Philip Gant

Philip Gant a historian of premodern East Asia; his research focuses on Korean legal and social life over the centuries. His dissertation “Taking Refuge in the Law,” explored the tortuous litigation in which Buddhist monasteries and monastics in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) grew increasingly enmeshed to arrive at views of an overlooked religious landscape(link is external). 

Gant received his Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages(link is external) (HEAL) at Harvard University, and his bachelor’s degree in History and East Asian Studies at Yale College. 

From 2017 to 2019, he was a William R. Tyler fellow at Dumbarton Oaks(link is external) in Washington, D.C. In the field, he was a summer fellow at the Academy of Korean Studies, and a 2017-2018 visiting student at the Kyujanggak Institute at Seoul National University. A Richard U. Light fellow and a Blakemore Freeman fellow in Seoul, Korea, he was a Greenberg/Yale-China Initiative scholar in Beijing, China, and a Reischauer Institute summer language grantee in Kanazawa and Yokohama, Japan.