2018 - 2020 Postdoctoral Associates

Charles Chang earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016, was elected as the 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at Stanford, and served as Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue in 2017-2018. His research focuses on political communication in contemporary China.

With the rise of the internet, smartphones, and social media, social science is becoming increasingly computational and often involves the collection and analysis of massive data. One type of study he has undertaken is to see how Chinese internet users, who number more than 700 million, respond to an unprecedented political event, for example, the most recent announcements of corruption at the highest level of government. Chang pioneered a method of graphing such that he could follow citizen response to each official announcement of the political event at a micro-spatial granularity and, time wise, from day to day and even from moment to moment.

Another type of study required him to solve the problem of scarce or inaccessible data in China, an authoritarian state that holds information close to its chest. Starting with maps that offered little useful information, Chang pioneered techniques that enabled him to fill in the gaps and show urban land in considerable detail, including the location, size, and compactness of different communities, which in turn gave him the means to gain knowledge of the social status of the people within each, how they communicate and behave.

At Stanford, he taught a seminar on the methods of “computational social science” and “digital humanities” to graduate students in which he explored how its methods can be used to study China. As to his present and future projects, they include a book that introduces computational social science to a broader social science public, and, more specifically, the use of its methods to the understanding of religion in China, a project that takes him closer to the humanities.

Chang taught the seminar “Digital China: Using Computational Methods to Illuminate Society, Politics, Culture, and History” in Spring 2019.

Gabrielle Niu is an art historian of pre-modern China. Her research interests include the art, architecture, and archaeology of the tenth to fourteenth centuries, with a focus on cultures and exchanges at China’s mutable borders. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Her dissertation, “Beyond Silk: A Re-evaluation of Jin Painting (1115 – 1234)”, explores Jin painting on silk, paper, temple and tomb walls and argues for regional frameworks for approaching 12th -13th century north Chinese painting cultures.

During her time at Yale, she developed a new research project “Mapping Middle Period (10th – 14th c.) Chinese Tombs: Funerary Murals from the Liao, Northern Song, Jin, and Yuan Dynasties.” She also taught a class in spring 2019 on Chinese art and archaeology at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Michael Thornton is a historian of early-modern and modern Japan, with a particular interest in urban history. In his dissertation, “Settling Sapporo: City and State in the Global Nineteenth Century,” he analyzed the planning and construction of Sapporo across the nineteenth century. He argued that the city was built as a settler-colonial capital, playing an instrumental role in the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido. The city was in turn heavily shaped by its colonial position and functions. More broadly, Thornton is interested in the transformation of Japanese cities between the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, including the development of new forms of social and political organization and municipal administration, with an eye to lessons that the rest of the world might learn from one of the planet’s most urbanized societies.

Thornton grew up in Kobe and Tokyo before attending Yale, where he received a BA in History in 2010. After brief stints in Germany and back in Japan he entered the PhD program in History at Harvard, from which he graduated in May 2018.

In Spring 2019, he taught the course “The City in Modern East Asia.”