2020-2021 Visiting Faculty & Scholars
Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Environmental Humanities of East Asia
Mark Frank is an environmental historian of China and the world. He recently finished his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has taught at the University of Illinois and Wesley College. At Yale he worked towards completing his manuscript, “Chinese Colonialism: The Ecology of Assimilation in Republican China and Beyond,” which chronicles the relationship between agrarianism and colonialism along China’s ethnically diverse frontiers between the fall of the Qing empire and the rise of the People’s Republic. This project draws on roughly two years of archival research in mainland China and Taiwan and has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Mark has begun work on a second book project that examines China’s relationship with the atmosphere from the late imperial era through the early twenty-first century. To date, he is the author of three historical articles on Chinese yak improvement schemes, high-altitude crop experiments, and sedentary-nomadic relations in eastern Tibet during the early twentieth century.
Institute of Sacred Music Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in East Asian Studies
Bo kyung Blenda Im is a 2012 ISM/YDS graduate (M.A.R. in religion and music) who received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in fall 2019 from the University of Pennsylvania. During the spring 2020 semester, she returned to YDS and the ISM as a lecturer in ethnomusicology. Her ethnographic project “Transpacific Modernity and the Challenge of Belonging: Negotiating Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul” centralizes Korean Christians’ engagements with black gospel and contemporary worship music. Holding the analytics of race, music, and religion in productive tension, she draws attention to the ways in which Korean and Korean diasporic Christians, in their articulations of selfhood and community, navigate and radically contest the normative conditions of transpacific modernity.
Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies
Floris van Swet is a historian of early-modern Japan whose work broadly focusses on the interactions between institutional and everyday understandings of status and identity. He grew up in the Netherlands before moving to the UK where he received his BSc from the University of Surrey, BA from the University of Sheffield and MA from SOAS, University of London. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation, “Finding a Place: Rōnin in the Tokugawa Period” explores the fate of rōnin, the so-called masterless samurai. This works shows that rōnin were in fact often neither ‘masterless’ nor ‘samurai’ and in doing so complicates our understanding of social status and the governance in the early Tokugawa Japan.
During his time at Yale, he worked as Postdoctoral Associate on the CEAS Digital Tokugawa Lab team.
Visiting Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in East Asian Studies
Ria Chae’s research deals with the Cold War in East Asia, focusing on the history of inter-Korean relations and nation-building on the Korean Peninsula. Her current book project tentatively titled “The Making of a Cold War in Korea” explores questions of agency and character of the Korean conflict from the Korean War to the contemporary period.
Chae previously was the Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2019-2020), Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University (2017–2019), Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (2016), Lecturer at Seoul National University and Dankook University, Korea (2013–2016), and Junior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC (2011–2012).
Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies
Werner Stangl has no background in Japanese history nor Japanese language. Having worked for over a decade as a historian of colonial Spanish America, he developed his interest in various aspects of digital humanities, such as digital scholarly editions and particularly GIS. Beyond his own scholarly research, he has worked for years as a copyeditor of a scholarly journal (Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas) and as a copyeditor and cartographer for several monographs.
From 2015 to April 2019, he built the HGIS de las Indias, an interactive website that reconstructs the changing administrative divisions and settlement patterns of the Spanish Empire in the Americas from 1701 to 1808.
Postgraduate Associate in East Asian Studies
Yuki Hoshino
Assistant in Research in East Asian Studies
Ingrid Barnes is a linguist with particular interests in Ancient Greek and Hittite, but is also comfortable working in Japanese. She is currently finishing her MA in Digital Tools for Premodern Studies at Tufts University. While at Yale, Ingrid was part of the Digital Tokugawa Lab, a group of scholars working on digital humanities projects with a focus on pre-modern Japan.