Weill Medical College of Cornell University · Courses
ASIAN
206 courses with the subject ASIAN, 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.
ASIAN 1104FWS: Songs of Love and War: South Asian Lyrics3
Why do humans write poems in times of love and war? What is the connection between song, pleasure, and pain? This course focuses on lyric poetry from South Asia in multiple languages and composed from the classical to the contemporary historical periods. Course materials, all in English translation, include the short poems of ancient Tamil and Sanskrit, the devotional poems of medieval poet-saints, the songs of nationalist poets such as Rabindranath Tagore and Subramania Bharati, and testimonial poetry of contemporary conflicts. Texts will be supplemented by contemporary performances in film and popular culture and by secondary sources. Students will develop skills in description, analysis, and arguments through a combination of drafting and scaffolded writing assignments. Written assignments will include expressive writing, peer responses, and argumentative prose.
The great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, is one of the principal monuments of world literature. This vast, enthralling, and powerful tale of intra-familial war and world historical decline (of which the famous Bhagavad Gita forms but a small part) transformed the religious and literary consciousness of India, and exercised a broad impact throughout South and Southeast Asia. This course will introduce students to this remarkable text and the literary tradition it inaugurated, through selected readings from the epic itself, along with samples of later renditions of its narrative (including contemporary theatrical, TV, and comic book versions).
ASIAN 1109FWS: Connected Cities in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries3
What can a tour of Asian cities teach us about early modern globalization? We will learn the fundamentals of good writing by learning about the key port cities of the Indo-Pacific in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our exploration will trace the bustling activities, scandals, and diplomatic endeavors in cities such as Nagasaki, Macau, Manila, Batavia, Acapulco, and beyond. We will write about the people and peoples in motion who encountered one another in these contact zones, including multi-ethnic pirates; Asian merchants in the Americas; samurai in Southeast Asia; and exiled Japanese Christians. By the end of the course, you will have deepened your understanding of the course material and the writing process through weekly Quite Writes and five formal essays.
This First-Year Writing Seminar is about Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture and provides the opportunity to write extensively about these issues. Topics vary by section and instructor.
ASIAN 1117FWS: Crafting Religion: Material Culture in Southeast Asia3
Is a Buddha statue sacred? Are churches built by Christians? In collaboration with the Johnson Museum, we will explore the multiple meanings of religious objects and sites to better understand the lives of communities in Southeast Asia. We will "look" at art pieces that index a religious reality, and "read" them to understand their makings, usages, meanings, and contemporary relevance, as objects of devotion ("sacred" contexts), as well "art" sitting in museums, looked at by tourists, or as "objects" traded for their economic value ("mundane" contexts). We will do free writing, write labels, describe objects' physicality and symbolisms. We will do close reading of articles. You will build on these skills, as you "craft" your final with the support of your peers.
ASIAN 1118FWS: Power, Protection, and Liberation: Buddhist Paths to Flourishing3
Buddhist texts and teachers often refer to "liberation," and "enlightenment." But what do Buddhists mean by "freedom"? How do Buddhist thought and practice address the human need for comfort and ways of inhabiting social and personal adversity? Looking at historical and modern-contemporary materials - including Buddhist writings, podcasts, and visual materials - we explore these and related questions. At the same time, working with different textual forms, we explore approaches to writing. What makes writing accessible and engaging? How can we describe richly and make our analyses and arguments clear? For academic writing and in our wider personal and professional lives, writing skills are a source of power, as well as an expression of creativity. Our assignments build writerly skills, and confidence, exploring summary, description, analysis and argument. We will write in a range of genres including more academic and journalistic pieces. Writing work takes place in and outside of class, through both independent and peer-work, and several assignments are workshopped through multiple drafts with the professor.
What is Southeast Asia? How does this faraway, exotic, region intersect with our realities? This course introduces key questions in the study of Southeast Asia (which includes Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) and its diasporas using cinematic, literary, historical and scholarly materials. This introduction to Southeast Asia's historical, religious, literary, visual, and political traditions -- and the ways in which scholars have thought about them -- addresses a variety of themes including notions of kinship, gender, political conflict, colonialism, media and the arts, sexuality, textual and visual genres, and forms of belief and belonging. Students will have an opportunity to investigate topics of interest to them, in the form of research essays as well as small-scale fieldwork, curatorial, or media projects. (ASIAN-GE)
This course serves as a general introduction to the study of Japan in the humanities. Through literature, film, art, and pop culture, we will explore how ?Japaneseness? and ?Japanese culture? have historically been constructed, debated, and rethought from early history to the present from a variety of perspectives and academic disciplines. All texts will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required. (ASIAN-GE)
This course provides an introduction to Korean culture and history from early times to the present. The course is designed to give students an overview of the transformations of Korean civilization in the context of the East Asian cultural sphere and globalization. We will engage with a wide range of texts and media across time periods, including films, primary historical sources in translation, literature, and music videos. Key themes and topics of the course include the formation of South and North Korea’s identities, the rise of Neo-Confucianism, Japanese colonization and (post) colonialism, the construction and performance of gender, the Korean War and postwar reconstruction, environmental change, and developments in popular culture, including K-pop. All texts for the course will be available in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required. (ASIAN-GE)
ASIAN 2222From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History II4
In 1868, samurai revolutionaries and their allies seized the reins of power and established a new capital they called Tokyo. Against all odds, this fragile regime survived and made Tokyo a center of power that would transform both Japan and the world. This survey of Japanese history explores the rise and fall of Japan as a modern imperial power; its foreign relations; its economic and scientific development from feudalism to futuristic technologies; and Japan's many modern revolutions, from the rule of the samurai to Westernization and democracy, from democratic collapse to fascism and World War II, and from Japan's postwar rebirth to the present. We will examine not only big events but also everyday life, including gender and sexuality, family and schools, and art and popular culture. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 2225Literature, Politics, and Genocide in Cambodia3
This course will examine various literary, historical, and political responses to the Cambodian genocide, particularly literary testimony by survivors and governmental efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. The course considers the limited effectiveness of these responses for addressing the causes and effects of genocide despite the vow of never again. To pursue these questions, students will read selections from novels and poetry written by Cambodian survivors, along with historical accounts of the genocide and analysis attempts by the Cambodian government and the international community to bring the perpetrators to justice. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 2230Introduction to China: Outsiders in History3
This is an introduction of Chinese civilization from ancient times up to the end of the Chinese empire in 1911. It is intended to familiarize students with the major concepts of Chinese history, society, and culture, focusing on agents that have been often neglected in canonical histories, such as socially marginalized people, the natural and ecological environment, and local and global networks. (ASIAN-GE)
ASIAN 2232Introduction to China: Getting Rich in Modern China3
People outside China often talk about China's rise, the changes in world economics and politics that come from the increase of the economic power of the People's Republic. From a domestic perspective, though, China's rise represents a promise to regular people that they will lead richer lives, both literally and figuratively. This course will examine the nature and history of that promise as it is experienced through literature, film, and other cultural texts. Why and how do PRC citizens want to get rich, and what happens when they don't? How does economic class shape identity in contemporary China? Can parts of the population be happy outside of the pursuit of material wealth? This class is one of several topical courses in the Department of Asian Studies that serve as introductory courses to important aspects or themes of Chinese civilization. The course assumes little or no background in the study of China. (ASIAN-GE)
ASIAN 2245Gamelan in Indonesian History and Cultures3
This course combines hands-on instruction in gamelan, Indonesia's most prominent form of traditional music, and the academic study of the broader range of music found in contemporary Indonesia, including Western-oriented and hybrid popular forms. Students thus engage with music directly, and use it as a lens to examine the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it. No previous knowledge of musical notation or performance experience necessary. (ASIAN-SC, MUSIC-HC)
Buddhism is now a global religion. How did it become one? Well before the digital age, traveling Buddhists and Buddhist objects moved across vast geographies, transforming communities along the way. The Indian Ocean — connecting West Asia to East Asia via South and Southeast Asia — was (and remains) crucial to Buddhist circulations. Looking at textual and visual materials from premodern times to the present day, this course shows how changing trans-regional conditions shape local Buddhisms, how Buddhist collectives around the Indian Ocean arena shape one another, and how trade, religion, and politics interact. (ASIAN-GE, HIST-HAN)
This course will explore religious traditions in South Asia (Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka) and East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) including Hinduism, Buddhism (South Asian and East Asian), Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto. We will also encounter a wide range of religious expressions, including myth, ritual, pilgrimage, mysticism, meditation, and other spiritual technologies. (ASIAN-GE)
ASIAN 2251The History of Religious Life in Imperial China4
In this course we will learn about the rich varieties of religious life in imperial China, focusing on major historical transformations between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. We will investigate the organization of pantheons and human relations with the divine, and consider how they might illuminate social relations. We will examine the ways in which religious rites and festivals helped to constitute social groupings such as families, communities, sects, and states. We will consider the roles of texts, theatrical performances, and clergy in transmitting and transforming understandings of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Finally, we will explore the spatial organization of the sacred in bodies, things, sites, and landscapes. (ASIAN-RL, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
In this course, we will explore over one hundred years of Japanese cinema?one of the most prominent and diverse global film industries?from silent comedies to J-Horror, ?ramen westerns? to Studio Ghibli. You will gain a thorough grounding in film vocabulary and tools of cinematic analysis, allowing for deep investigations of gender, genre, history, and the connections between film and other media in modern and contemporary Japan. All films will have English subtitles, and all readings will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 2254South Asian Religions in Practice: The Healing Traditions3
This course offers an anthropological approach to the study of religious traditions and practices in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The course begins with a short survey of the major religious traditions of South Asia: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. We look to the development of these traditions through historical and cultural perspectives. The course then turns to the modern period, considering the impact of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization upon religious ideologies and practices. The primary focus of the course will be the ethnographic study of contemporary religious practices in the region. We examine phenomena such as ritual, pilgrimage, possession, devotionalism, monasticism, asceticism, and revivalism through a series of ethnographic case studies. In so doing, we also seek to understand the impact of politics, modernity, diasporic movement, social inequality, changing gender roles, and mass mediation upon these traditions and practices. (ASIAN-RL)
In August 1945, Japan was a devastated country; its cities burned, its people starving, its military and government in surrender. World War II was over. The occupation had begun. What sort of society emerged from the cooperation and conflict between occupiers and occupied? Students will examine sources ranging from declassified government documents to excerpts from diaries and bawdy fiction, alongside major scholarly studies, to find out. The first half of the course focuses on key issues in Japanese history, like the fate of the emperor, constitutional revision, and the emancipation of women. The second half zooms out for a wider perspective, for the occupation of Japan was never merely a local event. It was the collapse of Japanese empire and the rise of American empire in Asia. It was decolonization in Korea and the start of the Cold War. Students will further investigate these links in final individual research projects. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This course explores the breadth of music found in present day China, Japan, and Korea--from indigenous musical traditions, through adaptations of Western art music, up to the latest popular styles--as well as the presence of traditional East Asian musics outside East Asia, including right here at Cornell. In both cases, music offers a lens for examining the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it. The course's academic focus on critical reading and listening, written assignments, and discussion is complemented by opportunities to engage directly with music, whether attending concerts or participating in workshops with student-led ensembles. Music majors may enhance this course with additional content and an extra credit by enrolling concurrently in MUSIC 3901. (ASIAN-SC, MUSIC-HC)
ASIAN 2261From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History I4
How did Japan evolve from samurai to superpower? We investigate this transformation in Japanese and world history over a two-semester sequence. Students are free to enroll in either semester independently. (All are welcome, but none required, to enroll in both semesters.) We begin in early Japan: the birthplace of the sun goddess Amaterasu, the imperial court devoted to her, and the samurai who rose to rule under her sway. Early Japan was also home to con-men and courtesans, mischievous gods and warring Buddhists, the world's first (and female!) novelist, and a surprisingly cosmopolitan culture of artists and scientists, comedians and entrepreneurs, human traffickers and international travelers. Our first semester exploring this eclectic culture culminates in the early modern era (1600-1868), when under samurai rule, Japan developed many modern elements that laid the groundwork for the revolutionary changes and superpower status examined in the second semester. We chart Japan's development not only through big events but also everyday life, delving into gender and sexuality, family and labor, arts and entertainment, and more. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
