KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Ruodi Duan is Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Languages & Cultures at Haverford College, with research and teaching interests in modern Chinese social and political history, comparative ethnic studies, China-Africa relations, and transnational history. Her current book project concerns how twentieth-century Chinese conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nation have been formulated in conversation with developments in Africa and the African Diaspora. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University and B.A. in Black Studies from Amherst College.
Graduate Presenters
Ming Sun is currently a first-year M.A. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at UPenn. He is interested in Chinese intellectual history and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language in early and Medieval China. His research seeks to find a middle ground between two different disciplines: the analysis of the compatibility between the philosophy of language in Chinese indigenous teachings and Buddhism from a perspective of comparative philosophy, and the establishment of a historical narrative of the gradual fusion of these two traditions from a historical standpoint. Ming earned a double Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona.
Wang (Sophie) Xi is a first-year student of the M.A. program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, and she received her B.A. in Art History from Smith College. Her primary research interest lies in funerary art and architecture of early imperial China, and she is particularly interested in the relationship and interaction between painting, sculpture, and architecture in religious, ritual, and funerary contexts.
Xiaoyang Ma is a graduate student at EALC Master program with a research focus on early Medieval Chinese art and Central Asian art. My current research project is on a Sui Dynasty tomb excavated in An’yang, Henan Province. I am particularly interested in questions of viewership in funerary spaces, regionality of workshop systems, and materiality of funerary objects. Grounded in close studies of stone objects from museum collections and archeological surveys, my current inquiry concerns the study of visual-verbal dynamics of filial piety illustrations in early medieval China, exploring the phenomenon of textual absence on stone panels.
Tianqi Zhu is a first-year M.A. student in EALC at Stanford University. My study focuses on premodern Chinese history and literature. Currently, I am interested in representations of space in texts and images in the making of religion, aesthetics, and knowledge in premodern China.
Runjie Wang is a PhD student at the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington. He studies Sinophone cinema, with particular attention to early cinema and film culture. He’s also interested in national (minority) cinema, labor representation in cinema and non-western film theory.
Marina Nascimento is a first-year PhD student from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies print media in modern Japan, focusing on magazines targeted to girls and women. Her research interests involve the role of prewar media in disseminating race and gender policies, education, and colonial and imperialist discourse, as well as female visual representation in magazines and women’s non-fictional writing. She received a BA in Japanese Language and Literature from and a MA in Japanese Language, Literature, and Culture from Sao Paulo University, in Brazil, and another MA in Innovative Japanese Studies from Tohoku University in Japan. She has worked as a research assistant in the Japanese Studies Center Library of Sao Paulo University and in the Tohoku University Kawauchi Main Library, as well as a public elementary school teacher for Brazilian immigrant children in Japan.
Shirin M. Sadjadpour (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Chicago’s History Department, focusing on artistic entanglements between German Expressionism and early Japanese Modernism. More broadly, her research interrogates the nations’ pre-war parallels and intersections by examining the ways in which the cultural mediation of tradition and modernity; attempts to grapple with the crisis of modernity; and the formation of alternative modernities found expression in material culture, art, and architecture.
Chunhao Luo is a first-year MA student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) department of the University of Pennsylvania. I hold a BA in History from University College London in UK. My main research interests included the cultural and environmental history of medieval and early modern China (broadly 12th to 16th centuries), with focuses on medicine, geography, and ethnic identities on the southern frontiers of the Chinese empires.
Bibiana Tsang is a first year MA student in East Asian Languages Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus in premodern Chinese art history. Bibiana was born and raised in Hong Kong and received her BA from The University of Hong Kong. She is the recipient of H.T. Ho Prize in Fine Arts and is the winner of The University of Hong Kong Museum Society Asian Art Essay Prize Competition. Her current research interests include Chinese architecture and representations of architecture in paintings from Han to Ming dynasties.
Lucien Sun is a PhD student focusing on Chinese art and visual culture of the Middle Period. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. He also spent a year at the University of Tokyo studying Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. His dissertation investigates the visual culture of Southern Shanxi during the Jin–Yuan periods, and how picture in its broad sense moved across space and media under the Mongol Empire. He is also interested in the materiality and medium-specificity of image-bearing objects across cultures. Related to this theme, Lucien’s most recent essay on the first section of the Codex Mendoza produced in colonial Mesoamerica appears in The Codex Mendoza: New Insights (USFQ Press, 2022).
Cynthia Xinyi Chen is currently a M.A. student at Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and received a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Media Studies from the University of Hong Kong. My current and prospective research interests include: Chinese popular culture, affective theory, global cinema in the contemporary society, audience & reader reception.
ZiFan Yang received a B.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently a graduate student at Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. My current and prospective research interests include: rhetorics of negation in modern East Asian literature; de-aestheticization of tragedy and parody-writing; writing in the mentality of gendered others; translingual readership.
Mingkang Hao is a first-year graduate student of Duke University East Asian Studies MA Program. Having received a B.A. in History, her research interest lies in gender and sexuality in modern Chinese history. Mingkang’s ongoing research project is mainly based on female-centered legal cases in the Republican era. Through textual analysis and interdisciplinary theory application, Mingkang conducts case studies to examine the dialectical interplay among different social powers, aiming to rethink gender and sexuality, law, and society in modern China historically.
Inkyeong Chung is a first-year MA student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily occupied with modern and contemporary East Asian literature, more specifically, the interrelationship and the transcultural dialogue between the countries in the region. Besides, she has an evolving interest in the literary, religious, and artistic discourses informed by the 21st-century outlook, such as new materialism, intersubjectivity, and ecoambiguity.