This December the Department will be celebrating our 50th Anniversary with a banquet to be held at the Renissance Hotel downtown, join us for a night of more...
Each year the department offers a variety of topics under the course numbed 360B. This year we are offering courses in Modern Japanese Literature, Cultures of Manga and Anime More...
Ph.D. Students
Clayton Ashton is researching the concept of ritual in early Chinese ethics, religion and political thought. Focusing on the writings of pre-Qin and Early Imperial China, he is currently exploring how the idea of ritual was combined with developing ideas about the body, emotions and human nature to create a nuanced system of ethics. His interests include ritual theory, virtue ethics, moral psychology and embodied cognition, with a particular interest in discovering meaningful points of intersection between these fields of study. His M.A. in Asian Studies was earned at UBC, and focused on the translation of archaeological texts from pre-Qin China.
Mara Blair's current research interests include gender roles and social hierarchies as represented in shojo manga featuring cross-dressing female lead characters. Her Master's thesis was written on Boys' Love manga. She has an MA in Japanese literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a BA in Drama and Japanese literature from the University of Washington.
Qingzhen Deng received her MA in Japanese Culture and Practical Linguistics from the Kobe City University of Foreign Languages (Japan) and obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Culture from Nara Women’s University (Japan). Her pervious study concerns the Chinese modes of expression in the oldest anthology in Japanese literature, Man’yoshu. The study examines how Chinese characters and Chinese expressions were adopted into Japanese writing system in the period when the system started to shape up. Her recent doctoral research focuses on the Classic Chinese poetry in the Six Dynasties (the 3rd-6th century). She is particularly interested in the Palace Style poetry, analyzing the representative poets – their lives, thoughts and roles in the history of Chinese literature
Nathen Clerici is interested in the possibility of "subculture literature"as a conceptual framework that accounts for writing neglected by the dominant binary of "pure" and "mass" in critical scholarship of modern Japanese literature. He is currently researching the work of Yumeno Kyusaku (b.1889 – d.1936), an author from Fukuoka who was active in the late 1920s and 1930s and is most commonly associated with detective fiction and ero guro nansensu. In addition, his interests include waka, material culture, cult film and genre theory. Nathen completed his M.A. at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2004.
Nianhua Feng holds an M. A. (in Classical Chinese Literature) from UBC, and an M. A. (in History) from Nankai University (Tianjin, China). Nianhua's current research focuses on Neo-Confucian poetry in Song China (960-1279). His other academic interests include Chinese intellectual history, and copyright protection in imperial China.
Gideon Fujiwara is now studying Tokugawa intellectual history, particularly 19th century nativism, or kokugaku. His current research focuses on a group of students of Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) living in the Tsugaru region of present-day Aomori prefecture, including Tsuruya Ariyo (1808-1871) and Hirao Rosen (1808-1880). His main interest lies in religious thought, as well as in the historical significance of nativism at the local level during Japan’s period of modernization. Gideon completed his M.A. in Japanese Intellectual History at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.
Nicole Go holds an MA and Hon. BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. Her PhD research involves literary interpretations of “Asianness” and cultural (self-)identification in modern Japanese and Asian North American literature, with a particular interest in the gendering and racialization of the Asian body as it moves through different cultural spaces.
Weiting Guo received his LL.B and M.L. from College of Law, National Taiwan University, and his LL.M. from Gould School of Law, University of Southern California. His main interest lies in the legal transitions in Taiwan during the Qing, Japanese, and Nationalist periods, as well as in the correlation among local legal practices, popular religion, and other intellectual traditions in late imperial China. He’s now working on a project investigating how disputers used geomancy, ancestral worship, and grave-destruction cultures to settle their conflicts, and how local magistrates compromised between local legal cultures and state’s penal policy while adjudicating this kind of disputes in Qing-ruled Taiwan (1683-1895).
Gergana Ivanova’s research centers on the reception and canonization of Heian court literature, as well as its role in popular culture, in terms of women’s education and the formation of notions such as cultural and national identities. She is particularly interested in the reception history of Sei Shônagon’s Makura no sôshi (The Pillow Book, 11th c.). Currently a Japan Foundation fellow, she has received an M.A. from Utsunomiya University as a Japanese government (Monbushô) scholar and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto.
