East Asian Languages and Cultures



	::	Faculty Directory
	::	Faculty Profiles
	::	Lecturer Directory
	::	Lecturer Profiles
	::	Visitors
	::	GSIs
	::	Graduate Student Directory
	::	Graduate Student Profiles
	::	Administration

	::	Emeritus Faculty
	::	Emeritus Profiles


	Graduate Student Profiles

	PEDRO BASSOE (Japanese Literature)
	Pedro was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, raised in Orlando, Florida, and has been steadily making his way across the U.S. towards California. He received his B.A. in Anthropology and Japanese Language from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana in 2010 and his M.A. in Japanese Literature from the University of Oregon in 2012. His master’s thesis focused on kirishitanmono stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, or stories that imagined the interaction between Jesuit Portuguese missionaries and Japanese people in the 16th and 17th centuries. In his thesis, he explored Akutagawa’s use of obscure grammar and vocabulary and a fantasized Christian-Japanese language that distance and exoticize his subject while also seriously engaging the theological implications of Christian religion in Japan. He is currently interested in the interaction of various religious traditions with modernity as expressed in modern Japanese literature. He is also considering a project focusing on the Kenyusha, Ozaki Koyo’s late-Meiji literary coterie, and their impact on literary trends of the 20th century. Most of his free time is spent with his family going to the supermarket, cooking, and going on walks, although he likes to sneak in some comic book and video game time whenever he can.

	RY BEVILLE (Japanese Literature)
	Ry is interested in modern Japanese poetry, particularly Nakahara Chuya. He has published two volumes of translations of this poet's work, including Poems of the Goat (2002) and Poems of Days Past (2005). He took his M.A. in Spring 2004, writing his thesis on the Taisho-era poet Tominaga Taro. Other areas of interest include comparative literature, translation theory and practice, kickboxing, slide guitar, and quality beer. Ry took his B.A. in English and Japanese from the University of Notre Dame in 1997 (spent 95-96 year at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan), and worked for five years after graduation in Fukuoka. Ry's translations can be viewed at www.nakaharachuya.com. Ry is currently a Fulbright fellow at the University of Tokyo, researching for his dissertation on form in 20th century Japanese poetry.

	DAVID BRATT (Chinese Literature)
	David received a B.A. from Calvin College (Philosophy and Asian Studies) and an M.A. from Stanford University (East Asian Studies). Before joining EALC in fall 2011, he lived in Beijing and Taipei for a total of four years. While in Taipei, he completed the year-long program at the International Chinese Language Program, took graduate courses at National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University, and worked as a teacher, translator, and writer. David is interested in the relation of textual traditions to religious practice, the introduction of Buddhism into China, and the history of Daoism. In his free time, he enjoys racquet sports, reading, and hiking.

	MARJORIE BURGE (Japanese Literature)
	Marjorie is a Ph.D. student focusing on pre-modern Japanese and Korean literature. She received her B.A. in Asian Studies and Japanese from the George Washington University in the spring of 2008. Her interests are primarily in Three Kingdoms/Unified Silla (Korea) and Nara period literature (Japan). Her MA thesis focuses on the intersections between the hyangga poetry of the Silla kingdom and the poetry of Man’yōshū in Japan. She is currently interested in exploring the idea of “Paekche literature” through both Korean and Japanese materials. Other interests include Japanese and Korean archaeology, classical waka poetics, early vernacular scripts in Japan and Korea, and early Japanese and Korean Buddhism.

	COREY BYRNES (Chinese Literature)
	Corey Byrnes received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.Phil in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Kings College. He keeps his interests as broad as possible, but has always been drawn to late imperial fiction - Jin Ping Mei, and Hong Lou Meng in particular - and medieval poetry. He likes to eat and cook.

	JESSE CHAPMAN (Chinese Literature)
	Jesse Chapman is a first year graduate student in premodern Chinese literature. His main interests are the Warring States philosophical texts and the exegetical traditions that grew up around them. More generally, he is attracted to texts that reflect on questions of knowing, being, and feeling

	LAURENCE CODERRE (Chinese Literature)
	Laurence Coderre is a doctoral student in Chinese Literature, primarily focusing on the Cultural Revolution and the Mao period more broadly. She received a B.A. in Music and East Asian Studies from Harvard in 2007 and an M.A. in Regional Studies - East Asia, also from Harvard, in 2009. Her master's thesis considered the importance of contextualization in the propaganda process, with a particular focus on one late-Cultural-Revolution narrative film. Future research projects include a return to the model operas (yangbanxi), the subject of Laurence's undergraduate thesis. She is also currently enthralled by the Russian language. As a French Canadian coming to California from Boston, Laurence remains deeply unnerved by the prospect of 'winter' without snow.