An exploration of processes of change in health care practices in China. Focuses on key transitions, such as the emergence of canonical medicine, of Daoist approaches to healing and longevity, of scholar physicians, and of traditional Chinese medicine in modern China. Inquries into the development of healing practices in relation to both popular and specialist views of the body and disease; health care as organized by individuals, families, communities, and states; the transmission of medical knowledge; and healer-patient relations. Course readings include primary texts in translation as well as secondary materials. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
This course introduces Korean popular culture in global context. Beginning with cultural forms of the late Choson period, the course will also examine popular culture during the Japanese colonial period, the post-war period, the democratization period, and contemporary Korea. Through analysis of numerous forms of media, including films, television, music, literature, and music videos, we will explore the emergence of the ?Korean Wave? in East Asia and its subsequent global impact. We will consider the increasing global circulation of Korean popular culture through new media and K-Pop?s transculturation of forms of American music such as rap. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is required. (ASIAN-SC)
Can we identify a distinctive Asian food and food culture? Challenging attempts to define heterogenous gastronomic practices as authentic reflections of a static Asian identity, this course discusses how food, diet, and cuisine have been integral to shaping boundaries of culture, identity, and nation across geographical and temporal divisions in Asia. We will examine how people use daily and visceral food experiences to imagine themselves as members of a given community, be it a nation, ethnicity, class, gender, or religion, while also examining how food practices constantly challenge that fixation and redraw these categories. Through examining a wide range of materials in diverse disciplines, ranging from reading historical and anthropological studies to watching ?food porn? and TV cooking shows, we will discuss topics related to cookery and the media, colonialism and culinary modernity, food production and consumption, gender and cooking, food and (trans)nationalism, diaspora and globalization of food as well as eating and inequality. (ASIAN-SC)
This course introduces the academic study of religion. This course serves as both an introduction to the academic study of religion and a survey of major topics in the intersections of religious communities and environmentally sustainable practices. Using real cases of environmentally sustainable, religiously oriented communities, we explore how myth, ritual, symbols, doctrines, and ideologies of time and space are activated in practical living decisions. This class involves readings of both primary sources, poetry and literature, secondary sources, films and site visits. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 2274Mughal India and the Early Modern World, c. 1500-18004
The largest of the three great Islamic empires of the early modern era, the Mughal empire at its height ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent, and more than 100 million subjects. This course offers a survey of the Mughal empire between c. 1500 and 1800, exploring how Mughal imperial culture reflected the cultural and religious diversity of India. We will consider how the rise and fall of the Mughals was connected to broader global transformations in early modern world, and how the rise of British power in India was shaped by the legacies of Mughal rule. Primary sources include court chronicles, biographies of emperors, as well as Mughal painting and architecture. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HPE, HIST-HTR)
This introductory course is a broad survey of the history of the Indian subcontinent from remnants of the Mughal empire through the end of the British empire into the postcolonial present. Prominent themes include the emergence of nonviolent protest, religious and regional identities, ethnic rivalries, social reform and the woman question, deindustrialization, nationalism and the place of democracy and militarism in a region that includes two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
The samurai looms large in Japanese history, often serving as one of the most recognizable symbols of Japan to global audiences. Yet this quintessentially ?Japanese? identity was also held by Japanese Christians, Koreans, Ming-dynasty refugees, women, Europeans, and even formerly enslaved Africans. Furthermore, far from being mere warriors, samurai filled many other roles, including those of doctors, naturalists, cosmographers, and popular fiction writers. By challenging the traditional image of the samurai, we will uncover the complexities of early modern Japanese culture and society. We will trace the samurai?s trajectory from their emergence in the 8th and 9th centuries to their zenith as the ?Great Unifiers? of the Warring States period. We will then consider their stagnation and decline during Japan?s ?Great Peace? and their eventual disappearance in the 1870s. We will also become critical consumers of various forms of samurai-related media?from Edo-period fiction, kabuki plays, and woodblock prints to contemporary anime, period films, and video games. Through this exploration, we will develop a more nuanced understanding of the samurai and their significance in Japanese history. No knowledge of Japanese is required. All readings will be provided in English translation. (ASIAN-SC)
The Indian subcontinent has been home to some of the most talented and surprising literary creators in world literature. These authors’ extraordinary lives and deeds have also influenced popular culture as the subject of biographies, films, monuments, and other forms of remembrance. In this course, we will consider how Indian authors have been understood through different eras of history, across different regions and linguistic traditions, and through different media. We will discuss specific seers and sages, playwrights, poet-saints, court poets, gurus, revolutionaries, fiction writers, memoirists, and even gods and consider their relationship to theoretical ideas of author and canon. We will also consider how authors animate contemporary debates about representation, religion, gender, and nationalism. Students will develop skills in literary, biographical, and historical analysis while becoming more familiar with both famous literary greats and marginal voices of Indian literature. There are no prerequisites for this course and all required readings will be supplied in English translation.
East Asian medicinal and martial arts, whether practiced in East Asia or in other parts of the world, have been important points of contact for people within and between often marginalized communities. In this course we will study the twentieth century development of East Asian combat and healing traditions, and the transport of those disciplines to the U.S. We will examine the personal, community, national, and global stakes of East Asian arts for those who invest in suppressing, teaching, and practicing them. We will consider how East Asian martial and medical practices relate, for example, to global and local histories of orientalism, colonialism, migration, and racism, and to historical post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements. Over the course of the semester, we will research martial and medical arts as they have been practiced in Ithaca, and place these local histories into their broader historical contexts. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HTR)
Students will study Chinese myths from the earliest times. Focus will be on understanding how people have used myth to create and convey meaning, on examining the form Chinese myths take, and on considering how they are related to religion, literature, historical accounts, and intellectual trends. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 2280Law and Society in Early Modern and Modern China4
China was and still is regarded in the Western world as a country without the rule of law. In this course, students examine recent scholarship that challenges this simplified understanding of the role of law in Chinese politics and society. It approaches law in early modern and modern China both as a state institution of governance and control, and as a platform that facilitates interactions and negotiations between state and society, between different social forces, and between different cultures. At the same time, this course guides students to develop projects of their own choice, either addressing legal issues or using legal sources, from tentative proposals to research papers based on their examination of original or translated primary sources. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 2281Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia3
This course offers a broad understanding of the crucial roles East Asian women played in culture, the economy, and society from antiquity to the early twentieth century. By rethinking the pervasive stereotype of the passive and victimized East Asian women under by staunch Confucian patriarchy, it aims to examine women?s struggles, negotiations, and challenges of the normative discourse of femininity, with a focus on patrilineal family, the female body and reproduction, domesticity and women?s economic labor, women?s work, literacy and knowledge, and the modernization of women. We will examine how Confucian notions of gender and family were, far from being fixed, constantly redefined by the historical and temporal needs of East Asian contexts. This examination is undertaken through a combination of reading original texts and secondary scholarship in various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, and material culture. No knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean necessary. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This course explores Asian speculative literary fiction and cinema including early mythological influences, science fiction, and contemporary discourses of technoscientific progress. Students will examine the historical development of the broad genres in their specific contexts; the conceptual relations between realism, science, fantasy, and speculation; and ultimately, question past and future understandings of ?Asia? as speculative. (ASIAN-LL)
In this sophomore seminar, we will explore cultural, political, and social debates in China's transition from an early modern empire to a republic, and then from a vanguard of world revolution to a post-communist party-state. Through examining primary sources in various forms (treatise, speech, and film), we will focus on issues such as Confucianism, Western-inspired cultural and legal concepts, nationalism, communism, feminism, liberalism, as well as indigenous understandings and appropriations of imported -isms. The course is organized around four debates: those between constitutional reformers and revolutionaries at turn of the 20th century; between New Culture radicals and statist reformers in the 1920s and 1930s; between politicians who resorted to social and political revolutions to save China and writers who believed in the transformative power of culture; and between liberals and leftist intellectuals in post-1989 China; with an interlude addressing the 1960s and the 1970s, when dissenting voices were encouraged in some ways and brutally suppressed in others. Students will participate in four debates organized at the end of each 3-week section. Each student will submit four short response papers on the four social debates the course covers. In consultation with the instructor, each student will choose a social debate from modern China that is NOT addressed in the classroom, developing a historiographical paper as his/her final essay. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 2285Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds4
Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern globalized world. The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds. People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 2287Gods, Ghosts, and Gurus: A Global Exploration of the Fantastic in Asian Religions3
This course serves as an introduction to key concepts in the study of the Fantastic, a fundamental analytic category in several academic disciplines, including literature, psychology, anthropology, art, and religion. Asia, the continent with the world?s largest population and the birthplace for several major religious traditions, is replete with narratives, beliefs and artistic practices which traverse the Fantastic?s diffuse aspects and explore its myriad dimensions. Our encounter with such phenomena will be concentrated on three of its key genres with roots in Asian and Asian-inspired religious movements: gods, ghosts, and gurus. Accordingly, course readings will discuss case studies from Hinduism, Buddhism, Traditional Chinese Religions, Vietnamese Cao ?i, and other such sectarian perspectives. Beyond gaining an empirical understanding of how each of these traditions has interpreted the classifications of god, ghost, and guru, we will also consider how religious practitioners have articulated their ideas about these entities in storytelling, visual objects, cinematic productions and other arenas of cultural expression. Overall, these inquiries will encourage students to critically engage with the following question: ?How can studies of Fantastical Figures affirm and expand conventional notions of religion?? (ASIAN-RL)
This course offers a survey of the art and culture of China from the Neolithic period to the twenty-first century to students who have no previous background in Chinese studies. The course begins with an inquiry into the meaning of national boundaries and the controversial definition of the Han Chinese people, which will help us understand and define the scope of Chinese culture. Pre-dynastic (or prehistoric) Chinese culture will be presented based both on legends about the origins of the Chinese and on scientifically excavated artifacts. Art of the dynastic periods will be presented in light of contemporaneous social, political, geographical, philosophical and religious contexts. This course emphasizes hands-on experience using the Chinese art collection at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art for teaching and assignments. In addition to regular sections conducted in the museum, students are strongly encouraged to visit the museum often to appreciate and study artworks directly. (ASIAN-SC)
In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations is highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China's long imperial tradition? This course explores the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present. It leads students to examine scholarship that challenges the popularly accepted myth of lineal progression of China toward gender equality, and to understand women's and men's life choices in various historical settings. At the same time, this course guides students to adopt gender as a useful analytical category, treating China as a case study through which students are trained to engender any society past and present. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
The Great Qing (1644-1911), a multi-ethnic empire that conquered China proper from the northeastern borderlands, expanded into central Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet, and consolidated the China-based empire's control over its southwestern frontiers. An heir to both Chinese and Inner Asian traditions, the Qing empire laid the foundation for the modern Chinese nation-state. In this course, students will focus on the political, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of China's long eighteenth century. Students will also locate the early modern Chinese empire in a regional and global context, examining its power influence in Korea and Southeast Asia, and its encounters and interactions with Western and Japanese imperialist powers. These encounters and interactions contributed to the domestic turmoil and foreign invasions that eventually led to the demise of China's imperial tradition. But they also gave rise to new forces that would shape the fate of modern China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Spring 2021 onward, this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for History Major. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
