22 courses with the subject EAAS UN, 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.
EAAS UN2342Mythology of East Asia4
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement Through close readings of major myths of China, Japan, and Korea, this course provides a survey of significant themes of East Asian culture. Inclusion of selected comparative readings also leads students to reconsider the nature of ‘world mythology,’ a field often constituted by juxtaposing Greek and Latin classics with oral texts collected during anthropological fieldwork. The core materials for this class are from ancient written traditions, but they speak with force and clarity to modern readers, as is underlined by our attention to latter-day reception and reconceptualization of these narratives. This is an introductory, discussion-based class intended for undergraduates. No prior knowledge of East Asian history or culture is required, and all course readings are in English. Satisfies the Global Core requirement.
EAAS UN2844CULTURE, MENTAL HEALTH, AND HEALING IN EAST ASIA4.00
Why do certain mental illnesses only appear in specific regions of the world? What processes of translation, adaption, and “indigenization” take place when psychiatric diagnostic categories, pharmaceutical regimens, and psychodynamic treatments developed in the West travel to China, Japan and South Korea? How do contemporary East Asian therapeutic modalities destabilize biomedical assumptions about the origins and treatment of mental illness? This course employs anthropological analysis to explore the paradoxes of “culture-bound syndromes”, examine how biomedical psychiatric practices have been received and transformed, and discuss the ways in which shamanistic rituals and Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical encounters understand their objects of intervention. Focusing on East Asia with a particular emphasis on China, we will employ interpretive and political economic anthropological analyses to explore experiences of people struggling with illness, the practices of health practitioners who treat them, and the broader social and historical contexts that shape these interactions
While the rise of China on the world stage has resulted in enormous interest in modern Chinese society, this interest has been directed largely at the culture and concerns of China’s majority ethnicity: the Han. Ethnicity is central to any discussion of society and culture in the West, and this course will seek to place it at the forefront of our understanding of modern China as well. China is officially a country comprised of 56 distinct peoples or “nationalities” (including the Han Chinese majority). In the literature presented here, translated both from Chinese and minority languages, students will have the opportunity to hear the rich and varied voices of China’s minority writers first hand, and through them gain an understanding of the key issues surrounding ethnicity in modern China. We will cover fiction, poetry, essays, and film by a broad range of different peoples: Tibetans, Mongols, Manchus, the Islamic Uyghur nationality of Xinjiang province, the Yi of southwestern Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, the indigenous writers of Taiwan, and others. We will pay close attention to how minority writers explore and assert their identities in a Han-dominated society, how their work can broaden our understanding of the cultural diversity at play in modern China, and how it can challenge our conventional definitions of what constitutes modern Chinese literature and culture. The course begins by considering the role of ethnicity and nation in the birth and development of Chinese literature in the 20th century, before moving on to examine works by specific ethnicities. Finally, we will address certain issues faced by minorities in China that cut across ethnic lines. Throughout, we will address some of the most pressing concerns of minority ethnicities, concerns that are deeply significant not only to our understanding of modern China, but to the modern world at large. Familiarity with Chinese or related cultural context beneficial, but not required.
EAAS UN3207Lights, Camera, Action: The Visual Culture of K-pop4
In this course, we will explore the total political economy of culture that is K-pop, simultaneously a State-sponsored industry, an agency-generated cultural product, and a fandom-distributed community. In the recent years, scholars in various sectors have been actively demystifying the many social performances entailing K-pop through the frames of globalization and transnationalism. To see K-pop as transnationalism in performance is to construe it not as unidirectional or monolithic, but as a constant interpellation between national export and transnational transaction, each utterance refracted a mile a minute by its "glocal (global and local)" performers through social and web-based media. Paying particular attention to how such identities are negotiated within the portmanteau "K-pop," we will engage with the critical frames of Korean studies, performance studies, and media & visual culture to explore its major topics and defining moments in rigorously discussion-based seminars.
