Harvard-Yenching Institute names visiting scholars, fellows

The Harvard-Yenching Institute recently welcomed 33 visiting scholars and fellows to the institute for the 2007-08 academic year.

The scholars are faculty members in the humanities and social sciences from selected universities in Asia. They will spend one year conducting research at the institute.

The 2007-08 Harvard-Yenching Institute Fellows are as follows:

Che-chia Chang is a historian of medicine at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His major research interests lie on the transnational exchange of medical ideas and materials in East Asia, with a special focus on Sino-Japanese interactions. He is currently working on a project on East Asian medical culture in the contexts of global competition among pharmaceutical enterprises.

Wen-Chin Chang is from the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, working in the field of anthropology. Currently, she is doing research on the transnational networks of jade trade. She aims to look into structural changes of the trade, with a focus on the traders’ dynamism in the re-formation of their transnational networks and operation of capital flow.

Wu Guo is a professor of the Institute of Religious Studies, Sichuan University. His field of specialty includes Taoism, especially two Taoist sects: Quan-zhen (perfect verity) and Jing-ming (purity and sunniness). While at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he is working on a research project titled “Taoism in Modern Chinese Society and Trends of Contemporary Neo-Taoism.”

Yujun Guo is a professor of law at Wuhan University, China. Her areas of interest include private international law and the legal problems of international economic transactions. At the institute, Guo will conduct a comparative study titled “Legal Regime for Protecting Cultural Property Between China and the United States.”

Chirui Hu is an associate professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University. His fields of specialization include ancient Chinese exegesis and Chinese linguistics. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he is conducting a project on the syntactic phenomena of Buddhist scriptures in Middle Times.

Yoong-hee Jo is an associate professor at the Academy of Korean Studies. During his stay at the institute, he will mainly study stories written by Joseon scholars to understand the intellectual contacts among East Asian people in the Korean peninsula during the Imjin War in the late 16th century.

Hyonjin Kim is an assistant professor of English literature at Seoul National University. His areas of interest include medieval European literature and English poetry before the Restoration. His research is on the ways gender and sexuality are constructed and manipulated ideologically in the medieval romance and in early modern prose fiction.

Wen Lei is an associate research fellow at the Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests include state ritual and the political institutions in Medieval China. Some of his publications were based on the stone inscriptions and the manuscripts unearthed in Dunhuang and Turfan in the 12th century. While at the institute, he is working on a project titled “The State Sacrifice and Lay Society in Sui-Tang China.”

Xinwei Li is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research focuses on the characteristic trajectory of the origin of Chinese civilization and the emergence of early states in China. His major publications include “Periodization of the Liangzhu Culture” and “Abandonment Ritual in Prehistoric China.”

Zhijun Liu is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University, China. His academic interest focuses on issues related to problems confronted in the process of socioeconomic development, such as urbanization, marginal workers, religious transformation, and human security. During his stay at the institute, he will conduct a case study on religion and human development in modern China.

Jin Makabe is an associate professor of the Graduate School of Law and Politics at Hokkaido University, Japan. He specializes in Japanese intellectual history from the 17th to the 20th centuries. At Harvard, he will study Chinese dynastic legitimacy in 17th and 18th century Japan, examining the political backdrop and intellectual transformations taking place during the late Ming and early Qing periods.

Kim Son Nguyen is currently a professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Hanoi, Vietnam). At the institute, he will conduct research on Vietnam’s Confucian intellectual class in the 15th century and its cultural characteristics and thinking tendencies.

Koichi Okamoto is professor of international history at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan. Okamoto’s research interests range from the intellectual history of modern Japan to the history of international relations. His project at the institute is a comparative study of Japanese and American colonialisms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Kuang-che Pan is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Pan’s major research interest is the intellectual and cultural history of modern China. Pan is currently working on a book project exploring how the U.S. Constitution has been translated into Chinese since the 19th century and how the American model of government came to greatly influence the democratization process in China and Taiwan.

Guoxiang Peng is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing. A member of the Society of the History of Chinese Philosophy, he is also the executive editor of the Journal of the History of Chinese Philosophy. Peng’s research interests include Chinese philosophy, intellectual history, and religion.

Makoto Tokumori is a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture, University of Tokyo, Japan. Through his early research on early modern Japanese intellectual history, he started to analyze discourses that justified the pursuit of self-interest in 18th century Japan. At the institute, Tokumori will be working on the analysis of “Kojiki-den” by Motoori Norinaga, considered the most influential intellectual of 18th century Japan.