ASIAN 2294Of Saints, Poets, and Revolutionaries: Medieval and Modern Iran and Central Asia3
From the poet-kings of medieval Persia to the trading networks of the famed ?Silk Road? to the wandering mystics of Herat to the constitutional revolution of Iran to the colonial and post-colonial occupations of contemporary Afghanistan, this course offers a broad cultural and political history of Iranian and Turkic Central Asia. In addition, we will explore the highly complex intellectual, artistic, and architectural trends and ?cross-cultural? exchanges that formed the backbone of many disparate Iranian-Turkic cultures. (ASIAN-SC)
This course explores the evolution of Orientalism, focusing on how East Asia has been perceived in the West and in East Asia. By analyzing a range of cultural and literary works spanning the genres of travelogue, poetry, fiction, film, opera, photograph, painting, illustration, etc., the course critically examines the Orientalist dichotomy between the West and the non-West and analyzes the internalization of Orientalism in East Asia in constructing the marginalized other. In addition, through a combination of reading, writing, and in-class discussion, the course investigates the historical conditions surrounding the production and dissemination of Orientalist representations of East Asia and their relevance in the contemporary world. (ASIAN-SC)
This course reexamines Korea?s place in East Asia by studying transnational cultural and intellectual interactions that Korea has had with China and Japan. The course is divided into three parts. First, it examines Korea?s centuries-long participation in the China-centered East Asian world order and its exit from that world order around the turn of the twentieth century. Second, it turns to Japan?s emergence as an expansionist power in East Asia, replacing China?s long-term hegemony in the region, and the diverse ways Koreans and other East Asians, including the Japanese, coped with the Japan-centered new formation of the East Asian world order in the first half of the twentieth century. Third, the course moves to contemporary Korea and investigates the impact of the so-called Korean Wave (the global popularity of Korean popular culture) on Japanese society and Korea-Japan relations, giving students a chance to think deeply about the effects of Japanese colonialism on contemporary Korea-Japan relations and the possible role of culture in smoothing over ongoing political and diplomatic tensions between the two neighboring countries. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This course explores the historical development of South Korea since the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South following liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. By combining films with primary documents and scholarly readings, the course provides a comprehensive and vivid understanding of South Korea?s history, society, culture, and politics from the mid-twentieth century to the present. In particular, it critically investigates key issues that emerged during this turbulent period?including the legacy of Japanese colonialism, national division and the Korean War, military dictatorship, rapid economic development, and the democratization movement?through both textual analysis and cinematic representation. In doing so, the course examines how memory and remembrance of the recent past have shaped contemporary South Korean society. No prior knowledge of the Korean language is required. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 2298The Epic of Rama: The Ramayana and its place in Indian Cultural History3
Valmiki’s Sanskrit epic Ramayana occupies a pivotal role in India’s religious and literary history. Its central hero, the divine prince Rama, came to be seen both as model for political virtue and an ideal object of religious devotion, while the poem itself became the archetypal model for later poets. In this course we will read extensively from Valmiki’s epic, as well as several later literary and dramatic adaptations, and conidier broadly the role of the Ramayana in the shaping of Indian culture. We will also view samples of film, television and comic-book versions. (ASIAN-RL)
This course will explore the Buddhist tradition from its origins in ancient India to its migrations throughout Asia and eventually to the West. The first part of the course will deal with Indian Buddhism: the Buddha, the principal teachings and practices of his early followers, and new developments in spiritual orientation. We will then turn to the transmission of Buddhism to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, where at least one of the early schools has been preserved. Next we will look at Mahayana Buddhism as it moves north and east, encompassing China, Japan, and Tibet. While much of the course will be devoted to developments in traditional times, we will also look at some of the ways Buddhist cultures have responded to modernity. (ASIAN-RL)
Maoism and Chinese Communism are not history after Mao's death in 1976. In China, Maoism holds the key to the enduring success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one of the most remarkable organizations of the 20th and 21st centuries that has survived the collapse of communism in Europe and the USSR. With the beneficial transformation brought by capitalism and globalization in China, the end of the Cold War and the narrative of the end of history cannot explain the resurgence of Maoism. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
How did people in the pre-modern world connect to people in other regions, and for what purposes? Did there exist a “globalization” for them, just as we are experiencing today? This course explores these questions by setting you on the journey to the Silk Roads – a long-distance transportation network that links medieval China to Central Asia, and presumably the Middle East and Europe. Departing from Chang’an – the capital of medieval China, we will follow various actors on the roads: traders, monks, artisans, envoys – and investigate the traces they left, including texts, images, and objects, to assess the economic, cultural, and political impacts these roads had. Although this course’s time focus is the Tang-dynasty China (618-907) – one of China’s most cosmopolitan ages, we will extend attention to materials spanning from 200 BCE to the end of the first millennium, to trace the earlier developments and the decline of the Silk Roads in the wider time scale. This course will be taught in collaboration with collections of the Johnson Art Museum and the Kroch Asia Library. (ASIAN-SC)
The Cold War is the biggest historical event of the twentieth century. It profoundly shaped the world that we live in today. But surprisingly, the Cold War remains understudied. Cold War scholarship focuses predominantly on the USA or the USSR and the history of political or military conflict. At the same time, it overlooks Asia as one of its key arenas and does not pay due attention to the cultural dimension of the phenomenon. This writing seminar will focus on culture – film, art, architecture, and literature. We will also look at the Cold War from the vantage point of Asia and discover why it was hot there. You will practice writing about cultural production and gain new perspectives on modern non-Western history. (ASIAN-SC)
Contrary to the conventionally portrayed image of Buddhism as a peaceful, benign, and nonviolent religion, Buddhist traditions across Asia have long been populated by demons, ghosts, and wrathful deities. This course explores the many faces of the demonic in Buddhism, from Mara—the tempter who sought to prevent the Buddha's enlightenment—to hungry ghosts in the Buddhist purgatory, and fearsome guardian deities of Tantric Buddhism. Through texts, rituals, visual culture, and popular media, students will examine how Buddhists categorized, confronted, transformed, and sometimes worshipped demonic beings. We will ask what kinds of ethical qualities Buddhists associate with demons, what practices are invented to engage them, and how demonic figures have served not only as a means of identifying religious others but also as a mirror reflecting the anger, desire, and ignorance that Buddhism locates within humans themselves. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 2575Tyranny and Dignity: Chinese Women from the Cultural Revolution to the White Paper Protests4
This course focuses on the human condition of Chinese women after 1949. In the name of the Women's liberation movement since the early 1900s, do Chinese women eventually hold up the half sky? From the cradle to the grave, what was most challenging in women's life? How did political, economic, and cultural forces frame women's professional careers and private life? No judgments nor imaginations. Using multi-media, such as Chinese independent documentary films, music, and photographs, students will discover the hidden stories behind the mainstream narratives. Workshops with film directors, pop music singers, and photographers offer students an unusual way of accessing all backstage field experiences. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This course explores the history of imperial China between the 3rd century b.c.e. and the 16th century c.e. with a focus on the following questions: How did imperial Chinese states go about politically unifying diverse peoples over vast spaces? How did imperial Chinese approaches to governance and to relations with the outer world compare with strategies employed by other historical empires? How did those approaches change over time? How did major socio-cultural formations - including literary canons; religious and familial lineages; marketing networks; and popular book and theatrical cultures - grow and take root, and what were the broader ramifications of those developments? How did such basic configurations of human difference as Chinese (civilized)-barbarian identity, high-low status, and male-female gender operate and change over time? (ASIAN-GE, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
This course surveys modern Chinese history from 1600 to present. Time will be devoted to each of the three major periods into which modern Chinese history is conventionally divided: the Imperial Era (1600-1911), the Republican Era (1911-1949), and the People's Republic of China (1949-present). It guides students through pivotal events in modern Chinese history, and uncovers the origins of China's painful transition from a powerful early modern empire to a country torn by civil unrest and imperialist invasion, and then from a vanguard of world revolution to a post-communist party-state whose global power is on the rise. (ASIAN-GE, HIST-HAN)
By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal. (ASIAN-GE, HIST-HTR)
To what extent does the ideal of the US as a vanguard for democracy and freedom in the world match up with other aspects-military, economic, and humanitarian-of US foreign policy? This same question about the degree to which discourses and practices correspond might be asked of other countries, like the Soviet Union, China, and Britain, but this course examines the ways in which US foreign policy has been deployed over the course of the twentieth century and the ways those policies have been perceived and received by people living in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Particular case studies will be addressed stemming from the faculty's specializations (for example, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Chile) and the emphasis is on the role of the United States in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Prominent themes will include forms of subversion, from military muscle to economic coercion, and how and why they have changed over time; meanings of liberty, democracy, freedom, and sovereignty in different places and times; popular responses to policies and actions of foreign administrations; the relationships between sovereign states and transnational corporations; the uses and abuses of History in the formulation and justification of policy initiatives and in local responses to them; and the complexities involved in discerning internal and external forces in an increasingly transnational world. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HTR)
Devotion, or bhakti, has been expressed through art for over one thousand years in Hindu traditions within and beyond South Asia. In this course, students will engage with diverse primary sources for bhakti in both verbal and visual registers. These will include the Bhagavad Gita, poetic hymns of saint-poets, visual representations of gods, temple arts, poster arts, dramatic performance, and film. Students will learn how the history of bhakti relates to that of Hinduism and study its connection to social histories of caste and gender. We will also discuss what happens to devotional art as it crosses the boundaries of nation, culture, and media. (ASIAN-RL)
This course examines the long, complicated history of Korea?s relationship with China, focusing on the period from the fourteenth century to the present. Rather than having a nation-bound interpretation of history, the course explores how Korea?s national identity?from the Choson dynasty, through the colonial period, to the contemporary era of the two Koreas?has been shaped and negotiated in close relation to its interactions with China. By addressing various issues in Korean history that reflect Korea?s strong ties and conflicts with China, the course not only offers a comprehensive understanding of Korean history from a broader comparative perspective but also contributes to the transnational history of East Asia. No prior knowledge of Korean or Chinese is required. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 3022Science and Discovery: Japan and the "New World," 16th–17th Centuries3
In 1610, Nahua chronicler Chimalpahin wrote that a group of Japanese merchants had made landfall in Mexico, bringing with them writing desks, folding screens, porcelain, and silk. During this period, Japanese warlords, merchants, and converts began to engage in overseas exploration, journeying from Acapulco to Rome and traversing the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. At the same time, these actors engaged in colonial expansion, invading Korea, settling in parts of Southeast Asia, colonizing the island of Ezo (Hokkaido), and dominating the Ryukyuan islands (Okinawa). We will disentangle the complex and obscured role of the Japanese archipelago in early modern globalization through decolonial and archipelagic thinking. In each session, we will apply the readings to a primary source, such as an edict, a world-map folding screen, a set of playing cards, or an anti-Christian tale, that will serve as a focal point for the respective theme of the session. By grounding our interpretations in a diverse array of primary sources, you will develop an interdisciplinary skillset in visual, literary, and historical evidence and gain robust knowledge of transoceanic exchange. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3023Partition: Violence, Citizenship and the Making of Modern South Asia3
This course examines the Partition of British India as both a historical event and an ongoing process that reshaped the political, social, and legal landscape of modern South Asia. Moving beyond nationalist narratives, it situates Partition within broader debates on nationalism, religion, caste, gender, violence, migration, and citizenship. The course analyzes how India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh emerged not only through territorial division and war, but also through the management of refugees, the codification of citizenship, and the regulation of social and religious difference. Drawing on historiography, oral testimony, legal documents, and interdisciplinary scholarship, students will investigate how colonial residues and postcolonial imaginaries continue to structure state formation and belonging in the region. We begin by examining how Partition has been narrated, archived, and remembered, asking how history itself is written and contested. We then turn to the lived experience of violence, displacement, caste, and social rupture, tracing how communities were transformed in the moment of division. We then explore how postcolonial states sought to govern difference through refugee policy, constitutional design, citizenship law, and the management of minorities and majorities. Finally, we consider secession, internment, and unresolved conflicts, including those of 1971 and Kashmir, in order to understand the enduring afterlives of Partition in contemporary South Asia. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3025More-than-Human Worlds: Ghosts, Animals, and Insects in East Asian Tradition3
