Staff Directory

Xuexin Cai grew up in a farming family in northwest China, where his parents cultivated vegetables and fruits in fields both nourished and threatened by the Yellow River. There, his interest in agriculture and in relations between human beings and the more-than-human world first took root. At 15, he left what had become a disappearing village on the edge of a rapidly expanding industrial city to continue his education in Singapore on a scholarship. He later completed his undergraduate studies in the Middle East on another scholarship before returning to China to live and work in Yunnan, a mountainous province in the southwest and the focus of his undergraduate research on tea production and trade.

In Yunnan, Xuexin served as a teacher and vice principal of a village primary school in a multiethnic region, where he began learning from local residents about the socioeconomic and environmental challenges experienced by different generations and ethnic communities. He also began collaborating with friends, colleagues, and local and external partners to build a safer, healthier, and more diverse and sustainable learning and living environment for students and teachers. These years in Yunnan profoundly shaped his research interests and methods, paving the way for his current doctoral work at Columbia University.

Xuexin's PhD research combines archival and ethnographic approaches to explore the socio-environmental history of southern Yunnan, one of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions. Just as his research is deeply rooted in place while attentive to transregional forces and comparative perspectives, Xuexin believes in the power of place-based learning that engages thoughtfully with issues across spatial scales. In both his scholarship and teaching, he strives to break down the artificial boundaries between intellectual and manual work, and between the human and the natural.

Paul is Unson Microcollege Program Director and an associate research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His research interests include Japanese history, environmental history, migration history, and Pacific history. He received his PhD in History from Princeton in 2015, and since 2016 has taught and researched in various capacities at Columbia: the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of History, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His article "Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo" was published in the journal Environmental History in 2018 and won the Association for the Study of Environmental History's Leopold-Hidy Prize. His monograph Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. He has taught a range of courses on Japanese history as well as upper-level courses on "Asian Mobilities," "Japan 1968," "Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific," and graduate seminars on "Borderland Japan," “Introduction to Historical Interpretation and Methods” (GR8910), and "Science, Environment and Technology in Japanese History." His writing has also appeared in The Financial Times, The Japan Times,Asahi Shimbun, Tōyō Keizai Online, and The New Statesman. He is currently researching the history of labour migration regulation in the Pacific plantationocene.

Paul has also been a junior research fellow at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research, a senior teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London, a Japan Foundation visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, and a JSPS visiting fellow at Osaka University. Before entering academia he worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo, accrediting greenhouse gas emission reduction projects under the Kyoto Protocol.

Masanori Seto is the founder and director of NPO Soma, a Fukuoka-based organization dedicated to forest restoration, traditional land stewardship, and ecological education. He earned his PhD in Entomology from Cornell University, where he specialized in soil organisms, spatio-temporal dynamics, and the interplay between hydrology, biodiversity, and human land use. He now applies this scientific training to practical conservation projects across Japan.

In partnership with the Unson Foundation, Seto has been working to restore the soil drainage systems in the ancient shrine groves of Dazaifu Tenmangū, where centuries-old trees have been threatened by urban runoff and soil compaction. His approach combines ecological assessment with historical landscape knowledge and has helped establish new standards for managing sacred woodlands in densely settled regions. He also serves as a program researcher and key community partner for the Columbia Summer in Itoshima program, connecting students with the ecological systems, historical landscapes, and human networks that shape contemporary Japan.

Mako Miura is a doctoral student in the Anthropology and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist in training, studying the interactions among young children in multicultural and multilingual early childhood classrooms in Osaka, Japan. Her dissertation research examines what happens when two- and three-year-old children from Vietnam, China, South Korea, and the Philippines who draw on a multimodal mix of verbal and extraverbal expressions spend time with one another in Japanese classrooms with peers speaking different languages.

