Benjamin Blythe

Bio
Hello! My name is Benjamin Blythe, and I am currently a first-year Master’s student at EALC focusing on Chinese politics. I am also pursuing a Master of Public Affairs through O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs with a concentration in international development. I am currently focusing on the relationship between infrastructure investment by Chinese state-owned companies in countries overseas and these countries’ domestic electoral politics. I have also researched how urban underdevelopment is influenced by highway development and legal restrictions on internal migration within China. I am currently studying Chinese through a Foreign Languages and Area Studies fellowship at the East Asian Studies Center. Before coming to Indiana University, I was an English lecturer and Princeton in Asia fellow at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia. I am originally from Trenton, Michigan and earned my BA in Political Science at the University of Michigan. I enjoy biking and cooking new recipes when I have time!

Wen-Hui Chen

Bio
Hi! My name is Wen-Hui Chen and I’m from Taiwan. I’m a first-year graduate student majoring Chinese pedagogy. My research interests include Chinese language pedagogy, language learning strategies, second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. I have taught Chinese at Colby College for two years before coming to IU. At IU, I’ve taught first year Chinese. l enjoy reading, watching films, listening to podcasts, and working out in my free time. I really enjoy teaching as well. Being a language teacher is the best decision in my life. There’s a line that I always love: I teach, what’s your superpower?

Jaynie Cheng

Bio
My name is Jaynie Cheng and I am a second year graduate student majoring in Chinese pedagogy. My research interests include multiliteracies, student motivation/engagement, and instructed SLA. I have also taught first and third year Chinese at IU, as well as FCI in the summer. While teaching during a pandemic has been a very special experience, I have a sticky note on my mirror saying “make your students feel great today”- this is a reminder to be empathetic and make sure that class is enjoyable for everyone, even when the pandemic is over. In my free time, I enjoy weight-lifting, baking, and photography. I’ve also learned how to do handstands since quarantine started!

Alessia "Alex" Cherici

Bio
Alex is a 4th year PhD student. She was born and raised in Italy, near Florence, and she earned her BA and MA in Chinese Language and Culture at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. In 2009 she moved to China where she worked as a language teacher and school manager until 2017. Here at IU she is pursuing her PhD, majoring in Chinese linguistics and minoring in Second Language Studies. Her academic interests consist of many, ranging from comparative morpho-syntax to second and third adult language acquisition. She has been working as an associate instructor for EALC for over three years and she has taught a variety of area study courses pertaining to East Asian society, politics, culture, and literature. She is also actively involved in activities outside EALC, including her role as a lead editor for the IU Linguistics Club Working Papers and her collaboration with the Italian language program. Her recent works include two studies on third language acquisition (involving Romance languages and Chinese) and a study on non-native acquisition of Chinese relative clauses. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation proposal.

Tzu-I Chiang

Bio
I am a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (Chinese Linguistics track) at Indiana University-Bloomington. My research focuses on sentence and neurocognitive processing, studying how temporo-aspectual information is processed and acquired in the human brain. Research methods include self-paced reading (both lab-based and web-based), eye tracking, EEG, and behavioral and cognitive testing. I am in collaboration with the Language and Cognition Lab (LaCL), where I gained experience in experiment design, data collection, and data analysis.

Xiao Dong

Bio
I am currently a second year Master’s student in EALC, majoring in Chinese Language Pedagogy. I am also working as an associate instructor of first year Chinese. My research interests include Chinese language processing and second language acquisition. Before IUB, I studied Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in China (BA), and I taught Chinese in China as well as Korea for two years.

Rui Fan

Bio
I am a Ph.D. candidate majoring in early Chinese thought and minoring in religious studies. Prior to IU, I got a B.S. in biology from Tsinghua University and a Masters in Liberal Arts from Dartmouth College. My interests in classical Chinese and in the discussions of ritual practice and ritual experience in early Confucian texts are grounded in my broader interests in languages, natural and formal alike, and in the well-being of animals, human and non-human alike.

Emily Gibson

Bio
Emily Gibson’s main research interests include security and intelligence of North Korea; the modernization of North Korea and its impact on perspectives within the North Korean civil society; and human rights violations of the North Korean regime. Gibson received a BA from Indiana University and wrote an undergraduate thesis on the North Korean state's and civil society's perspectives on democracy, human rights, and capitalism. She is also involved in Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) at IU.

