Current Fellows
| Current Fellows
Dr. Noa Nahmias
I work on the history of science in Modern China. My research is motivated by the question of how “ordinary people” interact with science – both as an idea and a practice. I focus on science and nationalism, public discourse on science, and the intersections of scientific knowledge and daily life. I am currently revising my dissertation, “Making Science Popular: Readers, Nation, and the Universe in Chinese Popular Science Periodicals, 1933 – 1952” into a book manuscript. Additionally, I am interested in the gendered aspects of scientific labor in the People’s Republic of China, and in contemporary science dissemination on social media platforms.
Dr. Lili Xia
Lili Xia is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches and cultural history. She is now working on her book manuscript titled “Claiming China against the North-South Divide: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture in the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).” By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, the book illustrates the burgeoning literati culture under Jurchen rule, and fleshes out the Jin poetic production in particular, within an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space of Middle Period Sinosphere (800-1400 CE).
Read MoreBefore coming to Hebrew University, she received her B.A. and M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Fudan University, and her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Recently, she published an article in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (2022), and a book review in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (2022). She also has some ongoing digital humanities projects using social network analysis and GIS supplementary to her book manuscript.
Guest Course: 46030 “Literati Culture of Late Imperial China, from the Song to the Qing”
Literati culture came into full bloom in late imperial China over the second millennium. Besides belles-lettres like classical poetry and prose, late imperial literati also engaged in calligraphy, painting, and connoisseurship, which in turn shaped their self-identity. This course aims to enrich and retell the literary history of premodern China by defining literati culture as a field of scholarly expertise as well as a “laboratory” of artistic experimentation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach by introducing intellectual and poetic discourses, socio-historical contexts, literary criticism, visual and material culture, in order to envision a “common ground” for Chinese literati community. Textual, visual sources plus material objects are meant to have conversations with each other in this course.Read Less
Dr. Daria Solignac (Melnikova)
Daria Melnikova received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese art. In her book manuscript tentatively titled The Trajectory of Performance Art in Japan: From Modernist Dance to Happenings, she examines experimental art practices as a dynamic forum of creative exchange between Japanese visual artists, dancers, musicians, theater directors, and photographers from the early 1910s to the late 1960s.
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Her research also sheds light on the broader milieu of Japanese-Russian artistic and intellectual transnational relations in her recent article “What is Futurism? Russia and Japan Exchange Answers” (The Art Bulletin, March 2021). Her translation of the essay “Beyond the Circle” (1987) of Japanese avant-garde artist Shirakawa Yoshio was published on Art Platform Japan, an initiative run by the Agency of Cultural Affairs. She also taught courses on East Asian Art at Columbia University, New York.
Contact: daria.melnikova@mail.huji.ac.il
Guest Course
Musical and Cultural Politics: Modernity and Modernism in Korea and Japan Modernism was a global artistic phenomenon with a multiplicity of aesthetic practices and ideas that sought to overthrow traditional academic art. In the first half of the twentieth century, the formation of modernism in Korea and Japan highlights the transnational and multidirectional nature of the development of a global modernism. Join a conversation about artistic innovations in visual arts, cinema, music, dance, theater, and literature and explore a complex relationship between modernism and modernity in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea.
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Dr. Yoonjung Kang
Yoonjung Kang is a cultural anthropologist with research and teaching interests in the areas of health, care, medicine, childbirth, and reproduction hinging on gender, class, and ethnic/racial dynamics in South Korea and contemporaneous Korean diaspora communities. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled A Plurality of Care: Women, Childbirth, and Health in Contemporary South Korea, examines the medico-social politics of South Korean women’s postpartum care practices which have been dramatically re-framed in a burgeoning postpartum care market over the past two decades.
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Dr. Kang completed her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her M.A. and B.A. from Yonsei University in South Korea. Prior to her appointment at the Hebrew University, she served as a Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Contact information: Yoonjung.kang@mail.huji.ac.il
Guest Course: Health, Care, and the Body in Korea
This course will explore how and what different meanings and practices of health, care, and the body have been believed, performed, and transformed in Korea, beginning around the turn of the 20th century to contemporary times. Through the examination of ethnographic and historical pieces that document how Koreans differently imagine and manage their bodies, health, and caring practices, we will discuss how health, care, and the body can be shaped by a complex interplay of science, medicine, law, tradition, social system, and/or moral values in Korean culture. Major topics covered in this course include magic and healing, religions, folk remedies and ethnomedicine, biomedical hegemony and Korean medicine, childbirth and reproductive governance, mental health, aging, beauty care, plastic surgery, alternative medicine and therapeutic culture.
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