2023-2024
Dayna Bailey is a second-year graduate student in Chinese Language and Culture with a BA in Chinese Language and Literature. Her recent academic work focuses on modern and classical Chinese literary translation, and she is currently working on her master’s thesis on the translation and analysis of Su Hui’s palindrome poem《璇璣圖》. A passionate linguist, Dayna has studied more than ten languages, which she enjoys using to explore global literature.
Faculty Advisor: Xiaofei Kang
Research Project: “To Hell and Back – The Influence of the Video Game Devotion
on the Taiwanese Guanluoyin Folk-Religious Practice”
Kyle Nguyen is from the Bay Area, California, and is a sophomore undergraduate student at the Elliott School of International Affairs. He is majoring in International Affairs with a concentration in Security Policy and minoring in Data Science. His research interests include the modern security relations between East Asian countries. During his TERP Fellowship, Kyle will analyze the economic and security aspects of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy (NSP) and its impact on Taiwan’s relationship with China, the US, and Southeast Asia nations.
Faculty Advisor: Sunggun Park
Research Project: “Assessing the Intricacies of Taiwan’s Southbound Policy and its Effects on Regional Activity in Overall East Asia“
Fiona Stokes is a Taiwanese American sophomore undergraduate student at the Elliott School of International Affairs. Within her IA major, she is concentrating on Contemporary Cultures and Societies. In addition, she is double majoring in Art History. During her TERP Fellowship, Fiona will be interviewing former inhabitants of Taiwanese military villages to better understand how its culture set the framework for contemporary Taiwanese society.
Research Project: “Dinner at Air Force Village No. 2”
Faculty Advisors
Xiaofei Kang holds a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University (2000). She teaches courses on religions in East Asia, and her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014). Her recent book, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda (Oxford, 2023) examines the intertwined discourses of religion, gender and the Chinese Communist revolution.
Sunggun Park, is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the George Washington University. He studies the impact of military strategy on foreign policy and the role of prestige and reputational concerns in international affairs. During the 2024-25 academic year at George Washington, he is teaching for the Security Policy Studies MA program and also for the Department of Political Science. Previously, he taught at South Korea’s Air Force Academy as an active duty officer.
Patricia Chu is a Professor of English and Director of Asian American Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies at George Washington University. Her main focuses are Asian American and diasporic literature, film, and cultural studies; Women’s writing and autobiography; 20th and 21st century American literature; Victorian literature, especially the English novel; literature of transracial adoption; children’s and young adult literature; fantasy and speculative fiction; postcolonial theory; autobiography theory; psychoanalytic/affect theory.
