2013 - 2014 Postdoctoral Associates

Nathan Hopson received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. His research focuses on the dynamics of postwar regionalism and sub-state nationalism in northeastern Japan, where he lived for eight years. He is currently working on a book project based on his dissertation, Tōhoku as Postwar Thought: Regionalism, Nationalism, and Culturalism in Japan’s Northeast. He taught “Japanese Nationalism in Global Context” in the Fall of 2013.

Hyung-Wook Kim received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012, specializing in pre-modern Korean history. His current research interests are on collective memory and nationalism in East Asia. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, Hyung-Wook worked on developing his dissertation, An Ancient and Glorious Past: Koguryŏ in the Collective Memories of the Korean People into a book manuscript and continued his research on the intellectual trends of eighteenth century East Asia. In the Spring of 2014, he taught a seminar on “History and Nationalism in East Asia.”

Kwangmin Kim specializes in early modern China and East Asia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008, and currently teaches Chinese and global history at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on the history of empire, borderlands, and transnational relations.   His recent publications include “Profit and Protection: Emin Khwaja and the Qing Conquest of Central Asia, 1759–1777,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 03 (2012): 603-626, and “Korean Migration in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria: A Global Theme in Modern Asian History,” in Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in Modern Korean Diaspora, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2013), 17-37. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale, he taught “Frontiers and Environments in Asia” in the Fall of 2013. He is currently preparing for the publication of his first book titled Borderland Capitalism: Muslim Notables and the Qing Empire in Chinese Central Asia, 1759-1864.

Mia Liu studies Chinese cinema and modern art and received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, The Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema, exposes how visual themes and motifs that have been established in literati landscape art are re-appropriated and re-invented in Chinese cinema between the 1950s and 1970s. It examines notions of place, monuments, sites, and the tension between word and image in a filmic text and the interstitial space between memory and history. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, she prepared her dissertation for publication and continued her research in Chinese photography, both popular and Salon, from the early twentieth century, as well as in the visual interactions between the photography circles and the cinema. In the Fall of 2013, she taught a course titled “Picturing Home and Country in Chinese Cinema.”

Ran Zwigenberg, a native of Israel, went to work for the United Nations after graduating with a degree in history from Hunter College. He recently finished his Ph.D. in history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on modern Japanese and European history, with a specialization in memory and intellectual history. His dissertation, The Bright Flash of Peace: Hiroshima in the World: 1945-1995, deals comparatively with the commemoration and the reaction to the Holocaust in Israel and Europe and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in Japan. His thesis is further expanded upon in his recently published book, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (September, 2014). In addition, he has published on issues of war memory, atomic energy, and survivor politics. He has won numerous fellowships including the Japan Foundation Fellowship, Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Zwigenberg has presented his work in Israel, Europe, the United States and Japan. He taught “The Atomic Bombings of Japan in World Culture” in the Fall of 2013.