This course traces the history of Korean cinema and literature from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Particular attention is given to colonialism, national division, war, gender relations, authoritarianism, urbanization, consumer culture, and diaspora. What kinds of familial, social, economic, and political relations do these films and literary works envision? We will link films and literary texts to their historical context, noting how representations of people, places, and ideas have changed over time—from colonialism, through poverty and malaise in the aftermath of the Korean War, to North Korea’s continuing search for autonomy in the world system and South Korea’s current position as global economic power and maker of the “Korean Wave ”
This course surveys modern Korean culture and society through Korean popular cinema. Drawing from weekly screenings and readings on critical film and Korean studies, we will explore major topics and defining historical moments in modern Korean history post-1945. Spring 2026: EAAS UN3217 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment EAAS 3217 001/13128 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm 602 Northwest Corner Theodore Hughes 4.00 14/15 Fall 2026: EAAS UN3217 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment EAAS 3217 001/12160 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm 602 Northwest Corner Theodore Hughes 4.00 15/15
EAAS UN3230Labor, Love, and Leisure in Contemporary China3
This course offers an introduction to life in Reform era China. We will employ anthropological analysis to examine how Maoist legacies and recent state liberalization efforts shape everyday experiences of labor, romance, and consumption. Scholarly texts will be supplemented with primary materials including political speeches, testimonies, and documentaries.
What is “cinema” in the Chinese-speaking world, and how have the aesthetics, politics and practice of cinema evolved over time? In what ways has cinema interacted with its sister arts, such as painting, photography, theatre, architecture, and music? And in what capacities has cinema represented and intervened into the social and political worlds of its production and reception? This course is an introductory course on Chinese cinemas from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, featuring landmark films from the 1930s to the present, with emphasis on contemporary films produced in the past three decades. We cover major genres such as melodrama, historical epic, comedy, musical, martial arts and documentary films, and study works by film auteurs such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chen Kaige, Ann Hui and Jia Zhangke. Besides the questions mentioned above, topics also include cinema’s approaches to history and memory, and its engagement with questions of gender, ethnicity, class and language politics
This course introduces students to major works, genres and waves of East Asian cinema from the Silent era to the present, including films from Japan, Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. How has cinema participated in East Asian societies’ distinct and shared experiences of industrial modernity, imperialism and (post)colonialism? How has cinema engaged with questions of class, gender, ethnic and language politics? In what ways has cinema facilitated transnational circulations and mobilizations of peoples and ideas, and how has it interacted with other art forms, such as theatre, painting, photography and music? In this class, we answer these questions by studying cinemas across the region sideby- side, understanding cinema as deeply embedded in the region’s intertwining political, social and cultural histories and circulations of people and ideas. We cover a variety of genres such as melodrama, comedy, historical epic, sci-fi, martial arts and action, and prominent film auteurs such as Yasujir? Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Yu Hy?nmok, Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Ann Hui. 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. As a global core course, this class does not assume prior knowledge of East Asian culture or of film studies
From Godzilla to Pokemon (literally, pocket monster) toys, Japanese monsters have become a staple commodity of late-capitalist global pop culture. This course seeks to place this phenomenon within a longer historical, as well as a broader cross-cultural, context. Through an examination of texts and images spanning over thirteen centuries of Japanese history, along with comparable productions from other cultures, students will gain an understanding not only of different conceptions and representations of monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures in Japan, but also of the role of the monstrous in the cultural imagination more generally. The course draws on various media and genres of representation, ranging from written works, both literary and scholarly, to the visual arts, material culture, drama, and cinema. Readings average 100-150 pages per week. Several film and video screenings are scheduled in addition to the regular class meetings. Seating is limited, with final admission based on a written essay and other information to be submitted to the instructor before the beginning of the semester
EAAS UN3343JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY CINEMA ＆ MEDIA CULTURE4.00
The course will closely examine 1) the various traits of postmodern Japanese cinemas in the 1980s and the 1990s after the phase of global cinematic modernism, 2) contemporary media phenomena such as media convergence and the media ecologies of anime, 3) media activism after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and beyond. We will proceed through careful analysis of films, anime, and digital media, while also addressing larger questions of historiography in general
EAAS UN3412Conflict and Culture in Korean History4
This course considers how accounts of conflict in Korean history reflect the development of core values, ethical priorities and emotions, and perceptions among Koreans from the late sixteenth century to the late twentieth century. By carefully examining the narrative and rhetorical styles of major accounts of problems such as wars, political strife, family tensions, and intellectual and personal tribulations at a given cultural and historical time, students will not only understand how Koreans have dealt with conflict throughout history but will also develop reading strategies for primary sources contested by and narrated in a multiplicity of ideologies, genres, and voices.
