Students

Mariko Azuma is a Ph.D. candidate in art history with a focus on modern Japanese art and visual culture. Her studies examine the spatial constructs of travel and tourism through mediums such as the built environment, photography, and travel pamphlets in the late-19^th-20^th century. At Duke, she is pursuing certificates in East Asian Studies and College Teaching. She is also interested in engaging with the broader scholarly community through the graduate student-led East Asia/Asian Diaspora Studies (EADS) Working Group. 

Felix is a PhD student in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Centered on the post-growth city, his research critically explores emerging forms of urban sociality, post-growth urban futures, and our relationship to the historical and material legacy of the built environment. He investigates these issues through an ethnographic project on the residential communities of long-standing suburban public housing projects (danchi) in Tokyo, Japan. His other interests include gender and the family, labor and precarity, Marxism and political economy, the politics of cultural heritage and architectural preservation, and the anthropology of space. 

Felix holds a B.A. (Japan in East Asia, 2016) and an M.A (Interdisciplinary Information Studies, 2018) from the University of Tokyo.

Haocong Cheng is a Ph.D. student in the history department. Identifying himself as a historian of science and technology, environment, and society of twentieth-century China, Haocong's current research project revolves around livestock in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia. He aims to bring together human and nonhuman actors while exploring questions about modernizing projects and transnational knowledge production. Before joining Duke, he received his BA in history from UCLA and MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia.

Doctoral Student in Religious Studies

My academic interests have been grounded in the study of World Christianity via historical analysis. I have examined the vitality and variance of Christian faith in the specific cultural contexts, in East Asia. As a neophyte scholar, I have developed my research fields in the juxtaposition of historical study, cultural study, East Asian study, and Theology. 


Education
B.A., Theology, Yonsei University, South Korea (2013)
Th.M., World Christianity and Inter-cultural Studies, Yonsei University (2018) 
M.Div., Vanderbilt University (2021)

Yuting Hu is a PhD student in the Literature Program. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary East Asian literature, aesthetics, and new media.


M.A., University of Pennsylvania
East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University

B.A., cum laude, University of Rochester
Comparative Literature (Highest Distinction); Philosophy (Highest Distinction)

Ph.D. Candidate in Literature 2018-Present
My research interests center on memory studies and literatures of mass violence. I work on French and Korean 20th century literatures with a focus on periods of occupation. My dissertation examines the ways that the figure of the collaborator is represented in and imagined through national literatures and memory cultures. I take a multilingual, transcultural, and transmedial approach to comparative work, using novels, film, museums, and memorials as objects of analysis in my projects.

Before coming to Duke, I completed an undergraduate honors thesis that examined the intellectual collaborator in French and Korean 1940s literatures as an exception to binary trauma discourses of perpetrator and victim.

Educational Background

Master of Arts, 2022
Program in Literature
Duke University (Durham, NC, USA)

Bachelor of Arts, 2018
Comparative Literature, Honors
East Asian Studies
French
Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH, USA)

I am a PhD student in the Department of Philosophyhttps://philosophy.duke.edu">Philosophy; and the Department of Gender">https://gendersexualityfeminist.duke.edu">Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. My research interests lie at the intersection of critical disability studies, feminist/queer/trans studies, and memory studies. I am especially interested in employing feminist and queer theories, trans studies, and critical disability studies to theorize memory and topics in epistemology.

My most recent project is in feminist epistemology, concerning the epistemic shift that some of us experience when we are born into a new and more marginalized social identity (e.g., diasporic experiences, gender transitioning, acquiring disabilities). I ask how the fluidity in our social identities complicates theses of standpoint epistemology. In another project, I wrote about the hermeneutical dimension of oppressive double binds and creative resistance strategies that minoritarian subjects employ through minoritarian world traveling/ world-making. In addition, I am interested in theorizing "misremembering," "false memories," or "memory errors" as a site of potentiality and a practice of minoritarian resistance, rather than a mishap or even a pathology. 

You are welcome to learn more about me or my research on my https://www.kexuanliu.com"; title="Personal Website">Personal Website.

Coralei Neighbors is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the intersection of infectious diseases, health economics, and global health policy. With a strong foundation in epidemiology and disease surveillance, gained through a Bachelor of Science from Baylor University and a Master of Science in Global Health from Duke University, Coralei has experience in tackling global health challenges through a dual lens of scientific inquiry and policy analysis.

Her research encompasses infectious disease surveillance, economic modeling, and policy evaluation. With experience in both national and international settings, she is currently contributing to infectious disease surveillance initiatives and developing models to assess the economic impact and sustainability of vaccines and other health interventions in diverse populations. Coralei's work aims to inform the development of evidence-based policies to improve global health outcomes.

Ph.D. student in the Program in Literature, Duke University

M.A., New York University
English and American Literature

B.A., magna cum laude, Bowdoin College
English and Music Composition double major, Russian minor