Current Visiting Scholars

Glen S. Fukushima focuses on the nexus between technology, national security, trade, and U.S.-Asia relations and is writing a book on the ties between Silicon Valley and Japan. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. In October 2021, President Joseph R. Biden nominated him to be Vice Chair of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April 2022.

From 1990 to 2012, Fukushima was based in Asia as a senior executive at one European and four American corporations:  AT&T, Arthur D. Little, Cadence Design Systems, NCR, and Airbus. He was elected once as Vice President and twice as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, Waseda University, and Sophia University and as an advisor or board member at the International Christian University, Keio University, Rikkyo University, Tsukuba University, and the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo.

From 1985 to 1990, Fukushima served as Director for Japanese Affairs (1985-1988) and Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan and China (1988-1990) at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in the Executive Office of the President, Washington, D.C. He has been a member of the Council of Foreign Relations since 1993.

He was educated in the United States at Deep Springs College, Stanford University, and Harvard University (Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Business School, and Law School) and in Japan at Keio University and the University of Tokyo, where he was a Fulbright Fellow and Japan Foundation Fellow.

Ellen Huang, Ph.D., researches the relationship between art, science and materials focusing on design and China. Huang has published for museum publications and academic journals about Buddhist material culture and ink painting, taught and researched in Taipei, Beijing, Seoul, and Shanghai and held positions at university art museums as a curator. Selected exhibitions include Ink Worlds (2018), Earthly Hollows: Cave and Kiln (2018), The Buddha’s Word (2018), and Clouding: Sign and Symbol in Asian Art (2021). She is a faculty member at the ArtCenter College of Design (Pasadena, CA) where she teaches art and design histories. She is completing a manuscript about Jingdezhen porcelain in the early modern world as a translated practice.

Ho Duk Hwang is a Professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University (Seoul), where he teaches Korean literature as a regular faculty member. He also holds adjunct positions at the Academy of East Asian Studies and serves as the Head of the Inter-University Center for Advanced Korean Language at SKKU. His research focuses on Korean contemporary criticism, critical theory, discourses of East Asia and comparative literature. 

Dr. Hwang has authored several influential works in Korean, including The Modern Nation and Its Representations, Franken Marx, Insect and Imperium, Modernity of the Korean Language and Bilingual Dictionaries (Vol. 1-11, co-edited), and Concepts and History: Bilingual Dictionaries of Modern Korea* (Vol. 1-2, co-authored). In addition to his Korean publications, he has contributed numerous articles in Japanese and English. His notable English-language works include:

 “Theorizing Asiatic Contradiction: The User Experience of Contemporary Korean Literature,” *symplokē*, No. 30 (2022), “The Geopolitics of Vernacularity and Sinographs: The Making of Bilingual Dictionaries in Modern Korea and the Shift from Sinographic Cosmopolis to “Sinographic Mediapolis” (Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文 (edited by Ross King), “Asiatic Mode of Production as Method: The Discourse of Democracy and Modernity in Korea,” Filozofski vestnik, Volume XXXIX, Number 2 (2018), “Stairs of Metaphor: The Vernacular Substitution – Supplements of South Korean Communism,” in The Idea of Communism3 (Edited by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee and Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2016). 

Ja Won Lee is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at California State University, East Bay. She is an art historian specializing in the visual and material culture of Korea, with research interests in collecting, gender, antiquarianism, and cross-cultural exchange between Asia and the West. Her research examines how collecting practices shaped identity and artistic production in late Chosŏn Korea and has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University’s Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Her recent publications include “Visualizing ‘National Art’: O Sech’ang’s (1864–1953) Art Collection and Connoisseurship against Japanese Colonialism,” The Art Bulletin 105, no. 4 (2023): 116–133; and “Collecting Culture, Representing the Self: Chosŏn Portraits of Collectors of Chinese Antiquities,” The Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 31, no. 1 (2018): 1–20. Trained in ink painting, calligraphy, and art history, Lee received her PhD from UCLA and has taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and the University of Hong Kong. She has also worked on exhibitions and conservation projects at major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frankfurt Museum for Applied Art, and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art.

Ayu Majima conducts interdisciplinary research on modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture, examining how Japan has reinterpreted and reconfigured its own modernity through encounters with the United States. Her work employs a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective to illuminate the interplay between everyday life, family, and the cultural sensibilities that shape them.

Her first monograph, The Melancholy of Skin Color: Racial Experience in Modern Japan (in Japanese, Chūōkōron-Shinsha, 2014), received the Rengō-Sundaikai Academic Prize and later appeared in a Chinese edition published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (Beijing) in 2021. She has also explored the modern history of meat-eating in Japan, with her research featured in ARTE’s Invitation au Voyage, and has examined the global circulation of Japanese food culture in a cultural policy study commissioned by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Building on her postdoctoral work at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University—where she presented “The Chrysanthemum and the Foot: Civilization, Cleanliness and Shame in Modern Japan”—Majima continues to investigate modern Japanese subjectivity across three interrelated dimensions: everyday life practices such as Japan’s rejection of outdoor shoes and the cultural role of slippers; family structures, including the marginal emotional presence of fathers and patterns of mother–child overcloseness; and cultural sensibilities, especially concepts of cleanliness and shame.

