Congratulations! Class of 2026

Faculty Advisor: Jane-Marie Law
Double Major in Asian Studies and Information Science

“Alanna Cooney has had a distinguished undergraduate career at Cornell and has been much admired by her faculty and peers alike for her gentle demeanor and her wide range of interests from STEM to poetry to meditation. Having lived for a number of years in Hong Kong, Alanna was already proficient in Mandarin and used this asset during her time here. Alanna dedicated her early time to working as the treasurer of Project Hope at Cornell, a group that raised money for underfunded schools in Hong Kong and China.   She also served as a teaching assistant from 2024 to 2026 in Information Science. She found the course, “Designing Technology for Social Impact” to be her favorite course.  In the summer of 2025, she was a Foreign Policy Research Intern at the Brookings Institution research Center in Washington, D.C., this year, she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright English Teaching Award to work in Taiwan.  All of us who worked with Alanna wish her well in her studies and work ahead.  She will be remembered most fondly and missed greatly.” Jane-Marie Law

Faculty Advisor: Jane-Marie Law

Arushi will graduate Summa Cum Laude
 

“Arushi Kende has had a truly remarkable career as an undergraduate at Cornell, and all her faculty have remarked on her sparkling intelligence, generous spirit and kind and humble demeanor.  While at Cornell, she has been a Rawlings Undergraduate Research Scholar and a Humanities Research Scholar. She conducted fieldwork in India in the winter of 2025 in preparation for her honors thesis on Indian altruism and service, entitled, "The Cultivation of Altruistic Cultures: A Study on Seva from Asia to Ithaca." During her studies, she looked at models of altruism in a cross-cultural perspective and during the summer of 2025 she was an intern at Fallen Tree Zen Community where she helped to run their food project, Operation Soup Pot Love, started during the pandemic. Arushi demonstrated a skill at taking deep intellectual insights and applying them to real world problems such as alienation, loneliness, hunger, poverty and marginalization. While doing all of this work, she studied Sanskrit, was also very active in Cornell United Religious Work and each year spearheaded a special event wherein students honor their teachers, called Guru Vandana. She also maintained an active and caring social community.  For her honors work, she was awarded Cornell’s highest level of honors, summa cum laude. She has also been awarded a prestigious Fulbright grant to continue her work on community based altruistic practice in India, beginning in the fall of 2026. Arushi was not only a most decorated student: she left a lasting mark on the hearts of all who knew her and will be very missed.” Jane-Marie Law

Faculty Advisor: Ding Xiang Warner
Double Major in Asian Studies and CAPS

“Emily Shen is a double major in Asian Studies and in China and Asia Pacific Studies. Throughout her time at Cornell, Emily consistently distinguished herself by her impressive self-motivation and stellar academic record. She distinguished herself also with achievements in an impressive range of extracurricular activities, which included service on the Class of 2026 Executive Board of Cornell’s Phi Beta Kappa Society as its co-President since 2025, several executive offices in the Illuminations Cultural Dance Troupe at Cornell, and Treasurer (from 2023 to 2025) of the Eastern Music Ensemble at Cornell. After graduation, Emily will take up an internship in Japan while exploring international graduate programs for postgraduate studies. It has been a great pleasure to work with Emily during her four years at Cornell, first as her First-year Writing Seminar instructor and then as her Asian Studies advisor and instructor in China’s Literary Heritage course. I wish Emily the very best as she embarks on the next chapter of her life’s journey.”  Ding Xiang Warner

Faculty Advisors: Tom Pepinsky (chair), Magnus Fiskesjo (minor member)
Thesis Title: “Funding the Fight: Diaspora Donations and the Spring Revolution” 
 

“Drake is a creative and thoughtful scholar of Asian studies whose research interests span the entire region, but with a special focus on Myanmar and China. He is a wonderful example of how language training is the foundation for in-depth, context-sensitive research on contemporary Asian affairs. His M.A. thesis on diasporic support for resistance groups in Myanmar is a fine example of how our students tackle the most pressing issues of our time.” Tom Pepinsky

Faculty Advisors: Suyoung Son (chair), Dan Boucher (minor member)
Thesis Title: “Sensing Hygiene: Sensory Order and Perception of Slaughterhouses in Shanghai, 1927-1937”

Jue Chen was awarded the Inaugural Asian Studies Gateway Fellowship 2024-2025 and 2025-2026

