DHAsia 2017 Fellows

CESTA and DHAsia are proud to welcome this year's 2017 DHAsia residents to Stanford! All future talks, clinics, and meetings to be held on the campus of Stanford University.

 

Michael Stanley-Baker studies Chinese medicine and religions, with a focus on Six Dynasties China (220-589 CE), the formative period for defining religion as a cultural category in China. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Dept. III. He holds a PhD in Chinese medical history from University College London, an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University, a clinical diploma in Chinese Medicine from Ruseto College, Boulder CO, and a BAHons in English and Philosophy from the University of East Anglia. He has held research posts at the Berlin Centre for the History of Knowledge, the Needham Research Institute, and the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taipei. He is writing a book titled Situating Medicine and Religion in China while developing a database platform to analyse the transmission of drug knowledge across multiple practice communities.

 

Song Chen received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2011 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Bucknell University. Song Chen’s research interests are both in the field of later imperial Chinese history and digital humanities. His work combines prosopography, network analysis, and GIS methods to reveal macroscopic changes in Chinese history using large quantities of historical sources. His 

recent projects investigate changes in the composition, career paths, and networks of China’s political elite in the Song period (960-1279). He was the Project Manager for China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) between 2006 and 2010 and has served on its steering committee since 2011. At Bucknell, Professor Chen teaches East Asian civilization, surveys of Chinese history, and digital humanities. He also serves on the steering committee of the China Institute and the coordinating committee for Digital Humanities Minor at Bucknell University. 

 

Priya Kumar recently completed her PhD in Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her thesis “Diaspora 2.0: Mapping Sikh, Tamil and Palestinian Online Identity Politics” compared three ‘stateless’ diaspora communities and investigated the multiple ways in which digital connectivity has given rise to transnational identity flows and localized patterns of diasporic political mobilization that are often overlooked in mainstream international politics. As a researcher for the e-Diasporas Atlas project, Priya helped to produced web cartographies and corpus datasets for each of the case studies presented in her PhD, which can be accessed through http://www.e-diasporas.fr. She has published on the Sikh blogosphere and transnational Tamil networks in peer-reviewed journals and edited book chapters. Building on her personal experiences and doctoral research, Priya’s TEDxGoodenoughCollege talk “Where are you from?” presents a reflective account and lighthearted discussion of hybrid identities, online forms of imagined community and the role of the web across the South Asian diaspora. She can be contacted at: priya_kumar [at] soas.ac.uk (priya_kumar[at]soas[dot]ac[dot]uk).

 

Manu P. Sobti is an Islamic architecture and urban historian, specializing on mapping cultural landscapes and urbanities across Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific regions. Currently Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Queensland-Brisbane, his ongoing projects focus on trans-national and inter-regional riverine terrains across Asia, especially the Amu Darya and the Ganges rivers. A recognized scholar and innovative educator, he was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA, and Chair of the PhD Program. He served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15), and the Uzbekistan Research Program (2008-15). In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also coordinated the Building-Landscapes- Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), developing a global research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies. He has published widely and is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards/fellowships towards his research (See http://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/15198 & www.blcurbanmorphologies.com).

 

Anna Greenspan is Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Media at NYU Shanghai. She holds a PhD in Continental philosophy from Warwick University, UK. While at Warwick, Anna was a founding member of the cybernetic culture research unit (ccru). Her current work focuses on the interconnections between urban China and contemporary media. Research interests include street markets and the informal economy, wireless waves, Chinese modernity and the philosophy of technology. Anna’s most recent book is entitled Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Oxford University Press: 2014). She runs a digital humanities project on street food (sh-streetfood.org) and is the cofounder of the Shanghai Studies Society (http://shanghaistudies.net) and Hacked Matter (www.hackedmatter.com). Anna’s personal website can be found at www.annagreenspan.com

 

Jeffrey Tharsen received his doctorate in 2015 from the University of Chicago's East Asian Languages & Civilizations department, specializing in the fields of premodern Chinese philology, phonology, poetics and paleography. Combining his work in literary and linguistic analysis with a deep background in software engineering, Jeffrey holds the position of Computational Scientist for the Digital Humanities at the University of Chicago, serving as university technical domain expert for digital and computational approaches to humanistic inquiry. In his work, Jeffrey advises and assists faculty and researchers with the utilization and creation of resources, platforms and strategies for humanistic research, teaches courses and leads workshops, and mentors students interested in developing new digital and computational research methods. During his graduate studies, Jeffrey received a Fulbright award for his Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, a new type of software suite which facilitates the analysis of Chinese historical phonology. He currently serves as primary technical advisor on a wide variety of digital humanities projects, and regularly presents at various national and international conferences.

 

Donald Sturgeon is Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. He holds postgraduate degrees from Soochow University (Taipei) and the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include issues of language, mind and knowledge in classical Chinese thought, and the application of digital methods to the study of pre-modern Chinese language and literature. Since 2005, he has managed the Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org), an online digital library of pre-modern Chinese which is now the largest such library in the world and attracts tens of thousands of visitors and large numbers of crowd-sourced contributions every day. His current projects include large-scale Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of historical Chinese documents, the application of machine learning to the dating of pre-modern Chinese texts, and development and evaluation of automated methods for analyzing pre- modern Chinese documents and their relationship to the wider corpus of pre-modern Chinese writing.