Graduate Students

Ava Bush

avabush@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese Art History and Buddhism

Ava Bush studies the transregional origins of the pictorial and spatial traditions undergirding early Japanese Esoteric Buddhist art and material culture. Drawing on ethnobiological and art historical inquiry, Ava investigates themes of embodiment...

Julie Yau Lee Chan

yauleechan@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Student in Chinese Literature

Julie Yau Lee Chan is a student of early modern Chinese literature. Her research interests revolve around theatre, performance, and media studies. Prior to joining Harvard, she received her B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from the Chinese...

Mark Yu-Shan Chen

yushanchen@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in HEAL/Japan

Mark Yu-Shan Chen received his BA in History and BS in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, and his MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge. His research has focused on the history of chemistry in Edo, Meiji, and...

Yufan Chen

yufan_chen@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Literature

Yufan Chen works on modern and contemporary Chinese-language literature, poststructuralist literary theory, and feminist and queer theory. His current research centers on the intersection of violence, literary form, and the politics and ethics of reading...

Kay Chen

kaychen@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in Religion

Kay (Ke) Chen’s research revolves around Buddhist monasticisms in middle-period East Asia. Her work explores how, during the formative period when Buddhist monastic rules first arrived in East Asia, these regulations and local monastic practices shaped...

Axl Cheng

axlcheng@fas.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in HEAL/China

Axl Cheng works on Muslims and Islam in late imperial China, with a focus on how law, economy, and empire shaped communal identities under Qing rule. She joins the HEAL program in Fall 2025. She holds a BA from New York University in Middle Eastern and...

Crystal Cheng

crystalcheng@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese Literature

Crystal Cheng's research revolves around early modern Japanese theater, literature, and visual culture, with a particular focus on the portrayal of murders and suicides of female characters. Her work aims to explore how the trope of selfless, sacrificial...

Jeonghun Choi

jeonghunchoi@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in HEAL/Japan

Jeonghun Choi’s research themes center around intellectual history and book history of Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particularly, he studies how popular writers and commercial publishing houses in Japan duplicated, pirated, and...

Charlotte Ciavarella

cciavarella@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in HEAL/Japan

Charlotte is a PhD student in History and EALC, focusing on the social and environmental history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan. Her dissertation project looks at the development of capitalism in Japan from the perspective of the nomadic...

Kassandra Diaz

kdiaz@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese Literature

Kassandra Diaz received her BA in Cognitive Neuroscience and Japanese Language & Culture, and her MA in Japanese from Washington University in St. Louis, where she focused on novelist Enchi Fumiko and her rebranding of folkloric tales of demonic women, or...

Guttorm Gundersen

gundersen@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in Religion/Philosophy

Guttorm Norberg Gundersen received his MPhil in East Asian Culture and History from the University of Oslo in his native country of Norway in 2017, where he wrote about Māra in Tiantai Zhiyi’s instructions on meditation. He is interested in traditions of...

Kwan Woo Hahn

khahn@g.harvard.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in HEAL/Korea

Kwan Woo Hahn received his B.A. from Yonsei University and A.M. in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University. The topic of his master’s thesis was the Korean authoritarian regime’s use of criminal organizations to quell the dissident voices...