through dance. She is trained in Bengali music and is a student of various dance forms. During her time at NU, she taught “Analysis and Performance of Literature” the introductory Performance Studies course and “Danced Nationalisms: Theory and Practicuum” at the Dance Department at Northwestern. She currently teaches at NU in Qatar.