This upper-level seminar explores how East Asian literary, religious, and cultural traditions have imagined worlds shared by humans and nonhuman beings. Focusing on the ways in which the boundary between the human and the nonhuman is defined, contested, and reconfigured, the course engages in close readings of theoretical and primary texts featuring ghosts, animals, insects, objects, disability, and the figures of the barbarian other. Students will analyze how nonhuman agents unsettle anthropocentric assumptions and articulate alternative ontologies of life, agency, and relationality. Drawing on contemporary theoretical frameworks such as posthumanism, multispecies studies, and ecocriticism, the course invites students to reconsider what it meant?and what it might mean?to inhabit a world that is fundamentally more-than-human. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 3049History, Theory, and Methods in the Academic Study of Religion3
This course will explore the development of and variety in the academic discipline of Religious Studies. We will consider the emergence of secular approaches to the study of religion arising out of the European Enlightenment, and more particularly, the methods in the academic study of religion based upon different theoretical approaches. We will be particularly concerned to reflect upon the category of religious experience in modern discourses from historical, social scientific, hermeneutical, and psychological points of view. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 3303Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Chinese Literature3
This course covers some of the most important and influential modern Chinese fiction, poetry, and film. Each semester has an independent theme, but in every semester the group reads canonical writers from the early 20th century, watches Socialist film, and studies the work of the post-80s generation. All texts in this course will be available in English; all primary texts will also be available in Chinese. (ASIAN-LL)
This course provides students with an analytical framework to understand China's ongoing economic transformation. The courses goals include: 1) to familiarize students with different perspectives on China's economic development and future prospects; 2) to provide a close working knowledge of the evolving current situation, with a focus on internal variation within China-telling different Chinese stories, not one China story-and particularly emphasizing urbanization and the goal of shifting from manufacturing and export-led to services and domestic-led economy; and 3) to give students hands-on experience using Chinese economic data in the context of a brief research note. Each week will connect to current events and debates, with students writing three blog posts over the course of the semester to bring academic research and social scientific analysis to bear upon policy-relevant questions and developments. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3305Seminar on American Relations with China4
A historical review of the fragile and volatile U.S.-China relationship from the opening by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s until the present. Several individual sessions will be led by current or former executive branch or congressional officials, business people, journalists, representatives of nongovernmental organizations and others who have worked in China or have participated in the making of U.S. policy toward China. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3309Temple in the World: Buddhism in Contemporary South and Southeast Asia3
How do Buddhists live out their philosophies and ethics? What are the spaces of ritual, devotion, meditation, education, and politics? How do Buddhist practices and affiliations satisfy aesthetic and emotional needs and build social networks? Working with textual and visual materials, including video clips and longer films, this course explores the unfolding of Buddhist life in 20th- and 21st-century South and Southeast Asia, in locations such as Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 3314Korean Literature and Performance: From P'ansori to K-Pop3
This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary. (ASIAN-LL)
Video games have become one of the major cultural forces of the world, far surpassing the size of the film and music industries combined. They have also been key to developments in digital culture and technology, with the full extent of their impact on contemporary society only beginning to be understood. For much of the history of digital games, the vast majority of popular works have come from Japan?Nintendo, Sony, Sega, Capcom, Namco, and other companies have defined the medium as we know it?yet this remains largely not reflected in the growing discipline of game studies. In this course, we will explore key works from throughout game history and game studies in relation to culture and media in Japan, through experiments in writing, gameplay, and other forms of critical media practice. (ASIAN-SC)
In this course, we will be exploring the vast range of Japanese poetry?one of the most influential poetic traditions in the world?from its earliest incarnations to the present day. Over the course of the semester, our investigations will range from the ancient poems of the Man?yoshu, to the haiku of Issa and Basho, to the emergence of modern free verse poetry, and finally contemporary poetry in the age of the internet. At the forefront will be how literature connects to other media, by looking at poems composed through audio, film, painting, video games, and the computer. To do so, we will be taking a hands-on approach: students will not only analyze the form and content of Japanese poetry throughout the ages, but will also engage in critical poetic production themselves, trying their hand at composing poems in a variety of modes akin to the works under consideration. All texts will be available in both English and Japanese; class discussion and all assignments will be in English. No prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 3319From Meditation to Mat, Cave to Cartoon: Yoga as Philosophy, Practice, and Public Performance3
Fitness. Flexibility. Relaxation. Spirituality. These are just a sampling of the many buzzwords associated with groups of allied practices like Yoga, Meditation, and Mindfulness that have contemplative and physical dimensions. With mythologized origins among communities of obscure holy men living in the mountains of South Asia, yoga-centered traditions are now part of a multi-billion-dollar global industry, endorsed by celebrities and everyday people alike. In fact, statistics show that at least 1 out of 6 Americans today performs some kind of regular yoga routine. Indeed, the image of the proverbial yoga practitioner has been so influential on American public life, that at least two popular cultural icons from the past century, a baseball player and a cartoon character, have borne the first name Yogi. This course examines the evolution of yogic systems across three key historical periods?the classical, colonial, and contemporary?and offers students new perspectives on how activities that originated or stemmed from religious practice have acquired new meanings and objectives. Our approach will allow us to investigate both the continuities and disruptions within yogic philosophies from ancient times to the present. It will also allow us to assess how yoga-related concepts intersect in present times with notions of spiritual liberation, health and wellness, capitalist success, and racial justice. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 3324Modern and Contemporary Korean Literature3
This course examines major writers, works, and developments in modern and contemporary Korean literature from the early twentieth century to the present. Beginning with the cultural transition at the end of the Choson dynasty, we will consider how social issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, migration, and the environment factor into literary constructions of the self, community, and nation. The course integrates creative writing workshops to illuminate the process of literary composition and deepen analytical engagement. We will engage numerous theoretical frameworks to explore and interpret Korean literature in a transnational and global context, including (post)colonial criticism, feminist criticism, and ecocriticism. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required. (ASIAN-LL)
Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China's borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 3331Opt Out, Tune In: Hermits, Pilgrims and Dharma Bums, from East Asia to Ithaca3
This course explores the intentional removal of oneself from society as expressed in East Asian Buddhist literature, through the acts of hermits and pilgrims. We read the diaries, essays, autobiographies, and poetry of recluse monks and nuns from China, Korea and Japan, and the musings of pilgrims through the ages in these countries, with special attention to Japan. Last, we examine how the actions of many of these writers influenced the American counter-culture movement in the 1960?s and into the present. We inquire what light these writings can shed on ?the great resignation? of recent years, and ?quiet quitting? as a response to late capitalism, ecosystem collapse and climate change and social upheaval in our current times. Many of the figures we read were directly critiquing social excess and materialism, and these writings offer surprising assessments of our current age. (ASIAN-RL)
The idea of the barbarians is as old as civilization itself. But what is a barbarian, and what is the role that barbarians play, as the savage enemies of civilization? In this course we will address such questions by looking at how different civilizations have imagined their barbarians, ranging from their key role in Greek drama, and as infidels in religious conceptions, to Chinese walls, and American savagery. We will examine both historical examples, and the barbarians of today -- the terrorists and insurgents so often framed as dark and primitive, in contrast with ourselves. Through readings and visual materials, we will seek to discover what these barbarians have in common. We will look comparatively for the underlying patterns of history that the barbarians are drafted from, to draw a new picture of the barbarians. At the same time, we will arrive at a new understanding of civilization as such, as well as of the general nature of human inequality, and how it is justified. (ASIAN-SC)
This course will give students the historical background and theoretical tools to understand the politics of Southeast Asia, one of the world's most diverse and fascinating regions. The first part of the course traces Southeast Asia's political development from the colonial period to the present day, examining common themes such as decolonization, state building, war and insurgency, ethnic relations, democratization, economic development, and nationalism. The second part of the course focuses on key issues in contemporary Southeast Asian politics, including political culture, representation and mass politics, globalization, regional politics, and civil violence. Our course will concentrate primarily but not exclusively on the six largest countries in the region-Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam-using the comparative method to understand variation across time, across countries, and within countries. (ASIAN-SC, GOVT-CP)
This course will explore the origins and early developments of a movement in Indian Buddhism known as the Great Vehicle. We will intensively examine a small slice of this movement?s voluminous literature so as to better understand its call for a new spiritual orientation within Buddhism. Topics of discussion will include the career of the bodhisattva, the lay/monk distinction, attitudes of Mahayanists toward women and other Buddhists, and the development of Buddhist utopias and transcendent buddhas. (ASIAN-RL)
This course will survey the rich and sophisticated tradition of Indian philosophical thought from its beginnings in the speculations of Upanishads, surveying debates between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and materialistic philosophers about the existence and nature of God and of the human soul, the nature of knowledge, and the theory of language. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 3349Contemporary Cambodia: Labor, Development and Society3
This winter session course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the role of labor and industrial relations in Cambodian development. Taught over the winter break (Jan 3-Jan 17), this is a three-credit course taught in Cambodia, through the School of Continuing Education and Summer sessions. The course involves a mix of lectures and field visits. Classes will be conducted for 3 hours a day, followed by relevant field visits. Each class will be supplemented by guest lectures from Cambodian locals. (ASIAN-SC)
The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3351Heritage, History, and Identity in Cambodia3
This winter course on site in Cambodia will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present - how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today. We will visit historical sites as well as museums and other relevant sites, including performances, where history is remembered and engaged. There will be lectures, including by Cambodian experts, as well as film showings. The course will be based in Siem Reap, in collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies, and there will also be excursions to Phnom Penh, the capital. (ARKEO-TM, ASIAN-SC)
In this course, we will study Asia's kingdoms, states, and empires, and how this past is formulated as national heritage in present-day modern Asian states. We examine how Asian states and their royal traditions first came to be, including Hindu, Buddhist, and East Asian kings and emperors, and how the legacy of these glorious pasts is reinterpreted and staged as national heritage. Our examples will include Cambodia's Angkor empire modeled on Indian traditions, as well as Burma, Thailand, Japan, China, and more. We will use readings, films, lectures and in-class student presentations on many topics. The course also serves as a prerequisite to the separate in-country Winter semester course Heritage, History, and Identity in Cambodia (ANTHR 3590/6590). (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3365Genocide Today: The Erasure of Cultures3
This course offers an introduction to the global issue of genocide and other mass atrocities, with an in-depth look at two genocides in Asia ongoing since 2017: in China, and in Burma (Myanmar). First, we will study how genocide works: the prerequisites, warning signs, and how it is carried out. We study the creation of the term genocide as a new crime in international law after WWII, in the UN Genocide Convention, and the checkered history of failing to prevent new genocides (incl. in Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new genocides under way against the Uyghurs in China and against the Rohingya in Burma: background, events, actors involved, the role of media and propaganda, and why Burma expels people while China force-assimilates people in place. (ASIAN-SC)
The course will survey in translation a selection of major works of poetry, drama, and aesthetic theory and criticism from the Sanskrit literary tradition of premodern India. Beginning with selections from the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, traditionally regarded as the “first poem” in the Indian tradition, we will turn to survey prominent examples from the ongoing tradition of epic poetry, the rise of romantic and heroic drama through the works of the fifth century Gupta poet Kalidasa and his successors, and the extensive corpus of Sanskrit and Prakrit lyric poetry from the 2nd to the 14th century AD. (ASIAN-LL)
This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship-critiquing them and engaging their ideas-we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.