Bojue Hou

Bio
Bojue "Berger" Hou has a BA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA from Stanford University. Studying medieval Chinese literature and literati culture, he examines how social conditions and intellectual trends informed the representation of the scholar-officials' engagement with the world. Berger particularly indulges in the emotive expressions in stories and letters, especially those which circulated after the An Lushan rebellion. Before graduate school, Berger worked as a cultural journalist and columnist. His semi-intellectual pastimes include premodern and early modern poetry, music, and aesthetics of China and Germany.

Lai Jiang

Bio
I am a second-year graduate student majoring in Japanese Pedagogy. I was born and raised in Wuhan, a fast-developing city with rich history and culture in central China. I discovered my passion for language teaching during my undergraduate career at Indiana University. After completing my B.A. from Kelley School of Business, I started my graduate studies at EALC. I am currently teaching second-year Japanese as an associate instructor. My research interests include corrective feedback, student-centered classroom, and language assessment/testing. I believe that languages are tools for communication. It is always inspiring to me how learning a new language enables learners to discover and embrace other cultures. When I have time, I enjoy cooking and painting. Both have made my life easier at this time when everyone needs to stay at home!

Chaewon Lee

Bio
My name is Chaewon Lee and I am currently a first-year MA student in East Asian Studies. A third culture kid, I am originally from South Korea and grew up in the UAE for 18 years before coming to the United States. I received my BA in International Studies (with a concentration in Diplomacy, Security, and Governance) and East Asian Languages and Cultures (with a focus on Korea) from Indiana University, Bloomington (2020). My current research interests center on the political economy, regional knowledge-sharing, and international relations of East Asia, with a particular focus on South Korea’s role as a regional middle power. In my free time, I enjoy running, practicing yoga, and listening to podcasts!

Jou Li

Bio
I’m Jou Li. My Chinese name is 酈柔. I am from Taipei, Taiwan. I am majoring in Chinese Language – Pedagogy Track and am currently teaching second-year Chinese. I love learning about different cultures and languages and sharing our unique culture. I also like reading, traveling, watching movies and listening to music.

Zeping Liu

Bio
I am a PhD student in EALC with a focus on Chinese psycholinguistics. My research interests include words and sentences processing, second language acquisition and bilingualism. I received my M.A. in Applied Linguistics at Beijing Language and Culture University in China.

Madison Luken

Bio
My name is Madison Luken and I am an MA student studying Japanese. My research interests are in Japanese literature and teaching. I began learning Japanese in 2018, prior to studying abroad in Yamaguchi Prefecture as an undergraduate math student, where I took classes in the International Studies Department for a semester. In the summer of 2019, I returned to Yamaguchi on a LUCE grant to work on a translation project at a folklore and history museum while also studying the environmental history of the mountain village around the museum. In 2020, I worked for Toyota Gosei as an interim translator and interpreter for the president of their plant facility in Kentucky. Next summer, I hope to teach elementary students Japanese and math during a summer program in my hometown of Cincinnati. One day in the future I would like to teach Japanese to high schoolers and introduce my students to some of my favorite novels and manga!

Emily Meek

Bio
Emily Meek received a BA in history with a minor in religious studies from the University of Mississippi. Her current primary research interests include modern Korean history, religion, and spirituality, particularly Buddhist monastic life in Korea and the transformation of institutional Buddhism in the colonial and postcolonial periods. She is the recipient of a FLAS Fellowship in Korean.

Aolan Mi

Bio
I’m a fourth-year PhD student in EALC. I’m interested in modern Chinese literature and cultural history, specifically the way literary imagination intersects with the discourse of science and technology. My current research examines how the railway—as a metaphor and a physical object— serves as a medium for Chinese people to envision the future of their nation in the war-ridden twentieth century. My broader research interests also include the discourse of labor, transnational exchange of ideas in East Asia, and East Asian popular culture. Before enrolling at IU, I received my B.A. in Chinese Literature and Language and my M.A. in Comparative Literature from Renmin University of China.

Hyowon Park

Bio
I am a second-year master’s student in the MA program in East Asian Studies. My research has been broadly circling around literary modernisms, modernities, (urban) space, media-technology, and infrastructure in (South) Korea and East Asia. I am currently working on my master’s thesis, in which I investigate 1970s South Korean literary discourses on the expressway. I try to see whether these different literary discourses collaborated with or contradicted the Park Chung Hee regime’s master narrative that promoted the expressway as the symbol of South Korea’s modernity, modernization, and nation-building. In my next project, I am planning to expand my current research project by examining various kinds of cultural texts including film, newspapers, and popular magazines, and draw a more comprehensive and dynamic topography of South Korean cultural discourses pivoting around expressway modernity. Before joining the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington, I studied at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, where I received BA degrees in Korean Language and Literature and English Language and Literature and an MA degree in English Literature.