	MICHAEL CRAIG (Japanese Literature)
	Michael Craig is a second-year Ph.D. student and transplanted Chicagoan who doubts he will ever get used to seeing mayonnaise on a cheeseburger and worries daily that establishing California residency has dropped him out of favor with Lincoln's ghost. He is currently working on an M.A. thesis that traces the discursive similarities and often paradoxical temporalities of developmental psychology, emergence theory, internet utopianism, and theorizations of the "multiplanar" cartoon image through a reading of the anime series Paranoia Agent. His hope is that this project will simultaneously account for and reenact the tendency of theoretical/artistic constructions of juvenile delinquency, including Paranoia Agent itself, to lose track of their subject (or at least to diminish its specificity.) Mike's other interests likewise tend to revolve around time/temporality and new media; for example, he is interested in the opposition between narrative time and play time in console Role-Playing Games, and in how that opposition is both reinforced and elided by such tropes as bonus dungeons and non-speaking or itinerant heroes. Favorite hobbies include gambling, disappearing, and otaku-style consumerism.

	AILEEN CRUZ (Japanese Literature)
	Aileen Cruz is a Ph.D candidate in Japanese literature. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Wellesley College with an emphasis on Latin American and Japanese literature. Currently she is interested in representations of burakumin in modern Japanese literature as it relates to colonialism and the representation of the Other. She is also interested in issues of gender and sexuality in Japanese women's fiction. Outside of school, Aileen enjoys (attempting) cooking for her eternally hungry husband, Jorge.

	CHRISTOPHER GREGORY (Japanese Literature)
	Chris Gregory is a first year PhD student in Japanese Literature at UC Berkeley. He received his BA from the University of Minnesota in 2006 with a double major in Asian Languages and Literatures and Theater Arts. As an undergraduate, Chris combined both fields by translating and writing about the absurdist playwright Betsuyaku Minoru for his summa honors thesis and also as the focus of an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Project grant. Before entering graduate school, he spent three years working in Japan as a Coordinator of International Relations at the Prefectural Government Office of Yamagata Prefecture. At Berkeley, Chris plans to explore avant-garde and experimental works from the early 20th century until present day with an emphasis on theater and performance.

	BARRETT J. HEUSCH (Japanese Literature)
	Barrett is a doctoral student specializing in pre-modern Japanese literature. After receiving his B.A. in Japanese from Pomona College he spent several years teaching in Japan and traveling throughout Asia and Central Europe. Possibly because of this, one of his main research interests is travel literature; others include medieval poetry, especially waka, and exile. His M.A. thesis was a study and translation of Michiyukiburi, a travel diary written in 1371 by Imagawa Ryoshun. His dissertation will continue his work on Ryoshun.

	MELANIE HONMA (Japanese Literature)
	Profile coming soon.

	MENGHSIN CINDY HORNG (Chinese Literature)
	Cindy was born in Taiwan, grew up mostly in Michigan, and received her B.A. from the University of Michigan before moving back to Taipei for three years. In this dynamic environment, she nurtured her love for Chinese and Taiwanese film and musical oldies, which she hopes to explore further at Berkeley. She is especially interested in the relationship between Nationalist (and nationalistic) cultural policies and popular art, including issues of government sponsorship and censorship, dialect-based mass media, and the intertextual pathways connecting literature, music, and film. For fun and relaxation, she enjoys exploring her new home in the Bay Area with her partner and her Shiba Inu.

	DAVID HUMPHREY (Japanese Literature)
	David Humphrey researches the development of comedy in contemporary Japan, investigating the evolution of new comic genres alongside new media forms. His dissertation project focuses on nonsense comedy forms from the late 1970s onwards; it explores the affective histories these forms mobilize in response to social changes effected through the transition to a so-called ‘soft’ economy and information society. David will be in Japan during the 2011 academic year to pursue research for this project.

