MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Council on East Asian Studies

2015-2016 Visiting Faculty & Scholars

Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Xiqi Lu (Ph.D., Wuhan University, 1995), Professor of History at Xiamen University, studies the medieval history of South China, particularly the local society and culture, as well as the history of the ‘Boat People’ living in the southern coastal region of China. His current research works to place the southern coastal region in a broader historical context of international trade, smuggling, and migration, and explores its connection to Southeast Asia from the third century to the tenth century.

Visiting Associate Professor in East Asian Studies

Yinggang Sun is the author of Prophecy, Knowledge and Political Legitimation in Medieval China (神文時代: 讖緯、術數與中古政治研究, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, first edition, 2014; second edition, 2015, 498 pages), A History of Sui-Tang and Five Dynasties（隋唐五代史, Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2014）, and around 50 published papers which mostly focus on medieval Chinese history and Buddhist studies. He co-edited with Jinhua Chen (Professor, Asian Studies, University of British Columbia) Sacred Space: Spatial Factors in Medieval Chinese Religions (Fudan University Press, 2014, 479 pages) and translated Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era by Yuri Pines (The Chinese edition published in 2013).

Professor Sun has held positions as a Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University of Taiwan and the Department of East Asian Studies of Princeton University, as well as a Visiting Fellow to the Institute of Asian Studies of Tokyo University, and to the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies (ICPBS) in Tokyo.

Visiting Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Tomoyasu Iiyama is an Adjunct Researcher at Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Tokyo, Japan, who has worked on northern Chinese social history during the Jin-Yuan-Ming and published Northern Local Literati: Civil Service Examination and Its Social Influence in North China, 1127-1368 (in Japanese) in 2011.

Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies

Nobuhiro Hiwatari (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a professor of political economy/international political economy at the Institute of Social Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He teaches at the Graduate School of Political Science as well as the Graduate School of Public Policy. He has also taught at Berkeley and Columbia and has conducted research at Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge. His research interests are the party politics of “neo-liberal” reforms at OECD countries as well as the impact of political regime heterogeneity on economic cooperation in the Asian-Pacific region. His works on these topics have appeared in academic journals as well as edited volumes.

He spent most of the academic year 2015-16 at Yale finishing a book project (titled The New Politics of Adjustment: International Economic Crisis and Partisan Competition) that examines how party competition during international recessions shapes the adoption of market-assuring reforms at OECD countries. He also taught a seminar entitled Japan’s Domestic Politics and International Relations in Spring, 2016.

Visiting Fellow for the Inter-Asia Initiative

XIE Shi received his B.A. in history from the Department of History, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and his Ph.D. in historical geography from the Center for Historical Geographic Studies at Fudan University in 2009. Elected by the committee of the Hundred Talents Program of Sun Yat-sen University, he is currently Professor of History, and supervises the Department of History’s doctoral program. He has also been selected to the National Program for Special Support of Eminent Professionals of China.  Xie also holds an appointment as Research Fellow at the Co-Centre for Historical Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong - Sun Yat-sen University, and is Executive Editor of the Journal of History and Anthropology, a publication of the Centre.

Xie specializes on social economic history and historical geography in China. His thesis was nominated for the Best 100 Ph.D. Dissertations by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2011. He has published articles at leading academic journals such as Historical Research (China), Bulletin of The Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan).  He has also conducted national research projects in his field. He has obtained substantial teaching experience in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the Sun Yat-sen University.

Visiting Research Fellows in East Asian Studies

Satoko Mita​ is a Research Fellow at Osaka City University in Japan.  Her research builds upon important new work on Japan’s status system to study “kawata” outcaste villages in the Kinai region during the early modern period. Her doctoral dissertation sought to explicate the internal social structure of a large outcaste community called Minami Ōji Village in Izumi province, while also examining its relations with commoner villages in the surrounding area.  During her time at Yale, Dr. Mita continued building on this earlier research, examining more carefully the development of leather sandal manufacturing (which was the main industry in Minami Ōji) in the 19th century using some newly uncovered documentary evidence.

Adam Craig Schwartz (PhD, University of Chicago 2013) came to Yale from NYU where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor (2013-2015) at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His interests are focused on the intersection between writing, religion, and the early development of philosophy and literature. His ability to work comparatively outside of China is a result of training in hieroglyphic Egyptian at the Oriental Institute. He is the author of “China’s first prayer” (JAOS 135.1 (2015)), 釋上博簡《容成氏》的“敃終 (Explaining the phrase ‘minzhong’ [an ideal end] in the Shanghai Museum’s Warring States bamboo manuscript Rongchengshi) (Jianbo 簡帛10 (2015)), “G-d, and perhaps a Sage, is hidden in the details: Deictic pictographs (指事文字) and a reappraisal of the primary meanings of Di 帝 (’Elohim) and Kong 孔 (Confucius’ surname)” (JAOS forthcoming), and The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions from Huayuanzhuang East (NYU Press; under contract). 

Yale World Fellow

Wallace Cheng is founder and managing director of ICTSD China, the first and only independent trade policy think tank in China. He is one of the most influential policy advisers to Chinese central government and various international institutions on global trade and Chinese economy. ICTSD is dedicated to engaging the nation to play a constructive role in shaping the future of global economic governance for sustainable development. In 2007, he established “Bridges China Dialogue” in Geneva, a prominent annual event featuring high-level conversation between ministers, negotiators, CEOs and opinion leaders. Prior to that, Wallace served as a key economist in the Shanghai Municipal Government. Currently, he co-manages a new industrial policy group, The E15 Initiative, a joint project with the World Economic Forum. He is also a board member of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development in London, a member of IMD Evian Group Working Group on Trade (Lausanne), and Adjunct Professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). Wallace co-edited two widely quoted books: From Rule Takers to Rule Makers and A Decade in the WTO, and is frequently interviewed by Chinese and international media including Xinhua, People’s Daily, Caixin, Reuters and Bloomberg. Wallace holds degrees from Fudan University and the University of Oxford.