Junho Peter Yoon is the Assistant Director of Columbia Summer in Itoshima at the Weatherhead East Asian institute. His research encompasses various fields, namely critical theory, cultural studies, ethics, and ecological thought, among others. In his doctoral dissertation project at New York University, tentatively titled "Toward Planetary Ethics," Junho traces the contours of what ethical thought and action might look like in the age of Anthropocene, contextualizing this inquiry through modern and contemporary Korean history, literature, and cinema. He holds an interdisciplinary M.A degree from University of Chicago, and a B.A in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University.

He has also previously worked with journals and various cultural institutions like e-flux Journal and Screening Room as a fellow, Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTIK), and New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF). He is currently co-editing two special issues on global Asian photography and the archive, and posthuman visuality in contemporary South Korean art and media.

Hekang is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Chinese history at Columbia University, where he works with Madeleine Zelin. His research focuses on modern Chinese history in global and imperial contexts, with particular attention to political economy, frontier governance, imperial statecraft, bureaucratic institutions, state finance, and transnational trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also undertaken extensive language and area-studies training in Russian and Soviet history at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, NYU, Princeton, and Middlebury. 

His dissertation project, Reinventing Frontier Commerce: China, Russia, and the World Economy, 1805–1911, examines how a historically rooted overland trade regime in Inner Asia—epitomized by the Kyakhta system linking the Qing and Russian empires—adapted to the emergence of an industrial, extraction-driven world economy in the nineteenth century. Although imperial Russia was Qing China’s second-largest trading partner in the eighteenth century, its relative importance was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by British India, the United States, and other maritime powers. Challenging the resulting historiographical marginalization of Qing–Russian commerce, the dissertation analyzes how transformations in frontier exchange—including the liberalization of cross-border trade, transnational migration, and the expansion of business ventures and fiscal extraction into imperial interiors—reshaped the political economy and practices of economic statecraft in Qing China and, to a lesser extent, imperial Russia. More broadly, the project explores how the interaction between trade and politics reconfigured sovereignty, jurisdiction, and imperial authority prior to the rise of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism. 

A doctoral student in Columbia University's Department of Religion, Catherine Miki Otachime approaches the study of religion through a deeply interdisciplinary and intercultural lens, with a particular focus on the premodern world. Her research explores the affective and sensory dimensions of faith—how religious systems shape perception, cognition, and embodiment across cultures. She is especially interested in non-rational modes of knowing—ritual, sound, image, and symbol—that challenge dominant epistemologies and offer alternative ways of engaging with the world.

Catherine is currently examining the cultural and religious interactions between medieval and early modern Japan and the Mediterranean world. More specifically, her current work centers on early modern encounters between Japanese and Iberian missionaries, leaders, merchants, investigating how visual, auditory, and ceremonial practices mediated dialogue between polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. She examines how religious and aesthetic frameworks translated complex metaphysical ideas across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries.

Catherine’s academic background spans literature, art history, anthropology, Japanese religions (Shinto and Buddhism), and the fine arts—including painting and traditional woodblock printing. She has studied in Brazil, Japan, France, and the United States.

Caixia Mao is a Doctoral Candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. She published in journals in the field of sustainability such as Technology Forecasting and Social Change; Resource, Conservation and Recycling; Sustainability; and World Food Policy. 

Prior to starting her PhD, she worked as a policy researcher at Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) in Japan to provide technical assistance to Asian governments in formulating national policies on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) under the SWITCH-Asia programme launched by the EU. She was managing projects under the 10-Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns (10YFP) adopted by the Heads of State in the Rio+20. She also worked at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) to promote circular economy and sustainable transportation policy initiatives through high-level political dialogues in Regional 3R Forum in Asia and the Pacific and Intergovernmental Regional Environmentally Sustainable Transport Forum in Asia. 

Caixia received a Master of Philosophy in Development Studies from the University of Oxford in the UK and a Bachelor of International Liberal Studies from Waseda University in Japan. She has native level proficiency in both Chinese and Japanese.