30 courses with the subject EAAS GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
This course introduces contemporary Tibetan society through the lens of anthropology and how various representations have produced different understandings of Tibet within China and beyond
This course, designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of East Asian Studies, Religion, and Art History, examines the principal modes, media, and contexts of visual culture in Japanese Buddhist history. The course is not designed as a survey of Japanese Buddhist art either in terms of media or chronology but rather an exploration, through the analysis of selected case studies, of the modalities of perception, materiality, and reception that distinguish the form and function of visual media in Japanese Buddhist contexts. Students are expected to have completed preliminary coursework in relevant areas of East Asian history, religion, or art history. The course is organized around selected objects in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will include meetings at the Met for viewing and analysis of objects in the galleries and in storage
“The world isn’t built with a ramp,” writes disabled adventurer Walt Balenovich in his book Travels in a Blue Chair. Neither is the world built with any universal understanding of disability. This course examines what it means to be disabled in both theory and practice, especially in East Asian contexts. We begin by closely examining the concept of “disability” and its various connotations, then look at permutations of disability in Japan, China, and the Koreas before ending with recent, more radical ways of thinking about disability. This interdisciplinary course is framed by feminist approaches to definitions and applications of disability theory, drawing further on literary and technological approaches to representation of minority subjects. Multimedia engagement with issues ranging from guide dogs to nanotechnology will aid in understanding overlaps between, and barriers of, disability on an international scale, while also building a critical toolkit for understanding “able-bodied” assumptions in ourselves.
In this course, we will take modern Chinese poetry as a crucible in which we can observe the interacting forces of literary history and social change. From diplomats who saw poetry as a medium for cultural translation between China and the world, to revolutionaries who enlisted poetry in the project of social transformation, we will examine the lives and works of some of China’s most prominent poets and ask, what can we learn about modern China from reading their poetry? In addition to poems, the course will include fiction, essays, photographs, and films by both Chinese and non-Chinese artists that place our poets in a broader context; topics of discussion include national identity, revolution, translation, gender, the body, ethnicity, and technology
This course will delve into an analytical reconsideration of postwar Japanese cinema specifically from the perspective of the Japanese New Wave. While we will aim to capture the exhilaration of the Japanese New Wave by closely analyzing existing studies on some of its key makers and their works, special attention will be given to what is left out of the category as it is conventionally understood, drawing on marginalized works and genres, such as educational and industrial films as well as pink films. Spring 2026: EAAS GU4122 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment EAAS 4122 001/13134 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm 522c Kent Hall Takuya Tsunoda 4 19/19
This course investigates the theories and practices of documentary film in Japan. Spanning from the 1920s to the present, we will engage in rigorous examination of the transformations of cinematic forms and contents, and of the social, cultural, and political elements bound up with those transformations. We will also juxtapose aspects of Japanese documentary film with global movements, and wider theories of documentary and non-fiction. Fall 2026: EAAS GU4123 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment EAAS 4123 001/12164 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm 405 Kent Hall Takuya Tsunoda 4 20/20
In viewing historical films and media works, we often grapple with the question of historical accuracy, and whether visual media is suited to the task of historical accounts, but another question we could ask is: Of what is film a history? This course will examine Korean history through cinema, and Korean cinema through history, by viewing films from various time periods that depict moments in Korean history
Moving beyond stereotypes of victimized Asian womanhood and the dominance of Confucian patriarchy, we draw on Chinese literary/historical texts to examine sites of agency and power. Interrogating a range of gendered identities, roles, and expressions—from classical romantic heroines (ex.Peony Pavilion’s Du Liniang) and dynamic women writers (ex.the poet Li Qingzhao) to sexy fox spirits, cross-dressed warriors (Mulan), and queer love affairs (Li Yu’s Women in Love)—we probe relationships among social roles, sexualized bodies, and the performance of gender
This course explores literary representations of childhood in modern Japan, expanding into how manga, anime, and film have also dealt with the topos. Through literary and visual texts that problematize spaces, memories, ideals, rights, and propagandic power of childhood, students will think through and discuss broader issues of age, gender, identity politics, generational trauma, history of social structures, and the future of human society
This course examines the processes of colonization that played a central role in locating Korea in an integrated world in the first half of the twentieth century. We will analyze the ways in which the intersections among an array of contemporary global issues and concerns (to name a few- social Darwinism, migration, urban space, gender, sexuality, militarism, race, liberalism, socialism, capitalism) shaped the modern experience in Korea under Japanese rule (1910-1945). Our approach will be multidisciplinary. We will look, for example, at art, architecture, literature, film, philosophy, religion, and historiography. Throughout, we will pay special attention to the place of Korea and Koreans in the expanding Japanese empire and, more broadly, in the global colonial context. Class will be held as a discussion seminar based on close reading of primary-source documents and recent scholarship.
