Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Jingyuan Mo
PhD Candidate, Department of Finance, Stern
Email:
jm3499@nyu.edu

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 24 - May 22)：

As Mo’s research areas focus on the Chinese economy, he was able to benefit a lot from the NYU Shanghai campus, due to its geographic location and proximity to large industry firms in the CBD areas, from where he can receive immediate help on his research on the Chinese financial markets. The NYU Shanghai campus is also very close to (within walking distance) the Great Wisdom, a major data vendor in China, and the China Foreign Exchange Trade System, with whom his adviser and him have been working with over the past three years on obtaining some unique data products on the Chinese bond markets.

Danielle Lessowitz
Master of Fine Arts Candidate, Department of Film, Tisch
Email:
dl1474@nyu.edu

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 16 - March 27)：

Lessowitz will be researching first person accounts of the Great Chinese Famine which occurred in the Chinese provinces from 1959 - 1953. Over 40 million Chinese Farmers died of starvation and during this time, China was exporting much of its grain, and there was no food shortage. Lessowitz hopes to assemble hundreds of audio and visual stories from survivors to create a data base of testimony. She will use this testimony to give voice to those who suffered, and bring light to this under documented genocide. In addition to the video records, Lessowitz hopes to use this research to inform a narrative feature script she has already written and would like to revise for historical and cultural accuracy. Lessowitz believes in the importance of exploring this historical event and discovering it fully before all of its witnesses are no more.

Eric McEver
Master of Fine Arts Candidate, Department of Film, Tisch
Email:
eam593@nyu.edu

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 1 - April 22)：

McEver will continue his work on his thesis film, Fossil. He intends to edit the film using the post-production facilities at NYU Shanghai and will utilize his international NYU Tisch network to work with post-production staff in Shanghai, and use the resources of NYU’s campus to conduct research and planning for a feature film based upon Fossil. McEver’s thesis advisor, Associate Dean Michael Burke, will provide guidance remotely from the primary campus in New York.

Cristina Colmena
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, GSAS
Email:
cc2917@nyu.edu

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 15 - May 12)：

Colmena’s dissertation explores the relationship between image and fiction that emerges every time we look at photographs or archival footage. By approaching the photograph as a fragment or synecdoche of a world that we have to recreate in order to understand, the frame of the image becomes the border that marks the transition from the concrete to the fictionalized. In this way, the image becomes a kind of storytelling. Colmena’s research seeks to create contact with a language made of “images” - graphic symbols like ideograms that with different combinations can express very complex concepts and time.

 

Jia-Lin Liu
PhD Candidate, Department of International Education, Steinhardt
Email:
jll405@nyu.edu

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (April 1 - May 14)： 

Liu and her faculty advisor, Dr. Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, are working on a research project that seeks to address both research/literature gaps in knowledge and the needs of the Chinese immigrant families in New York. They plan to add a China component to the study and also plan to do some ethnographic fieldwork on family members and relatives in China that are connected to the Chinese families that they have been observing since the beginning of the study in New York/US. Through their ethnographic fieldwork in New York City, Liu and Cherng realized that in order to further address their research study and focus on the holistic and comprehensive view of the mechanisms of Chinese immigrants outlook on immigration and education - in a deeper ethnographic/ anthropological / sociological way - it is very important that the two understand and expand this study to understand not just the immigrants here in the US, but their sending families - the roots of where the families came from in China.