The rapidly growing literature of the Korean diaspora is one of the most significant developments in Korean literature since the 20th century. As Korean literature has circulated as world literature, it has become more widely recognized in the Anglophone world through translation and through narratives written by Korean American authors. This course will explore Korean American literature and creative transpacific exchanges between Korea and the US, addressing issues of identity, language, place, migration, race discrimination, citizenship, and the ways in which storytelling shapes community. We will examine the vibrant dialogue between works of fiction and poetry across the Pacific, reading the work of Korean American authors alongside the writing of Korean authors working in the Korean language. Increasingly, Korean American writers are creating narratives that remember and reconfigure Korean history and Korea?s relationship to the US, and we will explore narratives and poetry that offer new perspectives on the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and American imperialism such as Min Jin Lee?s Pachinko, Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, and Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 3380The Asian Century: The Rise of China and India3
The course will be thoroughly comparative in order to highlight both the specificity of each country as well as more generalizable dynamics of 21st century development. It will be divided into a number of inter-related modules. After a framing lecture, we will briefly cover the two countries' distinct experiences with colonialism and centralized planning. Then we will move on to dynamics of growth, which will seek to explain the relative success of China in the era of market reforms. In analyzing political consequences, we will assess how new forms of cooperation and conflict have emerged. This will involve attention to both internal dynamics as well as how rapid development has seen an increasing accumulation of political power in the East. It goes without saying that accelerating growth has led to huge social change, resulting in profound reorganizations of Chinese and Indian society. Finally, the course will conclude by returning to our original question - is this indeed The Asian Century? What does the rise of China and India mean for the rest of the world, and how are these two giant nations likely to develop in the future? (ASIAN-SC)
This course surveys the art and architecture of South Asia since 1200 CE. We cover major developments over the last eight centuries, including the architecture of the Sultanate Period, Vijaynagar, painting and architecture in the Deccan and South India, Mughal art and architecture, and Rajput painting. We look at British period colonial art and architecture, the rise of nationalism and modernism in Indian art and the circulation of vernacular images, including posters and bazaar prints in the twentieth century. The recent globalization of South Asian contemporary art is also examined. Artistic movements are situated with reference to social, economic, and political developments. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 3383Imagining Indian Pasts: History, Heritage, and Cultural Memory3
Is the Indian past real or imagined? Why might different communities, or successive generations, tell the same history differently? Can history be told through myth, fiction, or popular films? Does it belong to individuals or collectives, and can it be bought and sold? If history is written by the victors, then where can we find unwritten and marginal histories? In this course, students will be introduced to major debates in the fields of Indian historiography, mnemohistory, and memory studies. We will discuss how India’s past has been reimagined over time by pursuing close analysis of primary texts, visual artifacts, and film. Students will become familiar with multilingual genres of history writing in Sanskrit, Persian, and vernaculars like Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, and Tamil. We will also learn about the impact of Christian mission, European colonization, tourism, immigration, heritage industries, and the rise of digital media on practices of cultural memory. (ASIAN-SC)
How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective? Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 3392Objects in Motion: Transoceanic Japan and the Port Cities of Asia3
What can objects produced in the port cities of the Indo-Pacific world teach us about early modern globalization? Movement into and out of key trade centers in the Indo-Pacific became more interconnected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course we study the peoples, animals, objects, and oceanic forces “in motion” that encountered one another in these contact zones, paying particular attention to how such objects are read as evidence of exchange. With a particular focus on the circulation of Japanese material culture and export artworks, our inquiry enables us to re-examine the conceptual and geographic boundaries of identity and artmaking in the early modern world. By tracing the mobilities of the Japanese diaspora through South and Southeast Asia and the Americas, we examine the emergence of diverse hybrid cultures and the creolization of local and global artistic traditions in Nagasaki, Macau, Manila, Goa, Batavia, Acapulco, and beyond. Alongside these case studies, we develop the methods of close looking, provenance research, and material analysis that illuminate objects whose makers and meanings often sit outside the traditional canon. This course also has a curatorial component: each student researches an object related to Asian port cities held in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum collection. Students prepare an exhibition with the selected objects in the Education Gallery, learning to draft object labels, shape a narrative for visitors, and consider the choices that go into presenting art to the public. (ASIAN -SC)
China is often thought of as being isolated from the outside world. It is imagined as existing in historic seclusion, and, following the establishment of the People's Republic, as pursuing a path of autarky. Such separation has then only been somewhat modified by the set of economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping first instituted in the late 1970s. In this lecture we will seek to turn such conventional wisdom on its head through examining what China is via a consideration of transnational currents within the country's development. However, the course's primary focus will not be upon the past, but rather the present and attempting to determine just where the point of intersection between China and the rest of the world is. Coming to terms with such an issue will provide those who enroll in the class with a deeper, more nuanced, understanding of China's rise and this trend's implications for the rest of the world. We will accomplish this task through a combination of surveying the existing literature on China and transnational politics, and considering new theoretical perspectives on both. (ASIAN-SC, GOVT-IR)
ASIAN 3396Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century4
Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attention to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions. Considers global transformations that brought the West into people's lives in Southeast Asia. Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded. Assigns primary texts in translation. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 3397Monsoon Kingdoms: Pre-Modern Southeast Asian History4
This course examines Southeast Asia's history from earliest times up until the mid-eighteenth century. The genesis of traditional kingdoms, the role of monumental architecture (such as Angkor in Cambodia and Borobodur in Indonesia), and the forging of maritime trade links across the region are all covered. Religion - both indigenous to Southeast Asia and the great imports of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - are also surveyed in the various premodern polities that dotted Southeast Asia. This course questions the region's early connections with China, India, and Arabia, and asks what is indigenous about Southeast Asian history, and what has been borrowed over the centuries. Open to undergraduates, both majors and non-majors in History, and to graduate students, though with separate requirements. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
This course explores Socialist Realism as a genre in Asia across literary production, cinema, visual culture, and architecture. It argues that Socialist Realism was not realist and ponders what it intended to communicate to audiences. Exploring Marxism, the history of socialist movements in Asia, and their cultural production, this course takes cultural objects as the entry point into a wide array of subjects: decolonization, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, alternative potentialities and ideal futurities, women's liberation and socialist nation-building, etc. In this course, students will learn how to think critically about Asian socialism and its agendas and analyse cultural production in relation to its historical milieu. (ASIAN-SC)
Instinctively, we think about time as an objective physical force: linear and irreversible. Yet, in the humanities, another way of thinking about time is productive for intellectual discovery– time as a cultural construct, with different shapes and velocities, that underlie the structures of Western and non-Western modernity and social, racial, and gender differences. Did people perceive time in the past the same way as we do now? Do Asian societies conceptualize time in the same imagery as Western ones? How do Asian religions, ideologies, and political systems affect popular ideas about time and futurity? In this course, you will become familiar with theories of temporality in Asia and learn how to think about time in the historical and cultural context and write about it academically. (ASIAN-SC)
How to define and interpret the human condition in China under Mao's ruling (1949-1976)? What was human resilience in the face of power? How did Chinese people constantly find ways to re-organize their lives in a pragmatic way? How to evaluate the human cost of institutional arrangements? In this undergraduate course, we will use first-hand resources and case studies to closely analyze life and death in the Mao Era. Reading the lived experiences of five social classes, such as industrial capitalists, workers, peasants, cadres, and intellectuals, in those successively political movements after 1949, students will gain an understanding of how the Chinese navigated their lives in difficult times. They might be a senior partner for Shell in Shanghai, a hearted Christian and wife, an outspoken intellectual who was persecuted over years, and a former hard laborer who is today one of Asia's best-known financiers or women from China's countryside and so forth. The course will shed light on the interrelations between institutional frames, individual identity, gender and revolutionary politics in the Mao Era and will highlight the many different experiences of life and death in Mao's China, in terms of class, gender, generation. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 3705Gateways of Tokugawa Japan: Global Encounters and Reframing the “Closed Country”3
This seminar offers an examination of Japanese foreign relations and engagements during the Tokugawa Period (1603?1868). This period has traditionally been organized through the frame of Japanese isolationism (sakoku, lit. ?closed country?). A retroactive application of Englebert Kaempfer?s conception of Japanese foreign politics, the term sakoku remains entrenched in twentieth-century understandings of the period?s transregional and transcultural dynamics. This course guides students through a reconsideration of the isolationist historiography of early modern Japan, known to famed Japanologist Donald Keene as the ?world within walls.? Upon further study of the four gateways, which facilitated trade with the Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Ryukyuans, and Ainu, recent scholarship has moved towards a pluralistic understanding of sakoku, with the corrective terminology ?maritime prohibitions? serving to highlight the multifocal, dynamic, and diachronic aspects of the concept. By examining historical documents, world maps, cosmographic writings, and literary evidence, we will explore the various modalities by which Japanese agents imagined, encountered, and ordered the outside world. No knowledge of Japanese required. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 3980The Pacific Horizon: Oceania, Asia, and the Americas4
The Pacific Horizon is a long one; it stretches from Chile west across the world's largest ocean to places such as Australia and Japan, and then back across the ocean again to North America. All the while it beckons to oceanian islanders, from Rapa Nui to Oahu, from Chuk to Vanuatu. In this class we will look at the Pacific as a unitary whole, as well as through the sum of a number of its component parts, often classified as regions. Yet always, the sea connects -- and we will try to get at connection with nearly every turn in this course. We are interested in looking at the breadth and width of this ocean through historical time, and how connections were made across wide, maritime spaces. (ASIAN-SC) (HIST-HTR)
ASIAN 4020Buddhist Moderns: Visions of Human Flourishing3
Do modern times (which are experienced and conceptualized in varied ways) pose distinctive problems and opportunities for Buddhists? How are Buddhist teachings drawn into forms of social and political critique, activist and advocacy projects, and theorizing about human communities and social processes? In the 20th and 21st centuries, how do Buddhist teachings and practices inform practical and conceptual approaches to human flourishing? Drawing on thinkers from several parts of Asia and the Americas, this seminar highlights how persons work creatively with Buddhist teachings. We shall explore how Buddhist teachings are interpreted to address painful circumstances, as well as how such hermeneutics may offer new (and sometimes liberatory) ways of seeing selves, others, and communities. Writers and artists considered in this seminar interpret Buddhist teachings and practices in relation to capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, environmental ethics, and nationalism. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 4021Zen Buddhism and its Japanese Context: Major Thinkers3
This course explores the Buddhist tradition of Zen through a focus on the major figures in its Japanese context who have contributed to its foundational practices and promulgation and its revitalization after periods of decline. We begin with the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the 6th century and the issues surrounding the establishment of the ?six schools? of Buddhism in the 8th century and the prestige and dominance of the Tendai School on Mt. Hiei. This allows us to see the uniquely Japanese context of religious debates. We then turn to an exploration of the Zen thinkers Eisai, D?, Keizan, and Hakuin and see how these thinkers all introduced ideas to Japanese Zen practice that led the tradition into new directions from its Chinese origins: tea cultivation, work practice, and monastic reform. Last, we study how Zen came to be regarded as the ?way of the warrior? and a symbol of Japanese uniqueness and militarism. The course ends with an exploration of Zen expansion in the US in the 20th century and the ?D? boom? in American literary theory. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 4023Buddhism and Politics in South and Southeast Asia3
Buddhist ideas, practices, and institutions play many roles in the political life of South and Southeast Asia, in the present day and throughout the long history of these regions. This course approaches ?politics? broadly. Thus, the course explores how persons invoke Buddhist concepts and understandings of Buddhist traditions when acting for and against state and sovereign powers, but also how Buddhist ideas and institutions are drawn into other social projects that shape the flow and accumulation of social capital, economic benefit, and authority. Case studies and theoretical works address historical, modern, and contemporary materials. Assignments include the opportunity for students to focus on a contemporary regional location of their choice. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 4024Science, Medicine, and Media Technologies in East Asia3