What did the dead become? Ancestors, spirits, or ghosts? Are these postmortem categories and roles ontologically distinct and mutually exclusive? How did the dead become ancestors, spirits, or ghosts? Where did the dead go and what kind of "lives after" did they have? With these questions in mind, this course explores the realm of the dead in ancient China (ca. 5000 B.C.E.-600 C.E.) instantiated by the living in rituals, objects, and writings. Focusing on contemporaneous materials obtained through archaeology, facilitated with transmitted history and literature when available, students will read about and learn to analyze a variety of conceptions of the dead and corresponding afterlife options recorded in diverse kinds of sources including material culture, architecture, artifacts, pictorial representations, and texts from ancient China.
This course explores how Chinese identity and society have been staged in theatre productions over the past century. Course content includes play scripts in English translation, videos, photographs, archival materials, and English-language books and articles about Chinese theater
This is a seminar for advanced undergraduates and master’s degree students, which explores the socioeconomic consequences of China’s development of a boom, urban residential real-estate market since the privatization of housing at the end of the 1990s. We will use the intersecting lenses of gender/sexuality, class and race/ethnicity to analyze the dramatic new inequalities created in arguably the largest and fastest accumulation of residential-real estate wealth in history. We will examine topics such as how skyrocketing home prices and state-led urbanization have created winners and losers based on gender, sexuality, class, race/ethnicity and location (hukou), as China strives to transform from a predominantly rural population to one that is 60 percent urban by 2020. We explore the vastly divergent effects of urban real-estate development on Chinese citizens, from the most marginaliz4d communities in remote regions of Tibet and Xinjiang to hyper-wealthy investors in Manhattan. Although this course has no formal prerequisites, it assumes some basic knowledge of Chinese history. If you have never taken a course on China before, please ask me for guidance on whether or not this class is suitable for you. The syllabus is preliminary and subject to change based on breaking news events and the needs of the class
Is the Cultural Revolution the Holocaust of China? Such analogy is often evoked to imply more than a mere rhetoric of accusation. This seminar explores the rise of testimonial literature—known as “Scar Literature”—that began to appear in print immediately after the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China. We will examine how this literature repudiates the repressions, violence and chaos of the Maoist era and speaks to the collective experience of Chinese intellectuals. We will analyze how this body of testimonial literature and related film productions bear witness to the suffering of intellectuals and render it commensurate or not commensurate with the genre of Holocaust literature. Our goal is to achieve a deeper understanding of the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution and its historical roots beyond analogical thinking. Topics of discussion include individual and collective memories, trauma, storytelling, social protest and moral accountability. All readings are in English.
This course introduces Chinese internet culture by examining interactive literary communities, multimedia platforms, cyber-nationalism, web-based activism, and the possibility of the internet commons in mainland China. We will pay close attention to the figure of netizen, online piracy, cyberbullying, censorship, and growing addiction to virtual reality among the Chinese youth. Topics of discussion include, for example, the tension between connectivity and control, between imitation and innovation, and between the real and the virtual. We will explore these new developments in media technology primarily from social, political, and international perspectives. The goal is to understand how the rapid proliferation of digital technologies has helped create a new landscape of popular culture across mass media and transformed contemporary Chinese society.
