Faculty | Postdoctoral Fellows & Visiting Scholars | Librarians & Staff | Graduate Students
Faculty
Cynthia Brokaw
Professor of History
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Cynthia Brokaw researches the history of the book in late imperial China. Her Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (2007) is a study of an important regional publishing industry and its impact on the dissemination of knowledge in south China. Her current project, "Book Culture on the Qing Frontier," examines the development of publishing and the creation of book cultures, both Chinese and Tibetan, on the southwestern frontier of the Qing empire. |
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Kaijun Chen
Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies
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Prof. Chen has published on "Learning about Luxury Goods: Transmission of Mercantile Knowledge from the Southern Song to the Early Ming Periods" and "The Self-cultivation of Technocrats: Tang Ying’s (1682–1756) Cultural Production and Skill Acquisition." He has recently taught courses including "From Desktop to Stage: Drama and Performance in Late Imperial China," "Crafting Early Modern China: Handicraft, Witchcraft and Statecraft," and "Literature and Science in Early Modern China."
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Wenhui Chen
Lecturer in East Asian Studies
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Learning Chinese is not merely a matter of mastering the language. Wenhui Chen makes sure students appreciate the manners, traditions, social nuances, and societal norms that are a significant part of life in China. |
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Matthew Gutmann
Professor of Anthropology
Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies
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Although most of his anthropological research has been in Mexico and Latin America, Matthew Gutmann has an undergraduate degree in modern and classical Chinese and he is now engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, especially at the Blind Date Corner (aka Marriage Market) in People’s Park (人民公园的相亲角). In China he is also an honorary Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and in the Department of Anthropology at Nanjing University. |
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Lung-Hua Hu
Senior Lecturer in Chinese
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Hu Lung-Hua’s research is focused on Mandarin Chinese phonology and grammar as well as pedagogy. She has also been working on assessing study abroad programs designed for American college students located in China and Taiwan. Another aspect of her research is on methods and effectiveness of incorporating technology in the teaching of Chinese. |
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Evelyn Hu-Dehart
Professor of History
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Evelyn Hu-DeHart often describes herself as a multicultural person who speaks several languages (including English, Chinese, French, and Spanish) and moves easily among several cultures. Her professional life has focused on what Cuban historian Juan Perez de la Riva calls "historia de la gente sin historia." |
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Yuko Jackson
Senior Lecturer in Chinese
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Hu Lung-Hua’s research is focused on Mandarin Chinese phonology and grammar as well as pedagogy. She has also been working on assessing study abroad programs designed for American college students located in China and Taiwan. Another aspect of her research is on methods and effectiveness of incorporating technology in the teaching of Chinese. |
Robert Lee
Associate Professor, American Studies
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Robert Lee studies the history of Asians in the United States, racial formations, and relations between Asia and America. Three books include: Dear Miye, Letters Home from Japan 1939-1946 (Stanford, 1995; Japanese edition - Asahi, 1999); Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Temple, 1999, Japanese and Chinese editions, 2006); and Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (Rutgers 2005). |
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Dore Levy
Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies
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Dore Levy studies classical Chinese poetry and fiction, forms of narrative literature, and East Asian and European literature. |
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Zhuqing Li
Adjunct Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
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Dr. Zhuqing Li is adjunct associate professor of East Asian Studies at Brown. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, the historical evolution of the Chinese language, Chinese dialectology, and returnees in China. Courses that she teaches at Brown include Returnees in China's Modernization and The History of the Chinese Language. Dr. Li’s latest book is Reinventing China: Experiences of Contemporary Returnees from the West (Bridge 21 Publications, 2016). It is currently under contract to be translated into Chinese. Her other books include a study of Fuzhou grammar and phonology and dictionaries of the Minnan and Fuzhou dialects respectively. On leave Spring 2017. |
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John Logan
Professor of Sociology
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Dr. Logan is PI for US2010, a project supported by Russell Sage Foundation to analyze trends in American society that are revealed by the most recent data sources, including Census 2010. He is continuing research on the impact of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast. He has also undertaken studies of neighborhood change and individual mobility in U.S. cities in the period 1880-1920, and today. Since the early 1990s, Dr. Logan has studied social change in China, especially impacts of market transition. |