Alan Reiser

Bio
I'm a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and MA student in Japanese Language Pedagogy in EALC. Ever since my years in software localization in the 80s and 90s, I've seen how cultural awareness and intercultural communication form the bedrock of a peaceful, prosperous world. I enjoy the “ah-ha moments” of the language classroom, and the mind-blowing, perspective-changing moments in the literature classroom. My dissertation, "Myth and Repetition: Weird mythopoesis in the post-modern literature of Neil Gaiman, Thoman Pynchon, and Shōno Yoriko" leans on Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and I am A Strange Loop to observe ways that a mythological mindset still operates in postmodern literature. We may find that today’s data-free conspiracy theories emerge from the constant urge to mythologize, to spin yarns that tame the perplexing, threatening world we live in.

Mao Sun

Bio
I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. double major between East Asian Languages and Cultures and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Before coming to IU, I received my M.A. in EALC from University of Kansas and my B.A. in English Language and Literature from Liaoning University. I work on the history, art, and archaeology of early China and pre-Islamic Iran. I am particularly interested in studying the communication infrastructure that connects Han China with the oasis city-states in Central Asia, the surge of interregional interaction between the two regions, and how it leads to early globalization in the Tarim Basin in light of excavated manuscripts, archaeological data, and transmitted texts. I am also interested in learning dead languages of the Silk Road and digital technologies to study the interconnected ancient world.

Yu Wang

Bio
I am currently a Ph.D. student in EALC with a minor in Religious Studies. My research on Early China integrates the studies of Chinese classical documents and unearthed materials, especially manuscripts. My research interests include the formation and transmission of early texts, the different narrative strategies in written documents, and the interaction between scholarly works and political ideology, as well as popular religious practices and everyday life activities in early societies. Before IUB, I studied Chinese philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University (BA/MA). I switched my research approach to a more historically oriented direction when I worked on my second master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania (MA).

Seung Soo Yoon

Bio
Hello, I am Seung Soo Yoon, a second-year M.A. candidate in East Asian Studies, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. I am from South Korea, but also lived in Thailand and the United States for extended periods of time. I received my bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt in History and Classical Civilizations. My research interest is in the transnational intellectual formation of Korean elites in the colonial period and their legacies in Korean intellectual discourse as educators, as well as the role of religion as a conduit for modernity. Specifically, I am researching the figure of Yun Ch’i-ho, who acquired both a belief in the path of self-strengthening for the Korean nation and the conviction in the Social Darwinist theory that evaluated races according to their degree of civilization, while studying in the United States during the late 19th century. Yun returned to Korea and took on leadership roles in educational institutions, but eventually grew disillusioned on the possibility of uplifting Koreans and ultimately supported the Japanese colonial regime’s war efforts. I will contextualize Yun within a broader spectrum of intellectuals to understand their influence on Korean society.

Tyler Yozze

Bio
Tyler Yozze is a second-year graduate student pursuing an MA in Japanese. Some of his academic interests include Japanese literature, linguistics, and teaching. Foreign languages and cultures have been of great interest to him since high school. For his MA final project, he will be writing an essay that investigates the works of Junichirō Tanizaki. Tyler received his BA from Indiana University Bloomington with a major in East Asian Languages and Cultures (Japanese track) and a minor in Germanic Studies (German track). He graduated summa cum laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Yiwen Zheng

Graduate student

Bio
I am a PhD student in Chinese Literature with a minor in History. I work across literary and historical texts of medieval China to consider how space and subjectivity constituted each other. I am interested in how marginal figures and communities endure through precarious temporalities and shifting topographies. Specifically, my previous and current projects explore the end of Tang not as a transition but as a peculiar literary arena itself. Other interests include fantastic literature, travel literature, and genre history. One thing I learned from my professors here is the idea that I should let the text “marinate” me while I “marinate” my text—a motto I have come to embrace in my studies.  Besides research, I also enjoy teaching a wide variety of cultural and language courses here at IU. I value every opportunity of learning from my students while sharing my knowledge and experience with them.