Walsh Millette

A second-year PhD student, Walsh joined the department in 2021 as the inaugural Burke Fellow in the Master’s program and continues now with his doctoral studies in Yuan and Ming period Chinese art. His approach is interdisciplinary and interregional, and his research engages with ideas of ethnicity, civilizational identity, and how these issues are expressed in representational and constructed landscapes.

Walsh completed an MA in Sinology as a Yenching Fellow at Peking University (2019-2021) where he was also awarded the China Government Scholarship by the Ministry of Education. His MA work at PKU on 19th and early 20th century landscape photography from Xinjiang brought him into working with visual materials, and he has been awarded multiple grants to research other photography projects related to China and Mongolia. At Columbia he has complemented his work on China with extensive study of Japanese art—his MA thesis here focused on Kano School screen paintings—and also with historical analyses of many of the various steppe cultures native to northeastern Eurasia and their artistic interactions with imperial China.

Before his graduate studies Walsh worked for three years as a language arts teacher in Beijing. He is a practicing artist and holds a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).