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Katherine Mason
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
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Katherine A. Mason is a medical anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in medical anthropology, anthropological demography, population health, bioethics, global health, science and technology studies, China studies, and gender studies. Her first book, based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China on the professionalization of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, is under contract with Stanford University Press and is due out in early 2016. Mason is currently working on two new projects: a collaborative mixed methods project that examines HIV/AIDS stigma among recent Chinese immigrants to New York City's three Chinatowns, and a multi-sited ethnographic project that examines the mother-newborn relationship during the early postpartum period in the U.S. and China. |
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James McClain
Professor of History
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James L. McClain has taught and researched the history of early modern Japan at Brown for nearly a quarter century. He is author of an award-winning book, Kanazawa: A Castle Town in Seventeenth-Century Japan, and more recently a 700-page textbook, Japan: a Modern History. He co-edited two volumes on two cities, Edo and Osaka, and is author of numerous articles. His research has won support over the years from the Japan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. |
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Rebecca Nedostup
Associate Professor of History
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Professor Nedostup is interested in: the social and cultural impact of modern Chinese political movements; migration within and across borders and the development of communities amid displacement; mobilization and demobilization; and the changing conception and treatment of the dead in the modern era. She also works on politics and religion in modern China and the relationship between modernity and religion in comparative contexts, and am interested in the methods of ritual studies and spatial analysis. |
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Samuel Perry
Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies
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Samuel Perry examines the revolutionary cultures of 20th century Japan and Korea. Focusing on the proletarian avant-garde, children's literature and fiction about and by Koreans, his current manuscript, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea and the Historical Avant-garde, shows how proletarian cultural workers in the 20s and 30s reconfigured culture into a vital social practice, opening up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, childhood, gender and ethnicity. |
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Harold Roth
Professor of Religious Studies
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Harold D. Roth is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative. Roth is a specialist in Classical Chinese Religious Thought, Classical Daoism, the Comparative Study of Mysticism and a pioneer of the academic field of Contemplative Studies. In fact, Roth is the person who initially coined the term "Contemplative Studies" and he designed the first university concentration program in this subject. |
Janine Sawada
Professor of East Asian Studies and Religious Studies
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Janine Sawada specializes in the religious and intellectual history of early modern Japan. She is currently studying the evolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of ideas and practices related to the worship of Mt. Fuji. |
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Naoko Shibusawa
Associate Professor of History and American Studies
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Naoko Shibusawa is a 20th C. U.S. cultural historian. She studies U.S.empire and political culture, as well as transnational Asian American history. She is interested in how commonplace ideas or ideologies in American culture have supported U.S. domestic and foreign policy and how nonstate actors have reproduced and reinforced state goals. |
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Kerry Smith
Associate Professor of History
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Professor Smith is developing a book-length exploration of the social and cultural histories of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. That event, which devastated most of present-day Tokyo and many of the surrounding communities, stands out as a key but largely unexamined rupture in the history of modern Japan. |
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Edward Steinfeld
Dean's Professor of China Studies
Professor of Political Science
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Edward Steinfeld's research focuses on the political economy of contemporary China, the political economy of global production and innovation, and the political economy of energy. Steinfeld's 2010 book, Playing Our Game, examined the interconnections between the manner by which Chinese industrial producers have integrated into global supply chains, the institutional changes within China that have facilitated that integration, and the transformation of state-society relations which has resulted. |
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Meera Viswanathan