This seminar course introduces students to the studies of science, technology, and medicine in East Asia, aiming to cultivate a foundational understanding of the field while exploring key topics relevant to the region. Each year, the course themes vary; this year, we focus on environments, media, and bodies. As a reading and writing intensive course, it challenges students to engage deeply with the material and articulate their insights through rigorous analysis. In doing so, students learn to appreciate the complex power dynamics at play as science and technology interact with a diverse range of actors, tracing intricate trajectories across national, transnational, and global networks. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 4075Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China4
Through readings and discussions, this seminar will take multiple approaches to explore history, politics and society in 20th century China from the perspective of fashion. How to define politics from the dimension of fashion? What's a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance? (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 4076History of US-China Relations, 1949-20254
How did the U.S. and China reach this precarious moment? Are they on the brink of a hot war, or can diplomacy still prevent the worst? Is a cold peace even possible? This course critically examines the history of U.S.-China relations from 1949 to 2025, exploring the key diplomatic, economic, military, social, and ideological developments that have shaped bilateral ties. Beginning with early Cold War hostility (1949–1972), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the prolonged diplomatic estrangement (1953–1972), the course traces pivotal moments such as Nixon’s historic rapprochement (1972-1979), the cautious engagement of normalization (1979–1989), China’s economic rise and global integration (1990s–2008), and the evolving tensions of interdependence often described as ‘One Bed, Two Dreams’ (2008–present), shifting security dilemmas, and ongoing trade and technological competition. Special attention will be given to the contemporary landscape of strategic containment, rivalry, and the price of competition and cooperation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will analyze primary sources, academic literature, government reports, and firsthand accounts to assess how U.S.-China relations have evolved within a broader global context. Discussions will engage with pressing issues, including military tensions in the Indo-Pacific, economic decoupling, and the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship in an era of geopolitical uncertainty. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
In this advanced seminar, we read and debate cutting-edge scholarship on modern Japan alongside classic studies. We?ll interrogate how ?Japan? emerged as an empire and nation-state; Japan?s shifting borders and fraught relations with foreign powers and conquered lands; and the tricky question of what it means to be ?Japanese.? Readings vary by semester, but major topics include empire, colonialism, and nationalism; war and peace, with emphasis on World War II; race, gender, and reproductive politics; democracy and fascism; labor and class; the history of science; and the meaning of ?modern.? (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This is an events-based course. Students will attend ten seminars in the South Asia Program seminar series. The work of scholars, filmmakers, and artists presenting research in the series spans the region and its diasporas (e.g., India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Indian Ocean worlds). Topics considered will cross the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Students will attend these events and engage with the material presented in short response papers and supplemental readings. The objective of this course is to offer students, whether they are familiar with the region or not, new perspectives on the lived experiences of South Asia. Students will also become familiar with interdisciplinary area studies as an intellectual project. (ASIAN-SC)
Overview of the history of the Japanese language followed by intensive examination of issues of interest to participants. Students should have reading knowledge of Japanese. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 4413Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia4
This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity. (ASIAN-SC)
Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in traditional Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This course explores the development of the concept of race as applied by and to Asian populations and societies. We also examine the idea of Asia and its others in global discourse, including through lenses such as Orientalism, Occidentalism, Pan-Asianism, and Afro-Asianism. Our focus is on the history of East Asia and trans-Pacific entanglements with Western empires from the early modern era to the present. A major theme is race science, or the scientific investigation and construction of race, as it was practiced on and by East Asian peoples. We also explore intersections of race with nationalism, imperialism, warfare, law and citizenship, and sex and the family. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology. (ASIAN-SC)
Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia? (ASIAN-SC)
Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
ASIAN 4435Making Sense of China: The Capstone Seminar4
This course serves as a survey of major issues within Chinese politics and foreign policy and constitutes the capstone seminar for CAPS students. It is intended to give students an opportunity to explore aspects related to Chinese politics, economics, and society that they may have touched upon in other China-focused courses at Cornell, but have not been able to examine as fully, and with the degree of care, that they would like. In this regard, the substance of the course will be developed through an iterative process between the instructor and the seminar participants. We will spend the first part of the course doing a series of recent influential readings on contemporary China and developing initial research projects. The second half of the class will be organized around student led presentations of research projects (accompanied by relevant academic, media, and policy readings). (ASIAN-SC)
This course investigates the incorporation of sensory perceptions into textual practice as represented in Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Jin Ping Mei was a 16th century Chinese novel masterpiece, describing the downfall of the merchant Ximen Qing?s household as he engages in corrupt and lustful actions with a number of wives, concubines, and maids. It is known for its sensational depiction of sex and sensory excess. Why does the novel devote so many pages to detailed descriptions of food, clothing, and music? What kind of visual, auditory, and tactile senses does the text elicit and how do they affect textual meaning? And how do the various sensory renderings of the text influence readers and reading practices? We will explore the ways in which text serves as a site of interconnection among senses and highlight the various forms of human sensuousness by combining a close reading of Jin Ping Mei with a reading of the most recent studies on intermediality, materiality, and the history of senses. (ASIAN-LL)
Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum. (ASIAN-SC)
China's transition to capitalism has resulted in more than a generation of rapid and nearly uninterrupted growth. It increasingly dominates the production of all sorts of goods, from the very low end and labor intensive, to the high value added and capital intensive. China is aiming to dominate future product cycles, and is making major inroads in digital technology, AI, and robotics. This spectacular re-emergence as a world power has also increasingly lead to political conflict, both domestically and internationally. This course proceeds by assessing the interplay between marketization and economic transformation on the one hand, and social change and resistance as seen from the perspective of workers, on the other. While the course is specifically concerned with labor issues, we will see that the workplace is a prism that condenses and refracts much broader transformations occurring in Chinese society. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4446Classical Indian Poetry and Comparative Poetics3
This course will treat the classical Indian tradition as a case study in comparative poetics. We will read works of Sanskrit poetry in translation, along with selections from the works of both Sanskrit and early modern and contemporary Western literary and aesthetic theorists. We will look at the way contemporary developments in aesthetics have shaped the reception of Sanskrit poetry and poetic theory over the past two centuries, as well as using parallel readings in classical Indian and contemporary theory to explore the broader normative question of how theoretical resources should be deployed in the interpretation of other, particularly classical literatures. (ASIAN-LL)
Seminar intended to examine the increasingly complex relationship that has evolved between China and the rest of the international system, with particular focus on the rise of Chinese nationalism and the extent to which those in Tibet, Xinjiang, and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan, are contesting such a trend. In so doing, the course emphasizes the interrelated, yet often contradictory, challenges facing Beijing in regards to the task of furthering the cause of national unity while promoting policies of integration with international society and interdependence with the global economy. (ASIAN-SC, GOVT-IR)
ASIAN 4451Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema3
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4452Critical Filipino and Filipino American Studies4
This course focuses on three major and interrelated themes within Filipino/Filipino American history: war/empire, labor/migration, and culture/imaginaries. How do we account for the overwhelming number of Filipinos in nursing, domestic work, and the U.S. military? How do filmmakers, visual/theatre artists, and writers continue to remember the oft-forgotten history of U.S.-Philippine relations? In what ways have diasporic and immigrant Filipinos as well as Filipino Americans created their own culture as well as engaged with their counterparts in the Philippines? By reading historical and sociological texts alongside popular cultural texts and artistic examples, this course considers the politics of history, memory, and cultural citizenship in Filipino America. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4454The Rise of China and Change in World Politics4
The rise of China is one of the most important and defining themes in changing world politics. This seminar course is intended for students to examine major issues and topics concerning the rise of China against the backdrop of paradigmatic change in world politics from a historical and theoretical perspective, and to engage in the academic discourse and policy debate about dynamics of China's rise and its implications for world politics, and vice versa, how evolving world politics inform and influence the process of China's rise - namely, mutual constitution of rising China and the changing world. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4456Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture4
This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective. (ASIAN-SC)
This course surveys major schools of classical Chinese philosophy: Confucianism, Mohism, and Daoism. We focus on the Confucian vision of an ideal life, moral development, and self-cultivation, whereby one refines and reshapes one's emotions to achieve ethical excellence and contribute to one's community. We explore the Mohist advocacy of an ethics in which everyone is to be treated impartially, and the differences between Mohism and Confucianism in relation to key ethical issues. We emphasize the Daoist rejection of Confucian moral preaching and the idea that the truth can be captured through theorizing and argument, as well as the espousal in this tradition of non-action and intuitive action. We shall see how advocates of these different philosophies debated and borrowed ideas from each other. (ASIAN-SC)
This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory. (ASIAN-SC, PMA-HTC)
Theories of modernization have inspired, informed, and plagued histories of middle and late imperial China. For the Song-Qing eras (roughly 10th-19th centuries), comparative studies have variously found and sought to explain modernization emerging earlier than in Europe, an absence of modernization, or alternative paths of modernization. Regional models have argued for pan-East Asian systems and patterns of modernization. Global models have argued that China had a vital role in European development as a provenance of modernizing institutions and ideas, as a source of exploited resources, or otherwise as an integral part of global systems. In this course we explore these historiographical debates and develop critical perspectives, including approaches to escaping Eurocentric and teleological frameworks. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on Chinese identity in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of Chinese art history in the West. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4477Ecocriticism, Indigeneity, and East Asia in Global Context3
This interdisciplinary seminar examines the relationship between literature and the environment in an East Asian and global context. We will explore key questions and approaches in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities as they relate to ecological change in Korea, China, and Japan. How does literature make environmental crises, their effects on sentient beings, and the earth itself more visible? In what ways does storytelling give voice to changing relationships between humans and the more-than-human world? The seminar will engage the significant conceptual contributions Indigenous thinkers from Asia and the Americas have contributed to ecocriticism as we examine how poets, novelists, filmmakers, artists, nonfiction writers, and critics have responded creatively to environmental change. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 4478China Imagined: The Historical and Global Origins of the Chinese Nation4
As China, with its China Dream, rises in power on the global stage, what China means to its inhabitants and outsiders has become an issue increasingly relevant to business, international relations, and cultural exchange, and a topic that draws intensive attention from historians and social scientists. This course brings together undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in shifting meanings embedded in the concept of China, either as part of their research agenda, or as a useful lens for comparative analysis. Focus will be on how China as an Empire/ a Nation was conceptualized by different people in different periods and in different contexts, and on the reality and representation of China as political, cultural, racial, and geographical entities. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
What does it mean to be ?modern?? How is it tied to one?s (person, community, country, government, stakeholders) desires and aspirations for the future? How does it relate to one?s past? In this seminar we explore how idea(l)s of modernity have taken shape, how they were received and articulated, and how they continue to change. We will read scholarship addressing idea(l)s of modernity in relation to health, technology, the environment, politics, gender, the economy, and more. Reading materials will adapt to seminar members? interests. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)
ASIAN 4487Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia3
This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4489Theory and Anthropology from Below: Special Topics3
This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political. (ASIAN-SC)
This is an advanced seminar on the political economy of East and Southeast Asia. Our central task is to uncover the political underpinnings of economic performance across countries and over time. Along the way, we will address issues such as corruption and rent-seeking, the developmental state, class conflict, ethnic politics, reform and stagnation, and democracy.
ASIAN 4499Water: Art and Politics in Southeast Asia3
This seminar will focus on the significance of water –economic, religious, political, social –and its role in the art and architecture of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Cambodia and Indonesia. While India and China can be seen to provide aquatic themes and patterns for transformation, the emphasis in this course will focus on local ingenuity, how technologies of water use and control at ancient sites in Southeast Asia can be seen to shape vivid symbologies, performing past and present. The course will be taught at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.
