2010 - 2011 Postdoctoral Associates

Francesca Di Marco is a cultural historian of modern Japan. She received her Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in the summer of 2009. Her dissertation, entitled The Discourse on  Suicide in Postwar Japan, explores the process of  the formation of the image of suicide between 1946 and 2008 in non-fictional media. It focuses particularly on the evolution of the media discourse in representing and narrating the act of suicide and its motivations, unveiling the conditions under which the historical appearance of suicide is formed, reinterpreted and reinvented. During her time at Yale, Dr. Di Marco developed her project into a book manuscript, which included two additional chapters on the discourse on suicide in prewar Japan. She also taught a course in the spring 2011 semester entitled “The Asia-Pacific Wars: Histories, Crimes, Memories.”

Youn-mi Kim is an art historian of cross-cultural Buddhist art of East Asia. Her primary research interest is the ritual aspect of Buddhist architecture and its relation to the religious worldview and politics of medieval East Asia. Her dissertation (Harvard 2010), Eternal Ritual in an Infinite Cosmos: The Chaoyang North Pagoda (1043-1044), explores inner and outer spaces of the Liao  pagoda, revealing that the pagoda was designed to be an epitome of the Buddhist cosmos described in the literatures of the Huayan School and its relic crypt  simulated an esoteric ritual altar. Her comparative study of the altar configuration from the Liao pagoda and Japanese medieval documents reveals hitherto less known Liao bearings on the Shingon School ritual practice in late Heian Japan, which brings her research into a transnational dialogue. Her broader research projects and research interests cover the meaning and function of East Asian twin pagodas and incantation prints enshrined in Buddhist sculptures. During her residence at Yale, she expanded her dissertation into a book manuscript and  taught a course titled “Religion, Politics and Visions of Afterlife in Northeast Asia through Liao Art of the 10th-12th Centuries.”

Alyssa Park is a historian of modern Korea. She received her B.A. from Princeton and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include transnational migration, border regions, and national belonging. Her dissertation, Borderland Beyond: Korean Migrants and the Creation of a Modern Boundary between Korea and Russia, 1860-1937, incorporates archival materials from Russia and Korea. It explores the building of a state border between the two countries through geopolitical contests, technologies of state  surveillance, and the circulation of global ideas about mobility and citizenship. She has recently revised her dissertation to include Manchuria. At Yale, she taught the seminar “Mapping ‘Korea’ in East Asia: Ideas, Politics, and Society.”