2014 - 2015 Postdoctoral Associates

Kazumi Hasegawa received her Ph.D. in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA) at Emory University in 2013.  Her dissertation, entitled “Examining the Life of Oyabe Zen’ichirō: The New Formation of Modern Japanese Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” reconstructs the life history of Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867-1941) and examines the formation of his Japanese identity within international racial discourse of the time. The dissertation also analyzes how Oyabe encountered the crucial intellectual discourses of “civilization” at the turn of the twentieth century. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, she made extensive revisions to her dissertation in preparation for publication. In the Spring of 2015, she taught her course entitled, “Civilization in Meiji Japan.”  Starting in the Fall of 2015, she will be teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Seunghan Paek received his Ph.D. in Art History from the Ohio State University in 2014. His current research focuses on the phenomenon of commercial signage in Korean urbanism, and the aesthetic, ethical, and political questions it raises. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, he worked on developing his dissertation, “Urbanism, Signs, and the Everyday in Contemporary South Korean Cities,” into a book manuscript.  He also continued to research contemporary architecture and urbanism in East Asia, with a project entitled, “The New Public Space: Spectacle, Media, and Urban Identity in East Asia.”  In the Fall of 2014, he taught an undergraduate seminar titled “South Korean Urbanism.”

Jonathan Schlesigner is a historian of China and the natural environment.  His research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a rush for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers.  His current book project, The Qing Invention of Nature, reveals how Qing subjects, amidst this ecological upheaval, reimagined nature itself.  Drawing on extensive archival research in Ulaanbaatar, Beijing, and Taipei, the book’s multilingual approach reenvisions the construction of frontier and metropole, nature and material culture, and artifice and purity in the Qing empire. Jonathan received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2012 and is an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University – Bloomington.  While at Yale, he completed his book manuscript, and taught an undergraduate seminar, “China’s Environmental History since 1600.” 

Bin Xu received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2011.  His dissertation, “The Elusive Harmony: Moral Legitimation and State-Society Relations in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China,” examines how the Chinese state interacted with civil society in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake.  The state-society interactions revolved around some moral issues pertaining to life and death and involved leaders’ compassionate performance, civil society’s participation in relief work, and the mourning ritual for the victims.  During his term as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale, he worked on a new project on collective memories of China’s “educated youth” (zhiqing) generation.  He also taught a course on “Collective Memories in East Asia.”