“Jue has an agile and curious mind. She not only possesses excellent research skills in uncovering original sources but also brings a remarkable openness and speed in learning new ideas. Over the course of her MA, she has made tremendous progress in formulating complex questions and carrying them through with clarity in her writing. I am truly proud of all that she has accomplished, and I have no doubt that her self-motivated determination and strong work ethic will lead her to exciting directions in her life and career. Congratulations!”  Suyoung Son

Faculty Advisors: Robin McNeal (chair), An-Yi Pan (minor member)
Thesis Title: “Hainan’s Performative Cultural Tourism and the Archipelagic Model”

“Luxi joined us for the MA after completing an undergraduate degree in Hotel Management in the UK, hoping to expand her expertise into cultural tourism, which has become a powerful driving force in rural redevelopment across China. Cultural studies were new to Luxi, but she devoted great energy into reading and thinking through case studies and theoretical approaches to understanding how tourism and culture in general intersect in complex ways with social and economic forces. She pursued training in Art History, performative traditions such as tea culture, and also took courses in City and Regional Planning, where she gained experience doing fieldwork in community planning. She turned her attention to the island province of Hainan, which one might think of as China’s Hawaii (only much closer to the mainland), producing a sophisticated argument about the unique environmental and cultural challenges of island tourism. She will now be returning to China, where a job in Shanghai already awaits her (and that makes for happy parents, too!).  Congratulations, Luxi!” Robin McNeal

Faculty Advisors: Larry McCrea (chair), Anne Blackburn (minor member), Dan Gold (minor member), Jane-Marie Law (minor member)
Dissertation Title: "Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā and Gaṅgeśa's Philosophy of Language"

"It has been a pleasure and a privilege working with Patrick over the past few years.  When Patrick came to us, he was already a highly accomplished scholar, having done groundbreaking work on Indian poetics as his University of Toronto MA thesis.  It was obvious from the start that he had extraordinary talent for his chosen field.  His skill as a reader of Sanskrit was a good as I have ever seen in a student at his level.  But it quickly became apparent that he was more than extraordinary Sanskrit savant.  He became part of a vibrant community of students here, working closely with others in a variety of settings, and pursuing all opportunities to expand the culture of premodern Indian studies here.  Once he began to assume teaching responsibilities it became clear that he was a highly gifted instructor and mentor as well.  He has taught Sanskrit here at all levels, including the Advanced course, and has shown himself to be not only technically proficient but inspiring, bringing more students into the program, stimulating them to continue and extend their work with the language, and going above and beyond the call of duty in helping students to find further opportunities for summer study and other opportunities beyond Cornell.  He and his students were instrumental in leading the push for the creation of our Sanskrit Studies minor, and he was a major force in drawing students into that program.  His exemplary teaching record here helped him secure appointment to Harvard's prestigious Sanskrit preceptorship, and he has taught there with distinction for the past three years.  Patrick's ongoing research on the history of Sanskrit language philosophy and syntax theory has probed deeply and insightfully into some of the most forbidding and poorly studied materials in the field of Sanskrit systematic literature, and he has brought to this work both a formidable mastery and a fine skill for making the most recondite and complex arguments intelligible to non-expert readers.  His research and teaching should be a model for the field, and I feel immensely privileged to have had the opportunity to work with him." Larry McCrea

Faculty advisors: Dan Boucher (chair), Suyoung Son (minor member), Magnus Fiskesjo (minor member), Anne Blackburn (additional member), TJ Hinrichs (additional member)
Dissertation Title: 

“Yuanyuan Duan has pursued the study of religious and cultural worlds of medieval Asia, drawing upon textual, visual, and material evidence from the southwestern Silk Roads. Her dissertation examines how esoteric Buddhist rituals connected to sacred sovereignty in the Dali kingdom of Yunnan were shaped and circulated across the cultural boundaries of China, Tibet, and India. Her work draws upon a little studied archive that includes Sanskrit and Sankrit-infused manuscripts that fall outside of traditional modes of transmission. Yuanyuan has been concurrently awarded the dissertation fellowships by the Ho Family Foundation in Buddhist Studies and the Chian Ching-kuo Foundation in Chinese Studies. She has also taught courses on Asian religions and cultural history, organized events supporting Buddhist studies, and built intellectual communities across disciplines in national international conferences. She now looks forward to continuing her interdisciplinary research and teaching career in Buddhist and Asian history.”  Dan Boucher

Faculty Advisors: Chiara Formichi (chair), Arnika Fuhrmann (minor member), Eric Tagliacozzo (minor member)
Dissertation Title: "Terrain and Terroir: Fine Dining Extinction in Malaysia”

