The Weatherhead East Asian Institute welcomes the 2016-2017 INTERACT Postdoctoral Teaching Collaborative: Peter E. Hamilton, Tucker Harding, Miki Kaneda, Victor Louzon, Rune Steenberg Reyhe, and Simon Toner.
INTERACT is a pioneering program at Columbia University that focuses on developing global studies in the undergraduate curriculum through a network of postdoctoral scholars focused on cross-regional, trans-regional and interdisciplinary study. Each year, postdoctoral scholars are selected by centers and institutes across the University, and function as liaisons between their home office and the INTERACT network of scholars. INTERACT’s primary goal is to improve global literacy among Columbia students and equip them to be leaders in a globalizing world. These objectives will be met through innovative courses, and participation in campus programs, workshops, and events.
PETER E. HAMILTON
Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Scholar in the Making of the Modern Pacific World, Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Peter E. Hamilton received his doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. He is a historian of China and the World and the modern Pacific. His research explores transpacific networks of migration and business, Sino-US relations, and new histories of East Asian capitalism. He is currently preparing a book manuscript, “The Networked Colony: Hong Kong, American Social Capital, and China’s Globalization.” Based on extensive archival research from across Hong Kong, Britain, and the United States, this work argues that Hong Kong’s rapid economic development between 1949 and 1978 provides essential context to understand China’s post-1978 export-driven development and today’s Sino-US trading relationship. A native of Kansas City, he graduated from Yale University in 2007, where he studied History and Mandarin Chinese. He joins Columbia after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at UT Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies.
TUCKER HARDING
Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Scholar in the Digital Humanities, Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Tucker Harding is an educator and theorist working on questions pertaining to the nature, qualities and the consequences of educational thought and forms of study. His current focus is on the pedagogy of culture and the history of educational thought in East Asia. He currently teaches courses in communication theory and the history of Western educational thought at Columbia’s Teachers College, and is in the process of creating courses in the history of East Asian educational thought and experience. Dr. Harding, who holds a PhD from Columbia, is a specialist in improving the study of complex problems and systems, and works with a range of educators and practitioners across a variety of disciplines to enhance decision-making (and related) skill development, and most recently in the realm of mass atrocity prevention.
MIKI KANEDA
Visiting Assistant Professor (Spring 2017), Department of Music
Miki Kaneda is an assistant professor of music at Boston University and received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. As a scholar and teacher, she aims to increase meaningful conversations between researchers and practitioners of sonic and visual arts in order to address the relationship between politics, culture, and the arts in ways that reach beyond institutional boundaries. Trained in musicology and ethnomusicology, her research interests and publication topics include the transnational flows of experimental music, graphic scores, art and the everyday, and media ecologies in postwar Japan. Her current book project, titled “The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan,” is an ethnographic and historical study that uses intermedia (a kind of multimedia art) as a vehicle to examine collaborative artistic and social processes in postwar Japan.
VICTOR LOUZON
INTERACT Postdoctoral Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Victor Louzon holds his PhD from Sciences Po. He received his undergraduate training at Sciences Po, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Paris), and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). He was a visiting graduate student at Qinghua (Beijing), NCCU (Taipei), and was a Fox Fellow and Fulbright doctoral student at Yale University. Dr. Louzon originally specialized in modern Chinese history, but his research interests now extend to war and political violence in East Asia in the 20th century, and to contemporary tensions in the region. His PhD dissertation deals with the 1947 “February 28th” rebellion against Chinese Kuomintang rule in Taiwan, considered as an aftershock of the Sino-Japanese War.
RUNE STEENBERG REYHE
INTERACT Postdoctoral Scholar, The Harriman Institute
Rune Steenberg Reyhe is an anthropologist and human geographer. He received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. He has done research in Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang since 2007. In southern Kyrgyzstan, Dr. Steenberg Reyhe examined social interaction around the annual walnut harvest and the networks of Uyghur traders from western Xinjiang. He has followed these networks to their villages of origin around Kashgar city. At the center of his research is a focus on conceptualizations of social relations and their expression and constitution in spatial, bodily, verbal and exchange practices. At the Harriman Institute, he will explore nuances in the language of giving at life cycle rituals in a more comparative perspective across Post-Soviet and Chinese Central Asia and its multiplex interaction with state institutions.
SIMON TONER
Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Scholar in Southeast Asian Studies, Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Simon Toner is a historian of the United States and Vietnam, focusing particularly on the history of the American War in Vietnam and U.S. development projects in Cold War East and Southeast Asia. He is currently completing a book manuscript, based primarily on Vietnamese and American archival sources, which explores the final years of the American War in Vietnam as an episode in the history of global development. In particular, it shows how changes in global development thinking and practice in the late 1960s and 1970s shaped debates between and within the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments and had a decisive impact on the course and outcome of the war. Simon is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Sheffield (on leave 2016-2017). He completed his PhD in International History at the London School of Economics in 2015.