At Stanford, Majima is developing a new ethnographic and cultural project based on a concept she herself has coined, provisionally titled “The California Paradox.” This term—her original analytic formulation—examines how wealth, competition, and contemporary forms of capitalism, including wellness capitalism, are reshaping the conditions, expectations, and trajectories of human life in the Bay Area (and increasingly, the world). Early reflections from this project appear in her monthly essay series “Japan Code,” published in Jiji Press’s financial journal Kin’yū Zaisei Business (Tokyo, Japan).

Xisai Song is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist, with research interests in chronic illness, health inequities, migration, labor, and ethics. As an ACLS/Henry Luce fellow in the academic year of 2025-26, Xisai is working on her book manuscript, titled “One Foot in the Grave: Politics and Ethics of Chronicity in China.” It is an ethnographic study that focuses on a group of young and middle-aged rural migrant workers suffering from kidney failure. It examines how they negotiate chronic treatments and navigate life after migration in their rural hometown. The book seeks to offer new insights into what constitutes equitable chronic diseases care in China and beyond. Xisai received a master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Stanford in 2015 and is excited to return to CEAS ten years after graduation.

Janice Stockard, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Chinese studies. Her research and publications focus on the effects of globalization and technological change on gender, family, and marriage in China – and cross-culturally. She recently co-authored the first digital cultural anthropology text, Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures Across Space and Time (Cengage 2018), providing students with greater in-depth focus on China than any other introductory text.

Stockard’s first ethnography, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860-1930, was based on the three years she spent interviewing South China silk workers. Originally published by Stanford Press (1989), Daughters is currently being translated for publication in China. For the new 2024 Chinese edition, Stockard is working with her original research assistant to develop a new introduction focused on strategies of ethnographic interviewing.

In a new expanded 2023 manuscript (under review) Stockard, focuses on the rise and decline of another silk industry. In Tree, Worm & Reel: Silk Roads through New England, 1750-1950, Stockard tracks early U.S. experiments to develop a domestic silk industry, the rise of a regional New England silk culture and its roads back to China.

Soichiro Takagi is a Visiting Scholar at Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University, and a cellist. He is a Professor at Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at The University of Tokyo, Visiting professor at University of the Arts London. He served as an Asia Program Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, etc.

His major field is information economics and innovation. His research includes the impact of technology on economy, how to generate ideas for innovation, and how to incorporate the arts for business innovation. He has authored many books and articles, including “Deframing Strategy: How Digital Technologies are Transforming Businesses and Organizations, and How We Can Cope with It” (World Scientific) and “Reweaving the Economy: How IT Affects the Borders of Country and Organization” (University of Tokyo Press), and “Blockchain Economics: Implications of Distributed Ledgers” (World Scientific, co-authored). He received KDDI Foundation Award in 2019. He received Ph.D. in information studies from The University of Tokyo.

Li Wang is an associated professor of Shanghai University of Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. in modern Chinese history in 2012 from Fudan University in Shanghai.

Wang’s academic interest is primarily the financial history of modern China, with a special focus on institutional and financial reform of the Republican China. Between 2008 and 2012 she participated in joint projects between the Hoover Institution Archives and Fudan University on archival collections and publications. She was a recipient of several government funding and awards in the fields of teaching and research. Her publications include a Chinese book entitled American Financial Advisor Arthur N. Young and Wartime Finance of Republic of China (Shanghai: Orient Publishing Center) and several journal articles published in leading academic journals in China.

Wang Li has been working on the political leadership of modern China based on archival materials abroad. She is currently exploring the historical formation of China’s modernization as well as the interpretation of the evolving image of the Chinese Communist Party from a fresh and comparative perspective.

My research interests lie at the intersection of film criticism, cultural studies, and contemporary Chinese literature, with a specific focus on exploring the transformation of intimacy in the digital age.

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.

Kaizuo Zhang, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Beijing Administration Institute. She got her Ph.D. degree from Peking University in 2012, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Tsinghua University from 2012-2015. Since 2015 she has been working at Beijing Administration Institute and researching on traditional Chinese culture, specifically Confucianism. Her book, The Ideas of Ruling by Ritual in the Northern Song Dynasty, published by People's Publishing House in 2021, talked about the different interpretations of traditional Chinese rituals in Northern Song Dynasty, which reflected that it was a transitional period back then. She has undertaken 7 national, provincial and university-level research projects and published 25 articles in authoritative journals. She is working on the modern American research on the academic history of China.