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Welcome to New (and Returning) Faculty and Graduate Students!

We extend a warm welcome to all the new faculty, visiting scholars, and graduate students.

New Faculty

Mark Blum, Professor (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley)

  • Research Interests: Buddhist thought and culture, the Buddhist doctrine of tathâgatagarbha; medieval Japanese Buddhism; the rise and spread of the Pure Land School in Japan; the response of Buddhism to modernity in Japan.
  • Courses (Fall 2013): “Japanese Buddhism” 


Ling Hon Lam, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Chicago)

  • Research Interests: premodern drama and fiction, women's writing, sex and gender, history of sentiments, nineteenth- and twentieth-century media culture and critical theory.
  • Courses (Fall 2013): “Introduction to Literary Chinese” and “Exploring Pre-Modern Chinese Novels”

Weihong Bao, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Chicago)

  • Research Interests: late Qing visual and performance culture, Chinese language cinema, contemporary screen and exhibition practice as well as transnational genre cinema, international film theory, and the intersection between film and media.
  • Courses (Fall 2013): “Global Genres and East Asian Cinema” and “Film and Media Theory”


Visiting Scholars

Pat Noonan (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley)

  • Courses (Fall 2013): “Contemporary Japanese Cinema” and “Japanese Modernism”


Hyun-Suk Park (Ph.D. University of Chicago)

  • Courses (Fall 2013): “Intercultural Encounters in Traditional Korean Prose” and “Colonization


Youngmin Kwon (Seoul National University)

  • Professor Kwon will be teaching courses in modern Korean literature, literary history and criticism (Spring 2014). He is a professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University and former dean of the College of Humanities there. He has written and edited numerous volumes of literary history, literary criticism and reference works on modern Korean literature, as well as the CD-ROM 100 Years of Modern Korean Literature. He is a former editor of the journal Munhak sasang (“Literature and Thought”) and current president of the International Association of Comparative Korean Studies.


New Ph.D. Students

Yue Liu (M.A. Yale University)

  • Concentration: early Chinese literature and thought


Chelsea Ward (B.A. Columbia University)

  • Concentration: modern Japanese literature