2019-2020 Visiting Faculty & Scholars

Visiting Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies

Jeongsoo Shin received his Ph.D in pre-modern Korean and Chinese literature from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2011. He studies garden culture in Korea and China, and is currently focused on miniature rocks, an aesthetic object appreciated among literati. With an eye to national borders, regional identity, and modes of circulation, Professor Shin scrutinizes the emergence of Korean connoisseurship of rocks, which culminated in the nineteenth century as a result of the interaction between indigenous Korean culture and Chinese influence. His research contributes to an understanding of Sino-Korean cultural exchange, East Asian material culture, the relationship between man and natural objects, and man in the realm of nature.

Visiting Senior Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Professor Luke Roberts teaches history of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times at UC Santa Barbara. He enjoys teaching and uses many visual and literary documents to help integrate social and cultural history with the economic and political. Professor Roberts likes to get students to think creatively about doing history. His research mostly focuses on the period between the late 1500’s and the late 1800’s, and his graduate teaching focuses on history during this period.

Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies

Amartuvshin Chunag

Tristan Grunow’s book manuscript, Empire by Design: Tokyo and the Building of Japanese Modernity, charts the respacing of the built environment of Tokyo under the process of Japanese state-formation and empire-building.  His most recent publication is “Paving Power: Western Urban Planning and Imperial Space from the Streets of Meiji Tokyo to Colonial Seoul” published in the Journal of Urban History in 2016.  Other publications include “Trains, Modernity, and State-Formation in Meiji Japan” and “A Re-examination of the ‘Shock of Hiroshima’: The Japanese Bomb Projects and the Surrender Decision.”

In 2017-2018, Grunow organized and hosted the UBC Meiji at 150 Project with the collaboration of colleagues in the Centre for Japanese Research, Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. As part of this project he co-curated, edited, and constructed the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource, compiling over a dozen visual essays by scholars from Japan and North America highlighting digitized materials related to Japanese history at UBC.  He also hosts and produces the ongoing Meiji at 150 Podcast, featuring interviews with prominent scholars of Japanese history, literature, and cultural studies from around the globe.

Dr. Xing Zhang is Associate Professor and Head of the Section of South Asian Culture at the Department of South Asian Studies and Research Center of Eastern Literature, Peking University, China. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in Germany and Visiting Professor and Researcher at Université de Montréal, in Canada. Her research focuses on South Asian culture, Indian languages and literature, and intercultural studies. Her research and fieldwork have been supported by grants and fellowships from Germany, Singapore, and Canada. She also served as a member of several research projects supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China. She has published a number of articles in SSCI and CSSCI journals, and is the author of two English monographs published in Germany and Singapore. At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, she will be working on the changing cosmology and knowledge of tigers among Buddhist communities in South and East Asia.

Japan Foundation CGP Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies

Garrett Bredell specializes in Comparative Politics with an emphasis on Parliamentary systems, voter behavior and democratic institutions. His current research examines the electoral and legislative costs of party switching, using Japan as a primary case study. 

Scott Wilbur was the 2018 Banque de France Chair at the Center for French-Japanese Advanced Studies of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He holds a Ph.D. in political science and international relations from USC. His dissertation analyzes the political economy of zombie firms, unprofitable businesses supported by financial relief. More broadly, Dr. Wilbur’s research examines how political institutions and politicians influence economic outcomes, with a regional focus on Japan. His research has been funded by a Fulbright grant. While at Yale, Dr. Wilbur taught the course “Politics and Economics in Japan” during the spring 2019 term.

Postdoctoral Associate in the Environmental Humanities of East Asia

Tomo (Tomonori) Sugimoto is a sociocultural anthropologist who recently completed his PhD in anthropology at Stanford University.

While serving as a postdoctoral associate in the Environmental Humanities of East Asia at Yale University, Tomo worked on his first book manuscript provisionally entitled, The Indigenous Right to the Settler Colonial City? Land, Nature, and Housing in Taipei. Invigorated by the recent rise of indigenous rights discourse in Taiwan, urbanized indigenous Austronesian people (yuanzhumin) have increasingly asserted rights to Taipei’s public lands as sites of foraging, fishing, hunting, and dwelling over the last several decades. The Han settler-dominated state has curtailed such distinct native claims to the city, violently displacing indigenous people from their communities and relocating them into public housing. Based on long-term ethnographic research in indigenous communities built on Taipei’s riverbanks and hillsides as well as their relocation sites, Sugimoto’s book will explore how, in the age of multiculturalism and green urbanism, certain native claims to Taipei’s land, environments, and infrastructure are celebrated, while others are criminalized and regulated. Articles based on this research have been published in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, Gastronomica: Journal of Critical Food Studies, and City & Society.

Prior to finishing his PhD in 2019, Tomo acquired his MA in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego in 2013 and his BA in social science from the University of Tokyo in 2011. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Toyota Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies/the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies

Hiroshi Fujimoto