Students

Research interests: sexual minorities, sexuality politics, feminism in post-socialist China, migration, state-society relations, modernization, global capitalism, and knowledge circulation

Research interest: representations of motherhood in Japan and China in film and literature, anthropology, history, digital humanities

Research interests: comparative poetics (pre-Qin poetry, pre- and early Islamic poetics), oral tradition, and audio-vocal culture, particularly the oral formulaic theory of poetry composition

Research Interests: Out-migration in post-socialist and industrial regions

Research interests: contemporary Chinese and Japanese literature, urban legends, culture/subculture, and folklore

Research interests: film, literature, Buddhism, feminism

Research interests: International relations and politics, particularly Sino-Japanese relations; history; issues related to aging in China and Japan

Grant Azevedo Beleza-Schutzman is a PhD student in the Department of Romance Studies. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature, translation theory, multilingual writing, and comparisons between the Sinosphere and Latin America.

As a Graduate Liberal Studies student, my primary research interest lies in the field of East Asian cinema. With a background in film, I’m most passionate about diasporic East Asian cinema. I hope to connect film studies (cinematography and sound as the foci) with affect studies and explore the themes of “nostalgia,” “displacement,” “belonging,” etc. I’m also interested in the relationship between cinema and religion, specifically how East Asian directors consciously or unconsciously insert religious ideals in their filmmaking.

Tatiana Farmer was born and raised in North Carolina. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she double majored in Global Studies and Psychology with a minor in Japanese. Tatiana participated in a range of internationally oriented extracurricular and professional opportunities. She traveled to Japan three times through the Kakehashi project, as a Gilman scholar, and as a FLAS recipient. After graduating, Tatiana joined a law firm in North Carolina. Tatiana will be pursuing a Master's degree in Public Policy at Duke University before entering the Foreign Service as a Public Diplomacy Officer. Tatiana enjoys learning languages and has studied Japanese and Korean at university. In her free time, she enjoys reading, cooking, traveling, and watching food blogs.

Yixuan Jiang is pursuing her M.A. in Graduate Liberal Studies at Duke University. Her current research focuses on immigrant literature, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, East Asian literature and cultural studies. Passionate about education equity and reaching underserved communities, Yixuan has been actively teaching K-12 in rural schools.

After completing her M.A., she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Literature to advance her academic and professional goals. In her spare time, Yixuan enjoys hiking, reading and traveling.

Yu-An Kuo is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at Duke. Her research interests span food, agriculture, multispecies, sound studies, environmental issues, STS, and East and Southeast Asia. She takes the edible bird nest industry in Malaysia as a lens to explore these intersections.

Ruona Qi (Tsaruun) is a Doctoral student at Duke Law School. Her research focuses on the intersection of environmental governance, ethnic minority studies, and land management in Inner Mongolia, China, exploring how state policies and local strategies shape environmental and territorial outcomes. Ruona is fluent in Mongolian, Mandarin and English. She has conducted extensive field research in ethnic minority regions across China since 2014, worked with UNESCO, and is a member of the IUCN CEC Commission.

Sayaha Takahashi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. Her research explores the politics of monuments, abstraction, memory-making, gendered labor, documentation and preservation, industrialism, and ecology, with a focus on postwar Japanese artists. 

Sayaha holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Art from the University of Tsukuba and an M.A. in Human and Environmental Studies from Kyoto University, Japan.

Anqi Yan is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at Duke. Her research interests include migration, labor, gender, sexuality, affect and digital ethnography.

As a Shenzhenese (under the slogan "Come, and you become a Shenzhenese"), my research interests center on rural migrant workers' experiences and negotiations with boundaries and spaces. With such interests, I work in factories and urban villages in Shenzhen under the contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and urban village reformation projects.

Yuanwei is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. His research focuses on the China-Africa encounter, with fieldwork in Ghana, where he explores Chinese corporate culture and business practices in Ghana and other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. He has a particular interest in the digital economy, ICT development, financial technology, cryptocurrency, and digital mining.

Before joining Duke, Yuanwei gained experience working at international organization, tech company, and venture capital fund in China, Switzerland, and Ghana. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Wuhan University and a master’s degree from Geneva Graduate Institute.