“Ahead of our first meeting, held on Zoom in early Fall 2020 as Cornell (and the world) found a footing in the pandemic “new normal”, Josh had suggested he would like to work on “Middle Eastern foods and confections in Malay and Javanese Sufism” exploring how “didactic and religious meaning in Sufi[sm] are conveyed through cuisine and taste”—haven’t we strayed! Since then, Josh has charted his own path, with the novelty of his ideas and approaches being recognized from the very beginning, as he was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation fellowship for his fieldwork. “Terrain and Terroir: Fine Dining Omnicide in Malaysia” is a beautiful if sobering read, where Josh asks questions about the future of the Earth through food production and consumption. Josh shows us that everyone—chefs, farmers and restaurant-goers; Christians, Muslims, indigenous peoples, Malaysians, foreign visitors—is implicated in the ongoing depletion of this planet’s life-giving fruits, even when we tell ourselves (and others) that our practices and choices are “sustainable”.  Your contribution to SEAP as chair of the 2024 Graduate Student Conference will not be forgotten, and both Prof. Son and I truly enjoyed working with you on the “Transforming Asia with Food: Women and Everyday Life“ project, and all that has since followed. Josh, you are wrapping up in “just” five years, but these have been dense and intense, as you strive to figure out how (or whether) academic pursuits can help navigate political turmoil and the planetary destruction of nature and humans alike. I hope you’ll now take time to see what deposits at the bottom and what comes up to the surface. Congratulations!” Chiara Formichi 

Faculty Advisors: Arnika Fuhrmann (chair), Shaoling Ma (minor member), Cristina Florea (minor member), Tamara Loos (minor member)
Dissertation Title: “Cold War Futures: Ideal Visions of Vernacular Capitalism and Socialism in Laos (1954-1975)”

“Anna Koshcheeva impressed members of the field through the scholarly maturity and originality of her doctoral project ever since she first applied to the department. After accepting Cornell’s offer in 2019, Anna thrived as a scholar, teacher, and organizer of intellectual events at the university. Her dissertation on Lao aesthetics and politics, “Warring Paradises: Cold War Visions of Futurity in Laos (1954–1975),” investigates the Cold War as a long-term cultural and political process rather than merely an event and undertakes a thorough reformulation of the frameworks with which scholars have thought about both socialism and aesthetics in Asia. Having acquired astounding and unique material during her research in Laos, Anna studies the multi-temporal, competing modes of this country’s aesthetic inscription into divergent geopolitical and historical frameworks. An incredibly exciting component of her work is that it focuses on a socialist context in Southeast Asia from a transnational and trans-bloc perspective. Anna’s rare ability to work with Russian—and German, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian, and French—materials in addition to her work with Lao and Thai sources facilitates this endeavor. We will miss Anna as a beloved scholar, teacher, and colleague but are excited for the next chapter of her amazing scholarship.”  Arnika Fuhrmann

Faculty Advisors: Chiara Formichi (chair), Arnika Fuhrmann (minor member), Eric Tagliacozzo (minor member), Jordan Sand; Georgetown University (Ad Hoc member)
Dissertation Title: “Architecture of Reparations: Jakarta-Tokyo Interurban Relations, 1951-1974”

“To say that Tsuguta has been my ”student” for the past seven years diminishes the richness of our intellectual exchanges and the contribution that this exchange has brought to my own work. When he showed up in Ithaca, in Fall 2018, to explore the possibility of pursuing a PhD in ALRC I was just gearing up to embark on my post-tenure project “on colonial modernity” (vagueness intended). He was interested in “work[ing] on the history of the development of kampung and housing in Jakarta” in the post-1945 era. I wasn’t sure how I could guide or support him, but I was intrigued, and he had a unique academic background. Little I knew that our respective interests would come to intersect so smoothly in the intervening years. Despite the ordinary and extra-ordinary disruptions of academic life in the 2020s, Tsuguta produced excellent work, consistently questioning and challenging himself. His dissertation, “Architecture of Reparations: Jakarta-Tokyo Interurban Relations, 1951-1974”, reflects on inter-Asian and trans-Pacific dynamics tying together imperial history, urban planning, media production, political agendas, and the human element that interweaves all of that. I was not surprised that his paper “From yakeato to kampung: Neon Signs and anti-Japan Sentiment in the early New Order” won the Indonesia and Timor Leste Study Group’s (ITLSG) Graduate Student Paper Award for the 2026 AAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver. Tsuguta, it has been a true pleasure to work with you, and I hope that this is only the beginning of our collaboration! I wish you the very best in Singapore, and beyond. Congratulations!” Chiara Formichi