Covering a period from the 7th century to the present, this class draws on Japanese literature, folklore, painting, performance, and anime, to explore the world of the supernatural, particularly the role of ghosts, gods, demons, animals, and nature. Students are introduced to various strands of popular religion, including Buddhist cosmologies and native beliefs about nature and human life, with special attention to the relationship between the living and the dead, and explore the role of human intermediaries. The course looks at these texts and media in relationship to the local community, gender, social and occupational status, environment (both natural and urban), and historical period, exploring issues of social identity and power
Border Thinking in Modern China examines how the ethnocultural frontiers of contemporary China were formed over the long transition from multi-ethic empire to modern nation state. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa notion of ‘border thinking’ or 'pensamiento fronterizo', this seminar examines how the discursive and material violence of the modern border developed out of centuries imperial conquest, colonial expansion, and mutli-ethnic alliance building along China’s northwestern and southwestern borders. Over the semester students are encouraged to foster their own understanding of ‘border thinking’ as the pursue research essays that take a borderlands approach to the study of Late Imperial to Modern Chinese history
This course approaches the Chinese knight-errant, often seen in the Kungfu films (most recently Mulan 2020), both as a historical fact and a literary imagination. It provides students with a broad overview of Chinese literature until the twentieth century, to familiarize students with the most prominent literary genres of each time period, from official history to classical poetry, from classical tale to vernacular fiction, from drama to film. Through reading/viewing the knight-errant literature, we will discuss issues including translation and comparative studies, "history" writing and forming, literary genre and media, gender boundary and transgression, national and trans-national
The aim of this course is to examine the interrelated concepts of body, borders, gender construction, and sexuality as expressed in Japanese literature, religion, and culture from the premodern period to the present. We will use a variety of media including oral literature, narrative fiction, noh play, early modern comic literature, novel, film, and anime
From Bong Joon-ho’s runaway success Parasite, to manga adaptations of Kobayashi Takiji’s novel The Crab Cannery Ship, to the proliferation of Chinese migrant worker poetry, recent developments in the cultural landscape of East Asia have seen a renewed concern with the plight of workers and other sections of the oppressed under conditions of late capitalism. This course offers students the opportunity to situate these developments within an extended historical trajectory as the basis on which to think about the relation of radical histories to our present and possible future. It does so by integrating contemporary cultural texts with earlier cultural experiments that arose amidst the political turbulence of the 1930s across a range of locations in East Asia
This course aims to pose the question of what ‘science’ can be in Tibetan and Himalayan cultures, and to examine these ‘sciences’ in their social, religious, political, transnational, and inter-cultural dimensions. Especially through the field of medicine, it explores the main developments of Tibetan knowledge mostly during the modern era from the 17th century onward, building on both ethnography and primary and secondary written sources. This course pays particular attention to the relation of this knowledge to various states, centralizing institutions, and policies and practices of legitimization, and further to the modernization and globalization of the production, application, and consumption of Tibetan medical knowledge, including during the current Covid-19 pandemic
This course explores the intersection of cultural production with national policies and global economies in the context of Tibet. We will focus not on colonial sources (Mythos Tibet) but on a wide range of representational and expressive practices by contemporary Tibetans in film, literature, music, social media, art, performance, local museums, etc. -- all since the 1990s. Tibetan cultural production today is at once localized and transnational, whether it is the vision and work of artists in the People's Republic of China or the creation of Tibetans living in the diaspora. We will explore the impact of colonialism and socioeconomic marginalization on the de-centering and re-centering of ethnicity and identity in education, publishing, and the arts. How do Tibetan artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, comedians, and other cultural producers negotiate the complexities of modernity, secularization, globalization and political agendas, vis-à-vis incentives to preserve traditions, while engaging creatively? Each week will focus on 2 to 3 primary sources and 1 or 2 related secondary readings. Our discussions of the primary source materials (film screenings, readings, artwork, performances, etc.) will be enriched with readings in Cultural Studies, sociology, and anthropology, and by conversations with area artists
What defines a “documentary” film? How do documentaries inform, provoke and move us? What formal devices and aesthetic strategies do documentaries use to construct visions of reality and proclaim them as authentic, credible and authoritative? What can documentary cinema teach us about the changing Chinese society, and about cinema as a medium for social engagement? This seminar introduces students to the aesthetics, epistemology and politics of documentary cinema in China from the 1940s to the present, with an emphasis on contemporary films produced in the past two decades. We examine how documentaries contended history, registered subaltern experiences, engaged with issues of gender, ethnicity and class, and built new communities of testimony and activism to foster social change. Besides documentaries made by Chinese filmmakers, we also include a small number of films made on China by western filmmakers, including those by Joris Ivens, Michelangelo Antonioni, Frank Capra and Carma Hinton. Topics include documentary poetics and aesthetics, evidence, performance and authenticity, the porous boundaries between documentary and fiction, and documentary ethics. As cinema is, among other things, a creative practice, in this course, students will be given opportunities to respond to films analytically and creatively, through writing as well as creative visual projects