	BRIAN HURLEY (Japanese Literature)
	Brian Hurley is from Columbia, Missouri and joined EALC in fall, 2008. He received his B.A. in Japanese from Washington University in St. Louis after completing an honors thesis about two novellas by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. He then took his M.A. in Japanese from Arizona State University, where he continued researching and translating works by Tanizaki. His M.A. thesis is a study of the professional, literary, and cultural contexts within which Tanizaki wrote in the 1910s and early 1920s, with special attention paid to Tanizaki’s plays. Beyond Tanizkai, Brian is interested broadly in the cultural climate of Japan in the 1910s and 1920s, how writers and texts engage with readerships and discourses, Japanese theatre, intertextuality, and how political meanings can be sewn into literature. Apart from Japanese literature, Brian enjoys cooking, a hobby which allows him to use some of the skills culled from working in a restaurant for three years, biking, studying French, and watching English Premier League soccer.

	MIYO INOUE (Japanese Literature)
	Born and raised in Southern Japan, Miyo initially came to the US to study filmmaking, receiving B.A. in Cinema and M.A. in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. In the process of writing her M.A. thesis on Japanese documentary filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, she was drawn to Japan’s 1960s and 70s, specially its social movements and their relation to film and literature. Her areas of interest include independent avant-garde films, translation, adaptation from literature to film, use of dialect, and interaction of grand History and personal histories.

	JULIA KEBLINSKA (Chinese Literature)
	Julia Keblinska is a first year PhD student in EALC studying Chinese and East Asian film culture. She previously received a BSFS in International Economics from Georgetown University (’08) and an MA in Chinese Literature from Columbia University (’12). Julia draws on these two disciplines to examine how regimes of industrial and economic practice, censorship, and sociopolitical organization intersected in the Chinese film industry and cultural products of the Reform Era (1976-89). In addition to local developments in Chinese cinema, she is interested in a comparative study of competing late Cold War ideologies and aesthetics in the cinematic landscape of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and right-wing authoritarian Korea and Taiwan. By integrating these local cinematic histories, she hopes to develop alternative readings of social and economic liberalization and trace the continuities that inform the development of regional media industries and products in China and East Asia.

	TAE HYUN KIM (Chinese Literature)
	Tae Hyun Kim is a Korean Ph.D. student of Chinese Literature with designated emphasis on Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. His current concern is largely to find a different historicization of early China with emphasis on methodological quests of philology, textual criticism, historiography and modern Western critical theory. He has published and delivered a couple of papers on the philosophy and textual formation of the Zhuangzi, Laozi, and Kongzi in English, and on that of the Xunzi, Mozi in Korean. Recently completing the translation project of the newest excavated text called Qinghua bamboo slip text (vol.1) in its entirety, he is now trying to gaze at the way of construction of the notion of history in early Chinese politico-intellectual realm by perusing early materials such as three Han commentaries of Chunqiu and two Warring States historical narrativizations of Shangshu and Yizhoushu as well as new archaeological texts such as bronze inscriptions and bamboo slips. By so doing, he is attempting to find a symptom of early Chinese way of constructing and appropriating the past and establishing the political and ideological authority.

	SOO MI LEE (Japanese Literature)
	Soo Mi received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and her M.A. in Asian Studies with an emphasis on classical Japanese literature from the University of British Columbia. At U.C. Berkeley, she hopes to focus her research on modern Japanese literature, with special interest in women's writing and zainichi literature. As a third generation zainichi Korean, she is particularly interested in exploring how zainichi women's literature has opened a previously closed door to self expression.

	XIAO LIU (Chinese Literature)
	Xiao Liu is a first-year Ph.D. student in Chinese literature. She received her M.A. in comparative literature from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and wrote her thesis on children’s literature in the Republican Era, examining the construction of modern subject. She is interested in both historical and theoretical explorations of “modernity” in modern Chinese literature and culture, particularly in how people experience such “modernity/modernities” under the rapid and dramatic changes since the 20th century.

	PATRICK LUHAN (Japanese Literature)
	Patrick received his B.A. in Mathematics and Japanese Literature from Columbia in 2004 at which point he worked in investment banking, helped manage a Japanese art gallery, and wrote for Harper's Magazine before continuing as an M.A. student of Japanese Literature at Columbia. For his 2006 M.A. thesis, Patrick explored the didactic character of the prodigal son in popular literature from the 1780s and translated two satirical picture books. Currently, he is delving further into the world of kabuki and its influence on conceptions of revenge, love, economy and family in early modern literature as a doctoral candidate at Berkeley. Writ large, Patrick's interests include the nineteenth century, the relation between history and narrative, the boundaries of image and text, and the reception of French literature in Japan