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies
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Professor Viswanathan does research in classical Japanese poetry and prose; Western medieval court literature; and comparative poetics. |
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Hye-Sook Wang
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
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Professor Wang's research has focused on sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of Korean language acquisition. |
Lingzhen Wang
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
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Professor Lingzhen Wang's areas of expertise include modern Chinese literature and culture, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, and Chinese cinema. |
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Yang Wang
Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies
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Yang Wang's primary research interests include the Chinese pragmatics, Chinese language pedagogy, and intercultural communication strategies. |
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Kikuko Yamashita
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
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Professor Yamashita specializes in historical linguistics, Japanese linguistics, and language pedagogy. Her research interests include pragmatics, communication strategies, discourse analysis, and the language policies and national language of Japan. |
Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars
Anna Belogurova
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
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Anna Belogurova received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia and specializes in the study of Chinese communist organizations in Southeast Asia and Chinese political participation in host countries. |
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Caroline Frank
Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
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Caroline Frank teaches early American global history and co-directs “Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas" (http://www.brown.edu/conference/asia-pacific/home). Her recent publications include Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (UPNE, 2014). |
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Xiao Liu
Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow
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Modern Chinese Literature and Film, University of California, Berkeley, 2013 |
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Haizhou Wang
Visiting Associate Professor
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The Pembroke Center is pleased to host Haizhou Wang, from Nanjing University, to take part in the 2013-14 Pembroke Seminar, "Socialism and Post-Socialism." While in residence, Wang will work on a book, Political Symbols and the Construction of a National Image, and continue his interdisciplinary study of images of militia women in Chinese political posters. |
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Librarians and Staff
Li Wang
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Curator, East Asian Collection |
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Toshiyuki Minami
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Senior Library Specialist |
Graduate Students
Yu-chi Chang — History
Shiu On Chu — History
Research Interests: Late Imperial China, Modern China, Intellectual History, Institutional History, Book History
Patrick Chung — History
Research Interests: 20th Century U.S. History, American Foreign Relations, Political Economy of East Asia, Asian American History
Brent Fujioka — American Studies
Research Interests: Comic Studies, Monsters and Monstrosity, Game Studies, Film Studies, Asian American Studies
Samuel Goldstein — Religious Studies
Research Interests: Excavated Manuscripts of Warring States China
Tali Kershkovitz — Religious Studies
Research Interests: Women and Pre-modern Chinese Religious Traditions
Amy Huang — History of Art and Architecture
Research Interests: Literati painting and collecting practice of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Justina Hwang — History
Research Interests: Modern Latin America, Social Revolution, Political/Diplomatic History, Cold War, Global China and Taiwan
Heather Lee — American Studies
"Consuming Labor: Migration and Mobility of Chinese Restaurant Workers in New York City, 1893-1949"
Patrick Magoffin — Religious Studies
Research Interests: History of Buddhism in Tang and Song China
Sherry Pan — Religious Studies
Research Interests: Intellectual History of Buddho-Daoism in Medieval China
Irene Pang — Sociology
Research Interests: Development, citizenship, internal migrants, dynamics of capitalism, comparative research, China, India.
Yibing Shen — Sociology
Research Interests: Comparative & Historical Sociology, Theory.
Derek Sheridan — Anthropology
Research Interests: Chinese Presence in Tanzania, Global China, Tanzania, Sino-African Relations, Popular Imaginations of Geopolitics, Interpersonal Ethics in Transnationalism, Global Commodity Flows, Taiwan.
Adrien Stoloff — Religious Studies
Research Interests: Classical Daoist Thought, Chinese Cosmogony and Cosmology
Yizhi Xiao — Comparative Literature
Research Interests: The acceptance and dissemination of Western literature in China, especially realist fiction and its role in shaping modernist Chinese literature.
Christopher Yang — Religious Studies
Research Interests: Early Chinese Thought and Comparative Philosophy
Suyoung You — Religious Studies
Research Interests: Confucian Traditions of China and Korea
Mujun Zhou — Sociology
Research Interests: Civil Society in Urban China.