EAAS UN3435Chinese Revolution, Asian Revolution, World Revolution: Revolution and Radicalism in the Long Twentieth Century4.00
This course examines the Chinese Revolution as a global event, one that provided new possibilities for understanding the future not only of China, but Asia and the world. In doing so, it refuses any notion of the Chinese Revolution as a merely "Chinese" event and instead marks the ways in which diverse sets of activists and revolutionaries from across Asia not only contributed towards the formation of Chinese revolutionary politics but also responded on their own terms. The Chinese Revolution thereby emerges as a truly global event and one that transformed political imagination. The course focuses largely on the responses and trajectories of Asian revolutionaries, especially from Vietnam and Japan, whose intellectual and political paths intersected with those of Chinese activists. Students can expect to work through the diverse intellectual interventions of pan-Asian diasporic communities in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century, read interwar proletarian fiction from Chinese and Japanese authors, compare Chinese and Vietnamese conceptualizations of "people's war" as an anti-colonial military strategy. They will emerge with a new understanding of the porousness and complexity of basic categories such as China, Asia and revolution
EAAS UN3575Approaching Cities and Life in Chinese Cultural History4.00
Italo Calvino's imagined Marco Polo cautions against commemorating the lived experience of a city, "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased." How shall we modern students of the past retrieve the ways in which foreign men and women dwelled in everyday practice? This seminar will take you on a tour of some key topoi — as both physical and literary constructs — throughout Chinese history, availing of a selection of textual, visual, and cinematic materials that shape and are shaped by the palimpsests of changing Chinese urban life
EAAS UN3720Women in Vietnamese society, history and literature4.00
This course explores the roles and representations of women in Vietnamese society, history and literature from premodern to contemporary times through folklore, poetry, prose and films. From different angles, in different contexts and through different approaches we will critically engage and situate literary and visual texts within larger historical processes of antiquity, folkore, religious beliefs and practice, sexual politics, feminism, monarchy, colonialism, war, modernity, nation-building and globalization that have impacted the roles and identities of Vietnamese women through the ages
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement The rise of China has impacted world politics and economy in significant ways. How did it happen? This course introduces some unique angles of self-understanding as suggested by Chinese writers, intellectuals, and artists who have participated in the making of modern China and provided illuminating and critical analyses of their own culture, history, and the world. Readings cover a wide selection of modern Chinese fiction and poetry, autobiographical writing, photography, documentary film, artworks, and music with emphasis on the interplays of art/literature, history, and politics. Close attention is paid to the role of storytelling, the mediating powers of technology, new forms of visuality and sense experience, and the emergence of critical consciousness in response to global modernity. In the course of the semester, a number of contemporary Chinese artists, filmmakers, and writers are invited to answer students’ questions. This course draws on cross-disciplinary methods from art history, film studies, anthropology, and history in approaching texts and other works. The goal is to develop critical reading skills and gain in-depth understanding of modern China and its engagement with the modern world beyond the cold war rhetoric. Our topics of discussion include historical rupture, loss and melancholy, exile, freedom, migration, social bonding and identity, capitalism, nationalism, and the world revolution. All works are read in English translation.
From the Daoist philosophical text Zhuangzi to the famous novel The Journey to the West, the "fantastic" has always been part of Chinese literature that pushes human imagination and questions the boundary of reality. Readers and writers created fantastic beasts (though not always knowing where to find them), passed down ghost stories, rationalized bizarre occurrences, and dismissed, sometimes embraced, tales that could potentially subvert their established framework of knowledge. The fantastic is also historically and culturally contingent. What one regards as fantastic reveals more about the perceiving subjects---their values, judgment, anxiety, identity, and cultural burdens. How do fantastic texts problematize the definition of humanity? How does the fantastic complicate our understanding of narrative, truth, and epistemology? How did premodern Chinese writers use the fantastic to approach and propose solutions to pressing social issues? Using “fantastic” literature as a critical lens, this course takes a thematic approach to the masterpieces of Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until late imperial China. The topics that we will explore include shifting human/non-human boundaries, representations of the foreign land (also the “underworld”), the aestheticization of female ghosts, and the fantastic as social criticism and allegory. All materials and discussions are in English
Undergraduate seminar addressing the intersection of technology and politics in the history of modern China, from the 19th century to the present. Main themes include technocratic management of land and environment, scientific representation of nature and Chinese society, and socialist approaches to mass organization and surveillance.
This course is intended to provide a focal point for undergraduate majors in East Asian Studies. It introduces students to the analysis of particular objects of East Asian historical, literary, and cultural studies from various disciplinary perspectives. The syllabus is composed of a series of modules, each centered around an object, accompanied by readings that introduce different ways of understanding its meaning
Introduces students to research and writing techniques and requires the preparation of a senior thesis proposal. Required for majors and concentrators in the East Asian studies major in the spring term of the junior year
