The Reed is the annual student journal of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Every academic year, the Institute puts out a call for written and visual essays from current Columbia graduate and undergraduate students. Weatherhead staff members select a winner and a runner-up in each category; winners and runners-up receive cash awards in additional to publication in that year's issue.
2026 Issue
The 2026 issue of The Reed is now available as both a downloadable PDF and in a limited number of print copies.
Featured in this year’s edition:
“There Would Be Reverberations: Columbia in the 1960s,” by Professor Morris Rossabi, Adjunct Professor of East Asian Language and Cultures, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC)
“Frontiers of Crisis: Asian Studies in an Age of Uneven Globalization,” by EALAC doctoral student Hekang Yang
“Between Memory and Dialogue” by Xinwen (Sheena) Liang, an MPA candidate in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA)
“Beyond the Other—Why Studying Asia Matters Now” by Irene Souny (GS ’26)
2025 Issue
In 2025, WEAI celebrated The Reed's return from a hiatus by releasing a print edition after several years in which it had appeared in a digital-only format.
2025's cover is an enlarged view of Echoes of Devotion, a digital painting by Yuhan Zhang ’26 that was inspired by the June 2022 ordination, in Bhutan, of 144 nuns in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Because it marked the first time nuns could access full ordination status in Bhutan, the ceremony was a landmark event in a religious tradition that extends back to the seventh century CE. (The painting appears in full inside the issue.)
Download the 2025 Reed
Previous Years