Dong-kyu Kim’s research interest is to understand how Korean shamanism has been constructed by the feedback processes between shamanism-image and shamanism-reality. That is to say, he assumes that the plural images of Korean shamanism (e.g. not only negative images of it, such as superstition, magic, and so on, but also positive images of it as a transmitter of indigenous Korean culture) should be understood in terms of the specific cultural context in which they were constructed, and academic discourses on Korean shamanism which have produced those images, have not been in-house game among academia but affected the formation of the reality of Korean shamanism. In this context, he argues that those images should be considered as crucial constituents of modern Korean shamanism.
Dong-kyu completed his M.A. at the department of Religious Studies in Sogan University (Seoul, Korea).
Eunseon Kim is interested in the the native awareness of Korean honrification. She is interested in historiotizing sociolinguistic ideologies in relation to the process of developing honorific system and the rationales for positive or negative effects of honorification.She is currently working on metalinguistic discourses concernin the Korean honorific system illustrated in language manuals and the social movement of promoting honorifics during the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Eunseon completed her MA thesis at UBC in 2010.
Jennifer Lundin Ritchie was awarded a B.A. in Chinese and an M.A. in Asian Studies from UBC. Her research focus is on Warring States philosophy, and particularly Daoism, in light of recent archeological finds at Guodian in Hubei province. She is exploring the significance of the Guodian Laozi (Dao De Jing), and its potential impact upon the modern practice of Daoism worldwide. Other interests include the Classical Chinese language and paleography.
Alexey Lushchenko received his B.A. in Asian Language and Culture (Hons.) from UBC in 2008 followed by M.A. in Asian Studies in 2010. His main area of research is the development of vernacular literature in Japan in the 14th-18th centuries, with a focus on stylistic variation and language use in the network of military narratives influenced by gunki monogatari. In addition, he is interested in the interregional circulation of military fiction in East Asia. His other interests include reading of kuzushiji (cursive script) and kanbun (Sino-Japanese) texts, historical linguistics and socio-political dimensions of language and writing.
Otilia Clara Milutin is currently researching the various representations of sexual violence in Heian (794- 1185 CE) tale literature, with particular emphasis on Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, arguing for the potential utility of such literary representations in establishing a historic-sociological account of Heian sexual violence. She earned her B.A. (Major Japanese/ Minor French) from the University of Bucharest, Romania, and her M.A. in Japanese Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Si Nae Park has earned both her B.A. (with major in Asian Studies and minor in Japanese) and M.A. (in premodern Korean Literature) from UBC. Si Nae is currently researching Chosôn (1392-1910) story collections primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a focus on the contemporary genre delineations and the role of orality in their creation and reception. Her research interests include the interplay between cosmopolitan (i.e. hanmun) and vernacular languages in Korean literary history and the formation and development of premodern/classical Korean literature (kojôn munhak) as a field.
Jeongeun Park received her M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Alberta. Her main research interest is in Korean Buddhism during the colonial period, focusing on colonialism, modernity and post-colonialism. Currently, she is researching Korean Buddhist journals and Japanese Buddhist missionaries during the early modern period.
Cam Van Thi Phan is examining the organization and development of the Buddhist repentance rituals during the Tang and Song (960-1279 CE) periods. An ordained Buddhist nun, her MA thesis focused on Tang (618-906 CE) Buddhism: the relationship and interaction between the monastic and laity groups.
Guy Shababo received his BA in Computer Sciences from Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and his MA in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University. His MA thesis was on the Korean Neo-Confucain scholar T’oegye (1501–1570) and the question of religious language. He earned a second MA in Asian Studies from UBC. He is currently interested in Neo-Confucianism in the late Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) and its influences on the new religious movements in Korea. He is also interested in analytic philsophy (particularly the “new” Wittgensteinians) and other thinkers of the 20th century.
Robban A. J. Toleno holds an M.A. degree in ecological anthropology. His current research looks at the moralization of plants in the religious history of China. He is especially interested in how Buddhist authors represent plants, or human experience of plant products, as sources of metaphor for expressing religious ideals. His dissertation is an investigation of the meanings and ethical tensions associated with wei 味 (taste or flavor) in Chan Buddhist writings and in Song-dynasty society more generally, 10th-13th centuries. His sources include various Buddhist writings, agricultural texts (nóngshū 農書), materia medica (běncǎo 本草), and compilations of recipes.
Ethan Windschitl received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder from the department of Asian Languages and Culture, with a focus on pre-modern Japan. His interest is currently focused on late Tokugawa literature, specifically the depiction of love in the genres of ninjobon and sharebon. His current research looks at concepts of love and their relation to the construction of female identity in early-modern Japanese literature.