Master of Arts Students
Allen Chen received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia in History and Asian Studies. He is interested in researching the historical development of Warring States Chinese thought, especially with respect to its relationship to state formation, rulership, legal history, and the central role of the idealized Sage-King in political philosophy. He also hopes to draw on recent archaeological finds of Warring States texts and to use the new insights they offer in his research.
Parvinder Dhariwal received her B.A. from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her undergraduate degree concentrated on Political Science and the Asian Studies fields. It is from here that her interest in South Asia emerged and led her to UBC to continue her studies in the Asian Studies department. Her current research focus is on the portrayal of women in contemporary Punjabi Literature.
Justin Forsyth graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in Korean in 2011. He completed an undergraduate honors thesis involving the translation of essays written by modern Korean authors, including Beop-jeong and Jang Yeong-hi. He studies Korean literature at UBC, and focuses his research on modern writers. He is also a student of Russian, and is interested in comparative literature with Korean, Russian, and American/English works.
Yong Chan Jun received his B.A. in International Relations and English Linguistics (Minor in Korean) from Kyunghee University, and served as a Korean overseas volunteer in China. He is interested in researching on the venarcularazation of CJK in the Sinitic Sphere. (With a focus on the Vernacularization of Sino-vocabulary in Korea during The Colonization Period --The Influence of wasekango和製漢語 and Language Policy of Japan over Its Colony-Chosun1910～1945).
Nicolette Lee received her B.A. in East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College. Her undergraduate thesis focused on the issues of female empowerment in Japanese Buddhism in regards to female religious roles. She is interested in continuing this research interest by delving into the creation and development of the temple wife role in medieval Japanese Buddhism. She is also interested in the relationships among the different female figures, such as nuns, temple wives and shamans.
Kimberly McNelly graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures. She is interested in researching Japanese Buddhist literature from the Kamakura period, specifically travel diaries, women's writing, and works by Saigyo. She is also fascinated by the intertextuality of utamakura found in medieval poetry and hopes to further current research in the field.
Vorontsova Julia received her postgraduate diploma in Chinese from Kharkov Skovoroda Normal University (Ukraine) and has undertaken doctoral-level research in Chinese linguistics at Hebei Normal University in China. She is interested in the phenomenon of cognitive spaces in language, applying conceptual metaphor theory to early Chinese texts, linguistics, as well as the influence of metaphor on modern language and media. Among hobbies: poetry, impressionist art, manga as a form of picturing social characters and behaviors, buddist temples and buddist art.
Ben Whaley is a graduate of Stanford University with a B.A. in Japanese (Honors and Distinction). His current research involves representations of race and ethnicity in Japanese popular visual media, specifically the comics of Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989). As an undergraduate, Ben's research focused on the evocation and transformation of American nostalgia in stage musicals performed by Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue theater troupe.
Elliott Yates is interested in advanced and heritage language learning of Chinese, and especially reading acquisition, reading choice, and literacy education. With a background in computers, he is analyzing how technology is currently used and can be used in socialization and literacy development in second language and heritage language communities. His studies involve applied linguistics and sociocultural linguistics, with a focus on Chinese language and Chinese heritage backgrounds.