Kirie is a humanistic archaeologist. A native of northern Illinois, she first came to Morse College as an undergraduate (class of ‘13) and finished with a double BA in English and Chinese, although she also took courses ranging from Constitutional Law to Opera History. During her undergraduate years, Kirie travelled to China frequently through the Light Fellowship. A Chinese archaeology course she took to fulfil a social science distributional requirement (and a paper she wrote on one particular bronze vessel in the Yale University Art Gallery) began a life-long fascination with East Asian material culture. After living in China for a year after graduation, she pursued a MPhil at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA in 2023, entailing archaeological fieldwork focusing on excavated musical instruments in both China and Japan. She is thrilled to be back at Yale a postdoc and to be part of the Morse community once again.