The goal of this course is to examine how Mao-era China (1949-1976) was engaged in cross-border exchange among revolutionary movements in the Global South, Western intellectuals, its diaspora community, and other socialist states. This course may be of interest both to students specializing in modern Chinese history and to students concentrating on other geographic regions who wish to gain new insights on global liberation movements and de-center Cold War narratives from a focus on US-Soviet conflict. Over the course of the semester we will examine a range of secondary scholarship and primary sources (in translation) that show how foreign observers engaged with Mao-era China as a civilizational other and how Chinese officials reimagined the “New China” after 1949 as a political, economic, and cultural entity on a global stage. Through written work and an in-class workshop, we will develop methodological tools for writing about China’s recent and highly contentious past
Covering a period from the late 19th century to the present, this class explores how ideas and practices in science and technology have historically entered popular imagination, social organization and political contestation, as they become mediated by various media forms and technologies such as photography, cinema, novels, television, video, internet platforms and data algorithms. In particular, we focus on how science and technology have shaped our understandings of the human body, and impacted on the various bodily experiences, from perception, cognition, to emotion and connection with others in the environment. This class helps students read media artefacts in a historically grounded and conceptually generative way, understanding media artefacts as historically conditioned, yet offering us resources for envisioning the future
This seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji” (Genji monogatari, c. 1008), one of the most significant works in the Japanese literary canon. Through a close reading and discussion of the primary text, which we will read in its entirety in English translation, the students will gain an appreciation and understanding of its central themes, socio-cultural background, narrative structuring, and various aesthetic considerations. A number of secondary materials and introduction to several works of reception will further help to contextualize its enduring influence to this day
This course presents a synchronous and diachronous exploration of The Tale of Genji, a masterpiece of Japanese literature. During the first half of the course, students will read the entire English translation of the tale, as well as a number of other primary texts from roughly the same time period in order to gain an understanding of the sociohistorical and literary context in which the tale came about, while the second half of the course is devoted to the reception and adaptations of the tale across various media, genres, and time periods, ranging from commentaries, noh plays, traditional paintings and even “fan fiction” to modern novels and manga. The aim of the course is to provide the students with an understanding of The Tale of Genji’s place within the Japanese literary tradition, and the impact it has had and continues to exert on all facets of Japanese culture
Japan has a long tradition of highly sophisticated vernacular literature (poetry, prose fiction, essays and poetic memoirs) by aristocratic court women, particularly from the tenth- and eleventh-century, including The Tale of Genji, often considered the world’s first psychological novel. Writings by women in the early period had a deep impact on subsequent cultural production, and these vernacular writings (as well as the figure of these early women writers) acquired a new, contested significance from the end of the nineteenth century as part of the process of modern nation-building. Gender became a major organizing category in constructing discourse on literature, literary language, and literary modernity, particularly with regard to the novel. This seminar engages in close readings and discussion of selected works from the eleventh-century to twentieth-century Japan with particular attention to the genealogy of women’s writings and changing representations of women, gender, and social relations. Issues include: genre, media, intertextuality, and literary communities; body and sexuality; and in the modern period, the “woman question” and global feminisms as well as authorship and authority. All readings are in English. Original texts will be provided for those who can read in the original
A recent American newspaper headline announced that China has become “the most materialistic country the world.” Globally circulating narratives often interpret Chinese consumers’ demand for commodities as an attempt to fill a void left by the absence of the Maoist state, traditional religious life, and Western-style democracy. But things aren’t as simple as they appear. This course explores the intertwined questions of “Chinese” desire and the desire for China. Avoiding reductionist understandings of desire as either a universal natural human attribute or a particular Chinese cultural trait, we will track the production and management of desire within a complex global field. Drawing on ethnographies, films, short stories, and psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, this course will explore the shifting figure of desire across the Maoist and post-Maoist eras by examining how academics, government officials, intellectuals, and artists have represented Chinese needs, wants and fantasies. From state leaders’ attempts to improve the “quality” of the country’s population to citizens’ dreams of home ownership, from sexualized desire to hunger for food, drugs and other commodities, we will attend to the continuities and disjunctures of recent Chinese history by tracking how desire in China has been conceptualized and refracted through local and global encounters
Source: Barnard College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