	MATT MEWHINNEY (Japanese Literature)
	Matt is a native of San Francisco, and joined the EALC in fall, 2012. He received his B.A. in Japanese and Chinese Studies in 2006, and an M.A. in Asian Studies in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. For his Masters, he examined expressions of “modern self and identity” in the literary works of Natsume Soseki, Taiwan colonial writer Zhou Jinpo and Henry James. Before coming to Berkeley, Matt spent two years as an MEXT fellow at Waseda University, where he explored the literary realms of the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods. At present, his research examines kanshi (classical Chinese verse) and its relationship to Japanese modernity and modern subjectivity. In addition to his fascination with kanshi’s aesthetic provenance in, and complex nexus of allusions to, pre-modern Chinese literature, Matt finds the pithy poems compelling in their capaciousness for philosophical inquiry, acute introspection and political criticism in the modern period. Matt has rendered Soseki’s kanshi into English, and hopes to translate the Sino-Japanese oeuvres of other writers, poets and intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His interests broadly include literary modernism, East Asian imperialism and colonialism, language pedagogy, theory and practice of translation, and the history of Japanese sinology. For leisure, Matt enjoys wine, poetry, calligraphy, sushi, and other things that, in the words of shadow master Tanizaki, “bespeak a sheen of antiquity.”

	BRENDAN MORLEY (Japanese Literature)
	Brendan will be a first-year Ph.D. student at Berkeley beginning this Fall. He was born in San Francisco and learned Japanese during his youth in northern California. As an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, he majored in Chinese and Asian Studies, with minors in mathematics and economics. Brendan entered graduate school in economics first, but transferred into Asian Studies after realizing that Japanese philology, literature, and history were his original and true callings. He completed an M.A. in Asian Studies at Oregon in spring of 2009. His research currently focuses on kanbun and mana texts, particularly those composed in a linguistically hybridized form of kanbun known as Waka-kanbun or "Japanized" kanbun. Broadly speaking, this was the orthography of record used on the archipelago throughout the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. Thematically, he is especially interested in premodern legal texts, contracts, and regulatory codes written by aristocratic and warrior households. Other interests include diary literature, haikai poetry, and Japanese corporate governance. Hobbies include lifting, basketball, kanji taikai, and missing the freedom of being an undergraduate.

	JEANNETTE PEI-SAN NG (Chinese Literature)
	Jeannette received her B.A. in English literature from Oxford, United Kingdom. After a few years working in journalism and translation, in her native Singapore and in China and Japan, she soon returned to academia. Her initial forays into research yielded a masters thesis on issues of cultural identity in Singaporean literature, and a masters degree in Chinese literature from San Francisco State University. While her main research interests are in modern and late imperial China, she is also interested in exploring theories of music and performance, sonic and oral cultures, the idiom of the vernacular, the formation of cultural and aesthetic identities, and Sinophone literary translation.

	SHELBY OXENFORD (Japanese Literature)
	Shelby received her B.A. in both Japanese and Political Science from U.C. Berkeley in 2009, completing an honors thesis on the role of imagination/lack of imagination in understanding the past in the selected works of Ôe Kenzaburô. Her current research interests are focused on the post-war period, particularly in how war memories and trauma are represented or misrepresented in literature and pop culture, and how these narratives shape the perception of the post-war national identity. She is especially interested the tension between the questions of what does it mean to have justice and what does it mean to have healing in the aftermath of traumatic experience. She maintains a healthy interest in politics and premodern literature.

	LISA READE (Japanese Literature)
	Lisa received a BA in English literature from Wesleyan University in 2009. She also studied in Tokyo at Sophia University, and joined the East Asian Languages department at Berkeley in 2011. She is interested in the modern reception of classical literature and thought in pre-war Japan, particularly as it was influenced by the establishment of literature as an academic discipline during the Meiji period. She has also translated a collection of short stories by Natsume Soseki (Yume Juya), during which time she became interested in the influence of classical Chinese poetry on Soseki's prose style. In addition to Japanese literature she hopes to incorporate political philosophy and aesthetics into her research at Berkeley.

	SHARON SANDEROVITCH (Chinese Literature)
	Sharon Sanderovitch received her B.A. and M.A. from Tel Aviv University, Israel, in East Asian Studies and Religious Studies. She began studying at Berkeley in 2008, after three memorable years in Beijing, which included language studies and a year as a visiting student at Beijing University. Living in vibrant, hectic Beijing, she had a taste of the new while pursuing a passion for the old—early Chinese thought and intellectual history. More recently, Sharon has been drawn to the early medieval period (third and fourth centuries CE), early Chinese Buddhism, and the contemporary literary genres and rhetorical forms.

