6 courses with the subject HSEA 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.
HSEA UN3320Making in Premodern Japan4.00
This course introduces students to the world of artisans and makers in premodern Japan from the seventh to the nineteenth century. Broadly, this course is divided into two sections. The first section situates makers within their historical contexts, from the ritsuryō state of ancient Japan to the early modern Tokugawa regime, in order to introduce students to the forms of labor artisans engaged in over the course of premodern history, including corvée labor, guild labor, and free market labor. The second section of the course takes a more thematic approach rooted in fundamental frameworks and ideas in material culture and craft studies. Each week, we will dig into a particular theme or problem, such as embodied knowledge or social marginalization, and think through the ways in which these themes materialized in the specific historical contexts we covered in the first half of the semester
HSEA UN3355Antiquarianism and the Politics of the Past in East Asian History4.00
This course introduces students to the history of antiquarianism in East Asia and explores how people in the past negotiated their own pasts through the medium of material culture. We will examine how historical societies engaged with antiquities—through collecting and displaying, copying and faking, preserving and erasing—and how antiquarian traditions shaped social memory and collective identity in China, Japan, and Korea from the first millennium BCE to the early twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the life and afterlife of ancient Chinese ritual bronzes through the centuries as a case study to consider how the politics of the past translated across both time and geographic space in East Asia
HSEA UN3642Peripheries of the Sinitic World through History3.00
This course surveys the southern and western peripheries of the political entities we today call China from the turn of the 1st millennium CE to the early 20th century. It does so primarily through translations of primary sources - travelogues and geographies- up to the 16th century, at which point it turns its attention to recently published monographs of varying breadth that can cover more ground, given the sheer number of available primary sources from that time on. No prerequisites but Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Tibet, China, or Vietnam is recommended
HSEA UN3851GODS, GHOSTS, AND ANCESTORS: RELIGION IN CHINESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY3.00
Examines the social and cultural place of Chinese religions through time, focusing on Chinese ideas of the relation between humans and spirits, and the expression of those ideas in practice. Problems will include the long-term displacement of ancestors by gods in Chinese history; the varying and changing social functions of rituals, and the different views of the same ritual taken by different participants; the growth of religious commerce from early modern times on. Topics will be organized roughly chronologically but the emphasis is on broad change rather than historical coverage
This course relies primarily on visual materials to familiarize students with the history of Japan from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the present. It follows a chronological order, introducing students to various realms of Japanese visual culture—from woodblock prints to film, anime, and manga—along with the historical contexts that they were shaped by, and in turn helped shape. Special attention will paid to the visual technologies of nation-building, war, and empire; to historical interactions between Japanese and Euro-American visual culture; to the operations of still versus moving images; and to the mass production of visual commodities for the global marketplace. Students who take the course will emerge not only with a better understanding of Japan’s modern historical experience, but also with a more discerning eye for the ways that images convey meaning and offer access to the past
Study of the role of the Mongols in Eurasian history, focusing on the era of the Great Mongol Empire. The roles of Chinggis and Khubilai Khan and the modern fate of the Mongols to be considered
