Fellows

John Kao

Dubbed “Mr. Creativity” and a “serial innovator” by The Economist, John has been active in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship for four decades. He is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Yale and will be teaching a course on innovative thinking at Tsai CITY. John draws from his experience as a serial entrepreneur, musician, former business school professor, author, and Tony-nominated producer of film and stage. He is a graduate of Yale College (1972), Yale Medical School (1977) and Harvard Business School (1982); his undergraduate association was with Trumbull College.

John has held faculty appointments at Harvard Business School (associate professor), the MIT Media Lab (visiting professor), the US Naval Postgraduate School (distinguished visiting professor of innovation) and Stanford University (course head, Innovation Management, Bowman House). He is co-founder and chairman of ThayerMahan, Inc., a leader in maritime intelligence and a board member of the Midnight Oil Collective.

John is author of the best-seller Jamming – The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity and Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters and What We Can Do To Get It Back. He writes regularly in a Forbes.com column; his work has been covered by The New York Times, Fortune, The Economist, and the Colbert Report among others. John produced Golden Child in partnership with Yale Drama School associate dean Ben Mordecai for which he received a Tony nomination. He served as production executive on the film sex, lies and videotape, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and executive produced Mr. Baseball for Universal Studios. In the summer of 1969, he apprenticed to rock legend Frank Zappa.

Joshua Kendall

Jin Kim

Igor Kirman

Igor is a partner in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he focuses primarily on mergers and acquisitions, activism and takeover defense, corporate governance and general corporate matters.

He is a frequent speaker at professional conferences, and has written articles in numerous professional publications on topics.  He was twice named as Dealmaker of the Year by American Lawyer (2006 and 2015). He is the author of a book, “M&A and Private Equity Confidentiality Agreements” (Thomson Reuters) and teaches a course on M&A as a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia Law School.

Igor received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics and Economics magna cum laude from Yale in 1993 and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1996.  He is involved in a number of civic institutions, including as a member of the Advisory Board of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, a Trustee of the Trinity School, and a director of Renew Democracy Initiatives (RDI), in addition to numerous involvements at Yale.  He was born in Ukraine and speaks Russian.

Yukiko Koga

My research explores emerging moral and legal landscapes for post-imperial and post-colonial reckoning in East Asia today as contemporary generations wrestle with the history of settler colonialism, forced migration, and slavery, decades after the formal end of Japanese imperial violence.

My first book, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire, explores how China’s transition to a market-oriented economy opened new spaces for current generations of ordinary Chinese and Japanese to encounter each other and navigate colonial inheritances in the urban everyday of Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. Situated at the height of China’s socio-economic transformation in the 1990s and 2000s, my ethnography demonstrates how the economic realm has become an unexpected site for the generational transmission of difficult pasts. While the concepts of memory and trauma are often used to show the lasting effects of original violence, I suggest that these concepts may have limited our political imagination about what is at stake for second and third generations in East Asia in coming to terms with contested pasts. I use the concept of “colonial inheritance” to make visible contemporary generational responses to the losses incurred through colonial modernity, as set in motion through China’s transition to a market-oriented society. As China’s economy grows, it channels contradictory impulses toward erasing, confronting, or capitalizing on the past into production, consumption, and accumulation, exposing and amplifying new forms of anxiety arising from inherited legacies of colonial modernity for both Chinese and Japanese. Beneath the rationalized rhetoric of economic prosperity and the pursuit of “modern life” lurks the tenacious question of reckoning with the past through quotidian encounters in the workplace, on the streets, and in residential complexes. I show how the economic sphere became a key site for generational transmission of losses, linking the moral economy of seeking redemption for the unaccounted-for past to the formal economy of exports, consumption, and the citywide pursuit of middle-class dreams.

My book-in-progress, Post-imperial Reckoning: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire, ethnographically examines the emergence of a new moral landscape for reckoning with Japanese imperial violence. It charts a significant sea change being carried out in the legal sphere by ordinary citizens doing the hard work of reconciliation that the political sphere seems to proscribe. At its heart is a series of collective lawsuits filed within Japanese jurisdictions since the mid 1990s by Chinese victims of Japanese imperial violence seeking official apologies, monetary compensation, and acknowledgement of historical wrongs from the Japanese government and corporations. These lawsuits have produced a new moral landscape that is challenging the widely accepted model of redress, in which closure is sought through the former perpetrator acknowledging past wrongs and making amends. Instead, my book shows how the legal redress movement expands the scope of reckoning, exposing how contemporary societies are implicated in violence that only appears distant. I tell this story of transformation through the lens of debt, which articulates the entangled complicity and implication at the core of belated imperial reckoning. Through ethnographic explorations of lawsuits inside and outside the courtroom, transnational and intergenerational collaborations among Chinese slave labor survivors and bereaved families, Japanese lawyers representing them pro bono, and citizen activists in both countries, I enquire into what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean in practice, and what settlements settle and unsettle. The book thus explores the stakes for current generations in coming to terms with distant, yet still alive, pasts.

I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University, MA in Political Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and Bachelor of Laws from Keio University in Tokyo. 

Siegfried Kra

Christina Kraus

Chris Kraus received her BA from Princeton and PhD from Harvard. She taught at New York University, University College London, and Oxford University before coming to Yale in the summer of 2004. She has research interests in ancient narrative (especially historiography and tragedy), Latin prose style, and the theory and practice of commentaries. She is a member of the program in Renaissance Studies.

Ann Kurth

Fred Lawrence

Frederick M. Lawrence (b. 1955) is an American lawyer, civil rights scholar, and president of Brandeis University. Lawrence graduated from Williams College Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude in 1977, winning the William Branford Turner Prize, the college’s highest honor, and Yale Law School where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal in 1980.

He clerked for the Honorable Amalya L. Kearse on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1980-81. After two years as an associate at Kramer, Levin, Nessin, Kamin, and Sol, Lawrence served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983-88, service as the Chief of the Civil Rights Unit of that office. He served under United States Attorneys John S. Martin, Jr., and Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Lawrence joined the faculty of Boston University School of Law in 1988, becoming a full professor in 1994 and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 1996. He taught courses on Criminal Law, Civil Procedure and Civil Rights Crimes, winning the Metcalf Award in Teaching, the university’s highest award for teaching. Lawrence publishes widely on criminal civil rights and free expression and is the author of Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (Harvard University Press 1999). Lawrence was named was Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School from 2005 to 2010. During his time at GW Law, Lawrence recruited the strongest classes in the school’s history, and his five years as dean were five of the six highest fund-raising years in the school’s history.

Lawrence became the eighth president of Brandeis University on January 1, 2011, serving five academic years. Lawrence’s signature achievement upon arriving at Brandeis was to secure the Rose Art Museum, hiring its director Christopher Bedford and rebuilding its Board of Overseers. Other achievements made during his administration include raising over $250 million, increasing the endowment by nearly 30%, and increasing applications by over 35%, to an all-time high.