ASIAN 4506Ocean Technopolitics and Global Futures3
This course examines the profound and far-reaching politics and dynamics generated by ocean technologies and infrastructures in this age of globalization and Anthropocene. It adopts an empirical and ethnographic approach and draws upon disciplines across natural and social sciences. Through multimodal course materials, scaffolding exercises, and reflective class activities, we will be looking into the bio-, geo-, and socio-environmental politics and dynamics of contemporary and emergent ocean technologies and infrastructures. The scope of the course is global with a significant coverage of Asia due to its role being a maritime epicenter. Through this course, students will gain critical knowledge and perspective to understand and navigate exigent oceanic issues, sociotechnical systems of power, and the planetary future.
ASIAN 4707Scale, Size, and the Politics of Expression in Asia3
When Beijing hosted the summer Olympics in 2008, its opening ceremony left viewers, journalists, and visitors impressed and sometimes alarmed by its enormity, encompassing a massive cast of dancers, musicians, and other performers led by iconic film director Zhang Yimou. It was judged as not just a celebration or an artistic achievement, but as a message: China was ready to overwhelm the world. Size mattered, likely in the moment's design, and certainly in its reception and interpretation. This interdisciplinary seminar takes an innovative approach to politics in Asia, considering size and its meanings: from the small and the close-knit to the expansive and powerful. We will consider especially the varied techniques of their political, public, and pop cultural representations. (ASIAN-SC)
Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4844The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New Art3
An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards-from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video-quickly came to be known as contemporary Chinese art. This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 4845Contemporary Performance Art in East Asia, 20th -21st Century3
Since the mid-twentieth century, artists based in and across East Asia have turned to performance art, using bodily actions to blur the boundaries between art and everyday social life. This course analyzes performance art’s sociocultural underpinnings by treating it as an artistic medium and a critical practice shaped by interrelated histories of geopolitical conflict, colonialism, modernization, authoritarianism, and globalization in the East Asian context. Students will examine a range of approaches including happenings, body art, durational pieces, site-specific practices, and socially engaged performances to consider broader theoretical issues such as performance’s paradoxical dependence on visual documentation, censorship and the politics of visibility, gender and sexuality, temporality, and spectatorship. Attention will be given to local contexts while also tracing transnational networks and art festivals that influence how East Asian performance art circulates and is interpreted.
This course is an introduction to ideological and narrative disputes in the field of Asian Studies, intended for new M.A. students and other graduate students in the field. It is intended to provide examples of and practice in cultural criticism, to help assess and resist received wisdom, and to aid in opening transnational scholarship to new ideas and new voices. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 5505Methodology of Asian Language Learning and Teaching2
This course presents theories of language teaching and learning, and shows how they apply to Asian language course structure, classroom instruction, and assessment techniques. Students will observe classes taught by experienced teachers, discuss language learning theory and practice, and design and implement their own class activities. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6020Buddhist Moderns: Visions of Human Flourishing4
Do modern times (which are experienced and conceptualized in varied ways) pose distinctive problems and opportunities for Buddhists? How are Buddhist teachings drawn into forms of social and political critique, activist and advocacy projects, and theorizing about human communities and social processes? In the 20th and 21st centuries, how do Buddhist teachings and practices inform practical and conceptual approaches to human flourishing? Drawing on thinkers from several parts of Asia and the Americas, this seminar highlights how persons work creatively with Buddhist teachings. We shall explore how Buddhist teachings are interpreted to address painful circumstances, as well as how such hermeneutics may offer new (and sometimes liberatory) ways of seeing selves, others, and communities. Writers and artists considered in this seminar interpret Buddhist teachings and practices in relation to capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, environmental ethics, and nationalism. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 6021Zen Buddhism and its Japanese Context: Major Thinkers3
This course explores the Buddhist tradition of Zen through a focus on the major figures in its Japanese context who have contributed to its foundational practices and promulgation and its revitalization after periods of decline. We begin with the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the 6th century and the issues surrounding the establishment of the ?six schools? of Buddhism in the 8th century and the prestige and dominance of the Tendai School on Mt. Hiei. This allows us to see the uniquely Japanese context of religious debates. We then turn to an exploration of the Zen thinkers Eisai, D?, Keizan, and Hakuin and see how these thinkers all introduced ideas to Japanese Zen practice that led the tradition into new directions from its Chinese origins: tea cultivation, work practice, and monastic reform. Last, we study how Zen came to be regarded as the ?way of the warrior? and a symbol of Japanese uniqueness and militarism. The course ends with an exploration of Zen expansion in the US in the 20th century and the ?D? boom? in American literary theory. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 6022Science and Discovery: Japan and the "New World," 16th–17th Centuries3
In 1610, Nahua chronicler Chimalpahin wrote that a group of Japanese merchants had made landfall in Mexico, bringing with them writing desks, folding screens, porcelain, and silk. During this period, Japanese warlords, merchants, and converts began to engage in overseas exploration, journeying from Acapulco to Rome and traversing the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. At the same time, these actors engaged in colonial expansion, invading Korea, settling in parts of Southeast Asia, colonizing the island of Ezo (Hokkaido), and dominating the Ryukyuan islands (Okinawa). We will disentangle the complex and obscured role of the Japanese archipelago in early modern globalization through decolonial and archipelagic thinking. In each session, we will apply the readings to a primary source, such as an edict, a world-map folding screen, a set of playing cards, or an anti-Christian tale, that will serve as a focal point for the respective theme of the session. By grounding our interpretations in a diverse array of primary sources, you will develop an interdisciplinary skillset in visual, literary, and historical evidence and gain robust knowledge of transoceanic exchange. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6023Buddhism and Politics in South and Southeast Asia4
Buddhist ideas, practices, and institutions play many roles in the political life of South and Southeast Asia, in the present day and throughout the long history of these regions. This course approaches ?politics? broadly. Thus, the course explores how persons invoke Buddhist concepts and understandings of Buddhist traditions when acting for and against state and sovereign powers, but also how Buddhist ideas and institutions are drawn into other social projects that shape the flow and accumulation of social capital, economic benefit, and authority. Case studies and theoretical works address historical, modern, and contemporary materials. Assignments include the opportunity for students to focus on a contemporary regional location of their choice. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 6024Science, Medicine, and Media Technologies in East Asia3
This seminar course introduces students to the studies of science, technology, and medicine in East Asia, aiming to cultivate a foundational understanding of the field while exploring key topics relevant to the region. Each year, the course themes vary; this year, we focus on environments, media, and bodies. As a reading and writing intensive course, it challenges students to engage deeply with the material and articulate their insights through rigorous analysis. In doing so, students learn to appreciate the complex power dynamics at play as science and technology interact with a diverse range of actors, tracing intricate trajectories across national, transnational, and global networks.
ASIAN 6025More-than-Human Worlds: Ghosts, Animals, and Insects in East Asian Tradition3
This upper-level seminar explores how East Asian literary, religious, and cultural traditions have imagined worlds shared by humans and nonhuman beings. Focusing on the ways in which the boundary between the human and the nonhuman is defined, contested, and reconfigured, the course engages in close readings of theoretical and primary texts featuring ghosts, animals, insects, objects, disability, and the figures of the barbarian other. Students will analyze how nonhuman agents unsettle anthropocentric assumptions and articulate alternative ontologies of life, agency, and relationality. Drawing on contemporary theoretical frameworks such as posthumanism, multispecies studies, and ecocriticism, the course invites students to reconsider what it meant?and what it might mean?to inhabit a world that is fundamentally more-than-human. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6049History, Theory, and Methods in the Academic Study of Religion3
This course will explore the development of and variety in the academic discipline of Religious Studies. We will consider the emergence of secular approaches to the study of religion arising out of the European Enlightenment, and more particularly, the methods in the academic study of religion based upon different theoretical approaches. We will be particularly concerned to reflect upon the category of religious experience in modern discourses from historical, social scientific, hermeneutical, and psychological points of view.
ASIAN 6076History of US-China Relations, 1949-20254
How did the U.S. and China reach this precarious moment? Are they on the brink of a hot war, or can diplomacy still prevent the worst? Is a cold peace even possible? This course critically examines the history of U.S.-China relations from 1949 to 2025, exploring the key diplomatic, economic, military, social, and ideological developments that have shaped bilateral ties. Beginning with early Cold War hostility (1949–1972), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the prolonged diplomatic estrangement (1953–1972), the course traces pivotal moments such as Nixon’s historic rapprochement (1972-1979), the cautious engagement of normalization (1979–1989), China’s economic rise and global integration (1990s–2008), and the evolving tensions of interdependence often described as ‘One Bed, Two Dreams’ (2008–present), shifting security dilemmas, and ongoing trade and technological competition. Special attention will be given to the contemporary landscape of strategic containment, rivalry, and the price of competition and cooperation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will analyze primary sources, academic literature, government reports, and firsthand accounts to assess how U.S.-China relations have evolved within a broader global context. Discussions will engage with pressing issues, including military tensions in the Indo-Pacific, economic decoupling, and the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.
In this advanced seminar, we read and debate cutting-edge scholarship on modern Japan alongside classic studies. We?ll interrogate how ?Japan? emerged as an empire and nation-state; Japan?s shifting borders and fraught relations with foreign powers and conquered lands; and the tricky question of what it means to be ?Japanese.? Readings vary by semester, but major topics include empire, colonialism, and nationalism; war and peace, with emphasis on World War II; race, gender, and reproductive politics; democracy and fascism; labor and class; the history of science; and the meaning of ?modern.? (ASIAN-SC)
This is an events-based course. Students will attend ten seminars in the South Asia Program seminar series. The work of scholars, filmmakers, and artists presenting research in the series spans the region and its diasporas (e.g., India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Indian Ocean worlds). Topics considered will cross the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Students will attend these events and engage with the material presented in short response papers and supplemental readings. The objective of this course is to offer students, whether they are familiar with the region or not, new perspectives on the lived experiences of South Asia. Students will also become familiar with interdisciplinary area studies as an intellectual project. (ASIAN-SC)
This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.
