Sawyer Seminar Fellows

Postdoctoral Fellow 2014-2015

Miki Morita is an art historian specializing in East Asian and Central Asian art, with a focus on the Buddhist art of northwestern China. She completed her Ph.D. degree in 2014 in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, she received B.A. degrees from Doshisha University and Amherst College, and an M.A. degree from Indiana University at Bloomington. Her research interests reside in the use of visual representations and material remains as primary sources in investigating socio-historical questions concerning East and Central Asian cultures. Her current research project attempts to reveal an aspect of the religious culture of the Uyghur people from the 9th through the 14th centuries through images of Kṣitigarbha bodhisattva from the Turfan region.

Predoctoral Fellows 2014-2015

Shuang Wen is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Georgetown University. Before coming to the US to pursue her doctoral degree, she obtained an M.A. in Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo, and an M.A. in Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting and Translation at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her dissertation, entitled “Mediated Imaginations: Chinese-Arab Connections in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” investigates previously little-known intellectual, commercial, and personal interactions between two major non-western societies during an era of large-scale western global expansion.

Clark Alejandrino is a Ph.D. student in History at Georgetown University specializing in Chinese environmental history. He is writing a dissertation titled "Storm Clouds Over China: Typhoons, State, and Society on the South China Coast" on typhoons along the southern Chinese coast from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, based upon research supported by a Luce/ACLS grant. Before coming to Georgetown, he finished a B.A. in History at the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines and an M.A. in Chinese Studies

at the University of Sydney.

Predoctoral Fellow 2013-2014

Yelizaveta Raykhlina is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Georgetown University. She graduated magna cum laude from New York University (2009) with a B.A. in history and Russian Studies. Her research interests include the cultural history of Imperial Russia in the long nineteenth century, the development of Russian philosophy in the European context, and the intellectual discourse behind the Russian exploration and conquest of Central Asia. Her current project focuses on commercial publishing from about 1830 to the early 1860s and analyzes the propagation of so-called “middle-class values” in several popular and emphatically non-elite mass circulation periodicals.