Graduate students

Yunlu Cheng

Yunlu Cheng is a doctoral student whose studies primarily concern critical theory and postcolonial studies. Previously trained in Politics and Sociology, they are particularly interested in the discourse of alternative modernity in contemporary practices of art, literature, mass media, digital platforms, and intellectual history. Their research involves a comparative lens between contemporary Chinese practices and Modern Japanese Thought, as well as the global genealogy of alternative modernity. In these endeavors, they aim to ground the analyses on a sounder basis that includes various social and historical actants into causation.

Lingheng He

Lingheng He is a Ph.D. student at the Department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. She received her BA and MA in the School of Chinese Classics at Renmin University of China (Beijing). She majors in the pre-modern Chinese literature and also dabbles in traditional Chinese history as well as the material, ritual and visual cultures of historical China. She mainly works on the writings and culture of the group of “talented women” (才女) in late imperial China (17th-early 20th century). She will complete the comprehensive exams next year. In her dissertation project, she intends to focus on the mourning literature produced by women during the Ming-Qing period and explore how women mourned and commemorated the deceased through their writings and how their gendered memories and emotions about the deceased and themselves were constructed and presented in these writings.

Jiaqi Ma

Jiaqi MA is a Ph.D. student at the Department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. She received her bachelor’s degree in architecture from China University of Petroleum (East China) and her master’s degree in architecture history, Theory, and Heritage at Southeast University. Her research interests mainly shed light on ancient Chinese architecture, funerary art, material culture, and socio-cultural communications across East Asia. With a particular focus on nomadic ethnic groups in Northern China and Northeast Asia, she investigates how complex mechanisms played out in various cultural exchanges to express their social and cultural identities and religious beliefs in the netherworld.

Jiarong Wang

Jiarong Wang is a Ph.D. student interested primarily in gender studies and visual arts in contemporary China and Japan. Prior to joining the EAS Department at McGill, she worked with Prof. Ayako Kano, Linda Chance, and Hsiao-wen Cheng at the University of Pennsylvania during her M.A. Her current project is about "Global Japan," the communication between Japanese cultures and other countries, especially gender representations in Japanese anime for Chinese audiences, and the roles of these representations in developing queer identities of Generation Z and the Fourth Love community. Her research looks at the discourse around queer bodies, and the intersection between identity, modernity, and technology.

Biao Zhang

Biao Zhang is a PhD student at the Department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. Biao received his Bachelor’s degree in Archaeology at Shandong University, and a first Master’s degree in Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong, and completed a second Master’s degree at Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. He studies Chinese Buddhist art and visual cultures from the eighth to the fourteenth century CE.

Xin Li

Xin Li is a first-year PhD student at the department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. Prior to joining the EAS Department at McGill, she received her BA and MA’s degrees in Wuhan University. She majored in philosophy during her undergraduate period, with a particular interest in the Enlightenment thought in Ming and Qing dynasties, minoring in Chinese Literature in the meantime. Her Master’s degree is in Ancient Chinese Literature, especially focusing on women writers in late imperial period (17th-early 20th century). Now her academic interests mainly lie in women’s writings, virtue and everyday life under the impact of Confucian ideology in late imperial China, and also in exploring the interactions between women and the Confucian gender system, and the female agency reflected in them during this period.

Gaëlle Boscals de Réals

Gaëlle Boscals de Réals is a first-year Master’s student working on Chinese spirituality in Mainland China and Taiwan. More precisely, her research project focuses on non-institutional forms of spiritual experience in rural settings, as well as transmission of knowledge. She did her undergraduate studies at McGill, with a major in Anthropology and a minor in East Asian Cultural Studies. This led her to lean into a more ethnographic approach to her research.

Ziwei Jiang

Haolun Sun

Haolun Sun is a first-year MA student at the Department of East Asian Studies. He received his bachelor’s degree in Tourism Management from Zhejiang University before being admitted to McGill University. He focuses on anthropology and sociology of religion and tourism in contemporary China, and he conducts ethnographic fieldwork at Mount Putuo to understand local space under strong Buddhist tradition and tourism development. He also enjoys discussions on sociological and anthropological theories and methodologies in general.

Karen Ren

Karen Ren is a MA student at the Department of East Asian Studies. She completed her Bachelor of Arts at McGill University in Psychology, Behavioral Science, and World Cinema. She is interested in the slow cinema genre, including directors such as Tsai Ming-Liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ozu Yasujirō, Edward Yang and Andrei Tarkovsky. She aims to examine Eastern religion and aesthetics, including painting, literature, and theatre, in slow cinema films, through a transnational and comparative approach.

Shi Ting Wang