Xiaohong Wan is a lecturer at the Department of Politics and Administration, South China Normal University. He has published extensively on the history of Chinese Americans and their participation in American politics. The project he proposed for his research at the Harvard-Yenching Institute is on the political participation of Chinese Americans in the Cold War.

Kuan-His Wang is an associate professor of law at Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University, China. His specializations include civil law and legal history. At the institute, Wang will research “The Unique ‘Cross Phenomenon’ in China’s Legal Evolution: From the Perspective of Controversies in the Course of Enactment of China’s Civil Code.”

Min Wang is an associate professor of the History Institute of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Her field of specialty is focused on modern Chinese history and Shanghai history. She has recently finished a book manuscript on the daily life of Shanghai journalists (1872-1949). The project she proposed for her stay at the institute is “History and Memory: The Study on Su Bao Case.”

Quan Wei is a teacher at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Her field of research study is related to Chinese Literature from the late Qing Dynasty to the contemporary, mainly classical prose and poetry. The project she proposed for her stay at the institute is “Old Type Literati from 1911-37: The Other Side of Modern Literature.”

Mingfang Xia is a professor at the Institute of Qing History, Renmin University of China. He conducts research on natural disaster and famine history in modern China and has recently concentrated his research on famine relief of the Qing Dynasty and environmental history. At the institute, Xia will work on a project on ecological changes and market development in North China since the Ming Dynasty.

Xue Yu is an assistant professor of Buddhist studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research covers both philosophy and the history of Theravada Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, and Humanistic Buddhism in the contemporary world. Xue Yu is conducting comparative studies between engaged Buddhism and humanistic Buddhism at the institute.

Ju Tak Yim is an associate professor in Korean classical literature in Pusan National University, South Korea. He has been working on reconstructing the bases of Korean poetry and song in the period of Goryeo. As a visiting scholar, he will be conducting a comparative study on East Asian music and song of the Old and Middle ages.

Wenzhi Zhang is an assistant researcher at the Center of Zhouyi and Ancient Chinese Philosophy of Shandong University, China. His interests relate to traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts. Zhang has authored two works related to the Zhouyi. His project at the Harvard institute will be on the excavated manuscripts related to the Zhouyi and the Yi studies of the pre-Qin period.

Xiurong Zhao is an associate professor at Renmin University of China. Her fields of specialization include the reformation and economic history of England and political thoughts of the West. Her research project at the institute is titled “The Conflict Between Commercialization and Philanthropy in the History of Modern Western Medicine.”

Jian’gang Zhu is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. His research interest is on urban community development and nongovernmental organizations. As a fellow, his research will focus on community development and governance in urban China.

The 2007-08 Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Fellows are as follows:

Guofei Chu is a Ph.D. candidate studying the history of international relations at Nanjing University, China. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, her dissertation research will be on the U.S.-Japan alliance in the post-Cold War era, from theoretical and historical perspectives.

Thu Hien Do is a lecturer from the faculty of literature, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University (Hanoi), where she is also working toward her Ph.D. Her dissertation is on the formation of Confucian tradition in Vietnamese literature. During her stay at Harvard, she’ll focus on the characteristics of Confucian literature in general.

Yoonjin Hur has lectured at Hanyang Women’s College and made presentations at a number of conferences. While at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she will continue her dissertation research project, which is titled “Economic Structure of Literary Text: On Communicative Economy and Libidinal Economy.”

Chia-Hua Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in history and philosophy of science at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her research topic is the transmission of Western mathematics to Japan in the 19th century. She is interested in the triangular relationship between the West, China, and Japan in the process of this transmission. At Harvard, she will focus on further investigation into the mathematical textbooks published in 19th century America.

Ngoc Tho Nguyen is from the Institute of Cultural Studies, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University-Ho Chi Minh City. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Nguyen, a Ph.D. candidate, will work on his dissertation on ancient Baiyueh cultures in Ling’nan (South China) and their relations to traditional culture in Vietnam.

Kyung Hee Rho is a Ph.D. candidate both in the Department of Chinese Literature at Kyoto University, Japan, and in the Department of Korean Literature at Seoul National University, Korea. Her ongoing research theme is the intersection between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese classical literatures from the 16th to the 18th century. She aims to reconstruct classical literary societies by focusing on the external conditions of the literary worlds.

Yifei Shen is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, Fudan University, Shanghai. Her current research interests include gender and family models in Chinese cities. Her dissertation — “Parents in My House” — is focused on a new family model and discusses urban family life under the one-child family policy and economic reform.