	ORNA SHAUGHNESSY (Japanese Literature)
	OOrna Shaughnessy spent four years in Kyoto, Japan, before coming to graduate school at UC Berkeley to study modern Japanese literature. Her M.A. Thesis, titled "A Literature of Commitment: the Aesthetics of Japanese Proletariat Fiction in 1927," examines the various politically inflected literary aesthetics of four writers of the 1920s. Currently, her dissertation research, for which she spent 2007-2008 as a Fulbrighter in Tokyo's National Institute of Japanese Literature, examines the figure of the translator in Japanese travel literature published in the 1860s and 1870s. Titled "The Omniscient Translator: The Culture of Language Play in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Japanese Travel Narratives," Orna's dissertation argues that travel literature of the time, as Japan experienced momentous political and social change, is characterized by a culture of language play. This culture of language play drew upon traditional Japanese literary conventions' legacy of complex word play and punning finesse to incorporate new foreign language words and ideas. Language itself came to be identified as the coin by which purchase of the modern was possible, and language acquisition and its embodiment--the interpreter or translator--sprung into dramatic prominence. By examining the character of the translator and the role of language play and linguistic translation in travel narratives, Orna discovers what was imagined possible in Japanese popular literature at the moment of incipient modernization and industrialization.

	EVELYN SHIH (Chinese Literature)
	Evelyn Shih is a comparative scholar of modern Chinese and Korean language literature with an interest in Japanese cultural and intellectual currents. Her research is framed by the fruits of colonialism and neo-colonialism in East Asia, but more specifically involves untangling the intertwined issues of dialect, polyglossia, transnationalism and symbolic capital in fictional representation. She hopes to investigate the category of nation in relation to national literature, and the global discourse of post-colonialism in relation to specific experiences of cultural contact and homology. Born in Berkeley, Evelyn lived in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania before moving to Taiwan with her family at the age of 10. She returned to the United States to attend Yale University, where she received a BA in Comparative Literature in 2005. She became curious about the influence of Japanese popular culture in Taiwan, and spent a year studying Japanese language at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. Following a stint as a features reporter at The Record newspaper in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey, she returned to Berkeley to work on a MA in Asian Studies and began studying Korean language and literature. She hopes to continue writing and doing research as a PhD candidate, and to become a decent teacher in the process. In her spare time, she likes to move from the spoken and the written to the visual, dabbling in photography.

	MARIANNE TARCOV (Japanese Literature)
	Marianne Tarcov's research interests include twentieth-century Japanese poetry, issues of translation and cultural exchange, and postwar literature. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She wrote her senior paper about Kuroda Saburô and the Arechi poets. Marianne spent 2006-2007 studying at the Kanto Poetry Center at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan.

	PAULI WAI (Chinese Literature)
	Pauli Wai is a second-year Ph.D. student interested in the Zuozhuan. She has migrated from late imperial fiction to early China two years ago, once she realized what blockbusters the Zuozhuan, Zhuangzi, and Han Feizi are (in her own mind). She is attracted to early China because philosophy, literature, ritual, and history are not conceived of as separate disciplines then. For her dissertation, she is thinking about Zuozhuan exegesis, with a particular focus on Liu Zhiji's and Zhang Xuecheng's modes of historical criticism. For some reason, after living in Mexico, she listens to nothing but Latin music: having bachata, reggaeton, cumbia, son, or rock (doesn't matter how old-fashioned or raucous it is) play in the background helps her refocus and study. She makes it a point to cook dinner everyday, to help her unwind after seminars and build those strong muscles for hauling books and groceries.

	YUN-LING WANG (Chinese Literature)
	Profile coming soon.

	ZI-QIAO YANG (Chinese Literature)
	Zi-Qiao Lawrence Yang is a Ph.D. student in Sinophone Literatures and Cultures with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. He received his MA in comparative literature and a B.A. in English, both from National Taiwan Normal University. His broader theoretical interests include phenomenology, cultural criticism of The Frankfurt School, affect theory, and bio-politics. He is currently exploring the questions of ephemerality/monumentality in 19th and 20th century Chinese/Taiwanese literatures and material cultures, with a particular focus on architecture. He enjoys watching baseball, biking, and roaming through the paths and hills of Berkeley and San Francisco.