Welcome to the post-doctoral fellows and visiting scholars in the East Asian studies community this year:

CEAS Post-doctoral Fellows in Chinese Studies

Elena Chiu is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for East Asian Studies. Chiu received her Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures from U.C.L.A. in 2007, with the dissertation “Cultural Hybridity in Manchu Bannermen Tales (Zidishu).” Chiu is teaching “East Asian Civilization: China” in fall quarter.

Jaesok Kim is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for East Asian Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2007, with a dissertation on “The Cultural Encounters in a Chinese Sweatshop: Transnational Movement of South Korean Enterprises and the Creation of Borderland Factory Regime,” based on research in Shandong and Hebei provinces. Kim also has an M.A. in Social Anthropology from Seoul National University.

FSI Post-doctoral Fellows in Japanese Studies

Michael Foster received his Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures from Stanford, and is an assistant professor at U.C. Riverside, specializing in Japanese literature and cultural studies. His areas of interest are folklore, early-modern literature, contemporary popular media, development of encyclopedic and natural history discourse during the Edo period, urban legends, and the cultural history of hypnosis in 20th century Japan.

Ayelet Zohar is a new post-doctoral fellow in Japanese Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Zohar completed her Ph.D. at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in 2007. She also has an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Tel Aviv University and an M.F.A. in ink-painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Zohar has shown her own art work in galleries and museums in Israel, China, U.K., and the U.S. In spring quarter she will teach “Visual Culture of Contemporary Japanese Photography.”

ICA Post-doctoral Fellow

Kenneth Mori McElwain received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford and was a post-doctoral fellow last year at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His interests are Japanese politics, comparative political institutions, electoral systems, and party politics. He returns to Stanford as an ICA post-doctoral fellow to teach an autumn course on Japanese politics and political economy.

Mellon Post-doctoral Scholar in Chinese Archaeology

Hsin-Mei Agnes Hsu is a Mellon post-doctoral scholar in Chinese archaeology. Her 2004 Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania’s department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Hsu is working with Professor Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel on the interdisciplinary project “First Great Divergence of Europe and China, 300-800 C.E.” Her speciality is Han art
and archaeology. Her dissertation is Pictorial Eulogies in Three Eastern Han Tombs. She has published articles on landscape, maps, and road systems in ancient China.

Shorenstein APARC Post-doctoral Fellow

Myong Koo Kang received his Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley and M.A. and B.A. from Seoul National University. His research interests include comparative political economy in East Asia , emphasizing financial and corporate reforms in Japan and South Korea; social network analysis; regional integration in East Asia; history of social mobilization and its institutional legacy (South Korea and Japan); and the South and North Korean relationship. He is a post-doctoral fellow with the Korean Studies Program of Shorenstein APARC.

Stanford Humanities Post-doctoral Fellow

Alexander Cook is a post-doctoral fellow with Asian Languages this year. Cook received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in May. His dissertation is titled, “Unsettling Accounts: The Trial of the Gang of Four—Narratives of Justice and Humanity in the Aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution.” He is teaching a course this autumn, “Literature in Twentieth-Century China.”

CEAS Visiting Scholars

Judith Banister is director of global demographics at the Conference Board. She specializes in global demography and the demography of Asia, in particular China. She is author of China's Changing Population (Stanford University Press, 1987) She will be conducting multiple projects on demography, statistics, economies, labor force, population structure, social change, gender issues, and demographic impacts on the environment.

Christian Henriot is a historian of modern China with a particular interest in urban history and wartime China. He received his training in Paris, Hong Kong and Stanford. He is a research fellow at the Institut d'Asie Orientale (CNRS-Lumiere Lyon 2 University). Christian was the Senior Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Stanford Humanities Center, where he focsed on The Virtual Shanghai project (www.virtualshanghai.net), a research platform that aims at writing the history of Shanghai through the combined use of textual records, photographs and GIS mapping. Henriot is currently researching funeral practices in Shanghai from the mid-19th century and onward.

 Yasuhiko Karasawa is an Associate Professor of History at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.  Karasawa received his MA in Chinese Philosophy at University of Tokyo.  His current research interest focus on the legal cases of Qing China.

T. Y. Lau is the founding Director of the Master of Communications in Digital Media Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle.  Lau was a Visiting Scholar at Hoover Institutionfrom 1998-2000.  He was also a senior consultant serving as Executive VP of Strategic Planning and Corporate Communications at a Hong Kong listed high-technology company, New World CyberBase from 1999-2000.

Megumi Shibuya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Tokoha Gakuen University in Japan. Shibuya received her MA in Education from the University of Tsukuba. Her reserach focuses on education in Southeast Asia, especially minority education in Thailand.

Helen Young is author of Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March (University of Illinois Press, 2001). She continues to pursue research, writing, and lecturing on the experience of women in modern Chinese history.