Biography
Yanchen Liu is a Ph.D. candidate (Medieval Christianity) in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His interest centers on the Romano-canonical judicial thinking and legal-commentarial literature in the High Middle Ages. His dissertation research investigates the glosses to thirteenth-century canonical texts, especially Bernard of Parma’s Glossa ordinaria to the Decretales of Pope Gregory IX, on the religious-legal issues around people living on the boundary of medieval Christianity – apostates, converts, heretics, Jews, magicians, Muslims, pagans, etc.
He has been awarded the 2018-2019 Vatican Film Library Mellon Fellowship, the 2019-2020 Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship, and the 2020 Heckman Stipend (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library) for his dissertation research.
In Fall 2020, as a GSAS Teaching Scholar, he designed and taught an undergraduate course entitled, “In the Margins of the Middle Ages: Medieval Religious Minorities” (Religion UN3207).
Having worked as an electronic research assistant at the Digital Humanities Center of the Columbia University Libraries during 2017-2019, he is also interested in Digital Humanities, especially the digital cataloging and editing of Medieval Latin manuscripts.