Healy, Gavin (EALAC-Hist)

Healy, Gavin
Field: East Asia/China
Advisor: Zelin
Year: 2014
gh148@columbia.edu

Gavin Healy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (History-East Asia), specializing in modern Chinese history. His dissertation, “The Political and Cultural Economy of Sightseeing: Foreign Tourism in the ‘New China’ (1949-1978),” examines how personnel within China’s state tourism bureaucracy struggled to balance the use of tourism as a form of political, historical, and cultural representation with the demands of developing a revenue-generating service industry in a socialist economy. He has presented portions of his dissertation research at the annual conferences of the Association for Asian Studies and the American Historical Association. His paper, “Visual Culture and the Tourism Industry in Mao-Era China: ‘Scenery Export’?” was awarded the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council Graduate Student Best Paper Prize in 2019. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he was a visiting student at the School of Tourism of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Education

MA, MPhil, East Asian Languages and Cultures (History-East Asia), Columbia University

MA, Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

JD, Columbia University School of Law

BA, Asian Studies, Cornell University

Experience

At Columbia, Gavin has served as a teaching assistant for Introduction to East Asian Civilizations (China), Introduction to East Asian Civilizations (Korea), and History of Modern China I. He was co-organizer of the Xingzhihui Chinese Studies Group, and served as East Asian Languages and Cultures Department co-representative to the Graduate History Association. He also serves on the editorial committee of Falüshi yiping [Legal History Studies] published by China University of Political Science and Law Press. Prior to pursuing graduate study in Chinese history, he practiced law in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul for ten years.