This is a survey of English-language literary criticism about literature in Chinese, including drama and film, from the late Qing to the present. Students read in a roundtable format, bringing diverse monographs into one conversation about the shape and content of Chinese literary studies in Western languages. The course is designed to prepare graduate students for potential field exams in Chinese literature, modern China, or one of their many subfields. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6612Japanese Bibliography and Research Methods1
An introduction to the key reference and research works available for Japanese studies (both print and digital). Uses of databases and reference works on a given theme will be modelled in the class hour. Students will then practice with these resources for homework, according to their selected research projects, and report back on issues. The course will also touch on book history. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6613Southeast Asian Bibliography and Research Methods1
Covers practical bibliographical skills and research methods necessary to accomplish quality research in the field of Southeast Asian Studies. During the semester we will explore resources available at the Cornell University Libraries, those provided through Library subscription, and resources available elsewhere. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6614Korean Literature and Performance: From P'ansori to K-Pop3
This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary. (ASIAN-LL)
Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in traditional Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6616Workshop on Chinglish in Theory and Practice3
Chinglish language is crucial to formulations of the Sinophone (and Cantophone), to disciplinary life in Asian Studies and translation studies, and in the lives of migrants and transnational people around the world. Chinglish is, however, often edited out of literary and scholarly texts, and its transformative potential competes with taboos against its use. This course will engage with contemporary Sinitic-Anglophone hybrid language in three ways: first, by encountering it as a topic in critical theory, second, by historicizing the practice from maritime pidgin to contemporary social media, and third, by writing scholarship, creative work, and public-facing essays in and about Chinglish. Students are expected to be partially bilingual, but literacy and fluency in both languages is not required. (ASIAN-LL)
This course explores the development of the concept of race as applied by and to Asian populations and societies. We also examine the idea of Asia and its others in global discourse, including through lenses such as Orientalism, Occidentalism, Pan-Asianism, and Afro-Asianism. Our focus is on the history of East Asia and trans-Pacific entanglements with Western empires from the early modern era to the present. A major theme is race science, or the scientific investigation and construction of race, as it was practiced on and by East Asian peoples. We also explore intersections of race with nationalism, imperialism, warfare, law and citizenship, and sex and the family. (ASIAN-SC)
This course argues that modern literary strictures ? such as market forces, censorship, and new media forms ? are contiguous with and interpretable in the same way as more traditional literary strictures like meter, rhyme, and tonal regulation. It asks how we can come to a more thorough understanding of contemporary art by treating its sociological and political context as a source of generative restraint. Theoretical texts will range from Foucault to Vaclav Havel; primary texts will be drawn from contemporary Chinese fiction, poetry and film. All texts will be made available in English for non-Chinese speakers. (ASIAN-LL)
To hone our skills in the analysis of topics in Asian studies, we will review critically a number of switchpoints that have produced conceptual difference in recent scholarly work. Asia scholars have laid claim to the historical, to modernity, coloniality, postcoloniality, religion, affect, temporality, race, capital, (mass) media, embodiment, the translocal, and the posthuman as the bases for producing conceptual difference. Each of these switchpoints has allowed for valuable interventions from Asian Studies into the humanities and social sciences. We will develop questions, criteria, and critiques to thoroughly test our tools of analysis and work toward yet other methods. Contemporary academia valorizes the production of conceptual difference. Thus, evaluation criteria routinely include originality and innovation. This is a valuable point of departure that allows us to ask, What kind of conceptual difference do we want to produce in our work? What kind of conceptual difference is intellectually rigorous? Asia as Question does not merely provide intellectual history but rather tests out?and creates?contemporary, critical approaches. As such, it interrogates especially notions of region and area; work on temporality; new ontologies; and current approaches to media ecologies. (ASIAN-SC)
This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology. (ASIAN-SC)
Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia? (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6631Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema3
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud. (ASIAN-SC)
The idea of the barbarians is as old as civilization itself. But what is a barbarian, and what is the role that barbarians play, as the savage enemies of civilization? In this course we will address such questions by looking at how different civilizations have imagined their barbarians, ranging from their key role in Greek drama, and as infidels in religious conceptions, to Chinese walls, and American savagery. We will examine both historical examples, and the barbarians of today -- the terrorists and insurgents so often framed as dark and primitive, in contrast with ourselves. Through readings and visual materials, we will seek to discover what these barbarians have in common. We will look comparatively for the underlying patterns of history that the barbarians are drafted from, to draw a new picture of the barbarians. At the same time, we will arrive at a new understanding of civilization as such, as well as of the general nature of human inequality, and how it is justified. (ASIAN-SC)
Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China?s borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English. (ASIAN-LL)
This course investigates the incorporation of sensory perceptions into textual practice as represented in Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Jin Ping Mei was a 16th century Chinese novel masterpiece, describing the downfall of the merchant Ximen Qing?s household as he engages in corrupt and lustful actions with a number of wives, concubines, and maids. It is known for its sensational depiction of sex and sensory excess. Why does the novel devote so many pages to detailed descriptions of food, clothing, and music? What kind of visual, auditory, and tactile senses does the text elicit and how do they affect textual meaning? And how do the various sensory renderings of the text influence readers and reading practices? We will explore the ways in which text serves as a site of interconnection among senses and highlight the various forms of human sensuousness by combining a close reading of Jin Ping Mei with a reading of the most recent studies on intermediality, materiality, and the history of senses. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6644Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia3
This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia. (ASIAN-SC)
Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum. (ASIAN-SC)
This course will give students the historical background and theoretical tools to understand the politics of Southeast Asia, one of the world's most diverse and fascinating regions. The first part of the course traces Southeast Asia's political development from the colonial period to the present day, examining common themes such as decolonization, state building, war and insurgency, ethnic relations, democratization, economic development, and nationalism. The second part of the course focuses on key issues in contemporary Southeast Asian politics, including political culture, representation and mass politics, globalization, regional politics, and civil violence. Our course will concentrate primarily but not exclusively on the six largest countries in the region-Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam-using the comparative method to understand variation across time, across countries, and within countries. (ASIAN-SC, GOVT-CP)
ASIAN 6648Classical Indian Poetry and Comparative Poetics3
This course will treat the classical Indian tradition as a case study in comparative poetics. We will read works of Sanskrit poetry in translation, along with selections from the works of both Sanskrit and early modern and contemporary Western literary and aesthetic theorists. We will look at the way contemporary developments in aesthetics have shaped the reception of Sanskrit poetry and poetic theory over the past two centuries, as well as using parallel readings in classical Indian and contemporary theory to explore the broader normative question of how theoretical resources should be deployed in the interpretation of other, particularly classical literatures. (ASIAN-LL)
ASIAN 6651Heritage, History, and Identity in Cambodia3
This winter course on site in Cambodia will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present - how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today. We will visit historical sites as well as museums and other relevant sites, including performances, where history is remembered and engaged. There will be lectures, including by Cambodian experts, as well as film showings. The course will be based in Siem Reap, in collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies, and there will also be excursions to Phnom Penh, the capital. (ASIAN-SC)
In this course, we will study Asia's kingdoms, states, and empires, and how this past is formulated as national heritage in present-day modern Asian states. We examine how Asian states and their royal traditions first came to be, including Hindu, Buddhist, and East Asian kings and emperors, and how the legacy of these glorious pasts is reinterpreted and staged as national heritage. Our examples will include Cambodia's Angkor empire modeled on Indian traditions, as well as Burma, Thailand, Japan, China, and more. We will use readings, films, lectures and in-class student presentations on many topics. The course also serves as a prerequisite to the separate in-country Winter semester course Heritage, History, and Identity in Cambodia (ANTHR 3590/6590). (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6656Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture4
This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective. (ASIAN-SC)
This course surveys major schools of classical Chinese philosophy: Confucianism, Mohism, and Daoism. We focus on the Confucian vision of an ideal life, moral development, and self-cultivation, whereby one refines and reshapes one's emotions to achieve ethical excellence and contribute to one's community. We explore the Mohist advocacy of an ethics in which everyone is to be treated impartially, and the differences between Mohism and Confucianism in relation to key ethical issues. We emphasize the Daoist rejection of Confucian moral preaching and the idea that the truth can be captured through theorizing and argument, as well as the espousal in this tradition of non-action and intuitive action. We shall see how advocates of these different philosophies debated and borrowed ideas from each other.
This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory. (ASIAN-SC)
Theories of modernization have inspired, informed, and plagued histories of middle and late imperial China. For the Song-Qing eras (roughly 10th-19th centuries), comparative studies have variously found and sought to explain modernization emerging earlier than in Europe, an absence of modernization, or alternative paths of modernization. Regional models have argued for pan-East Asian systems and patterns of modernization. Global models have argued that China had a vital role in European development as a provenance of modernizing institutions and ideas, as a source of exploited resources, or otherwise as an integral part of global systems. In this course we explore these historiographical debates and develop critical perspectives, including approaches to escaping Eurocentric and teleological frameworks. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6665Genocide Today: The Erasure of Cultures3
This course offers an introduction to the global issue of genocide and other mass atrocities, with an in-depth look at two genocides in Asia ongoing since 2017: in China, and in Burma (Myanmar). First, we will study how genocide works: the prerequisites, warning signs, and how it is carried out. We study the creation of the term genocide as a new crime in international law after WWII, in the UN Genocide Convention, and the checkered history of failing to prevent new genocides (incl. in Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new genocides under way against the Uyghurs in China and against the Rohingya in Burma: background, events, actors involved, the role of media and propaganda, and why Burma expels people while China force-assimilates people in place. (ASIAN-SC)
China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on Chinese identity in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of Chinese art history in the West. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6677Ecocriticism, Indigeneity, and East Asia in Global Context3
This interdisciplinary seminar examines the relationship between literature and the environment in an East Asian and global context. We will explore key questions and approaches in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities as they relate to ecological change in Korea, China, and Japan. How does literature make environmental crises, their effects on sentient beings, and the earth itself more visible? In what ways does storytelling give voice to changing relationships between humans and the more-than-human world? The seminar will engage the significant conceptual contributions Indigenous thinkers from Asia and the Americas have contributed to ecocriticism as we examine how poets, novelists, filmmakers, artists, nonfiction writers, and critics have responded creatively to environmental change. (ASIAN-LL)
What does it mean to be ?modern?? How is it tied to one?s (person, community, country, government, stakeholders) desires and aspirations for the future? How does it relate to one?s past? In this seminar we explore how idea(l)s of modernity have taken shape, how they were received and articulated, and how they continue to change. We will read scholarship addressing idea(l)s of modernity in relation to health, technology, the environment, politics, gender, the economy, and more. Reading materials will adapt to seminar members? interests. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6679China Imagined: The Historical and Global Origins of the Chinese Nation4
As China, with its China Dream, rises in power on the global stage, what China means to its inhabitants and outsiders has become an issue increasingly relevant to business, international relations, and cultural exchange, and a topic that draws intensive attention from historians and social scientists. This course brings together undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in shifting meanings embedded in the concept of China, either as part of their research agenda, or as a useful lens for comparative analysis. Focus will be on how China as an Empire/ a Nation was conceptualized by different people in different periods and in different contexts, and on the reality and representation of China as political, cultural, racial, and geographical entities. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6680The Asian Century: The Rise of China and India3
The course will be thoroughly comparative in order to highlight both the specificity of each country as well as more generalizable dynamics of 21st century development. It will be divided into a number of inter-related modules. After a framing lecture, we will briefly cover the two countries' distinct experiences with colonialism and centralized planning. Then we will move on to dynamics of growth, which will seek to explain the relative success of China in the era of market reforms. In analyzing political consequences, we will assess how new forms of cooperation and conflict have emerged. This will involve attention to both internal dynamics as well as how rapid development has seen an increasing accumulation of political power in the East. It goes without saying that accelerating growth has led to huge social change, resulting in profound reorganizations of Chinese and Indian society. Finally, the course will conclude by returning to our original question-is this indeed The Asian Century? What does the rise of China and India mean for the rest of the world, and how are these two giant nations likely to develop in the future? (ASIAN-SC)
How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective? Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa. (ASIAN-RL)
ASIAN 6692Objects in Motion: Transoceanic Japan and the Port Cities of Asia3
What can objects produced in the port cities of the Indo-Pacific world teach us about early modern globalization? Movement into and out of key trade centers in the Indo-Pacific became more interconnected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course we study the peoples, animals, objects, and oceanic forces “in motion” that encountered one another in these contact zones, paying particular attention to how such objects are read as evidence of exchange. With a particular focus on the circulation of Japanese material culture and export artworks, our inquiry enables us to re-examine the conceptual and geographic boundaries of identity and artmaking in the early modern world. By tracing the mobilities of the Japanese diaspora through South and Southeast Asia and the Americas, we examine the emergence of diverse hybrid cultures and the creolization of local and global artistic traditions in Nagasaki, Macau, Manila, Goa, Batavia, Acapulco, and beyond. Alongside these case studies, we develop the methods of close looking, provenance research, and material analysis that illuminate objects whose makers and meanings often sit outside the traditional canon. This course also has a curatorial component: each student researches an object related to Asian port cities held in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum collection. Students prepare an exhibition with the selected objects in the Education Gallery, learning to draft object labels, shape a narrative for visitors, and consider the choices that go into presenting art to the public.
ASIAN 6696Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century4
Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attentions to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions. Considers global transformations that brought the West into people's lives in Southeast Asia. Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded. Assigns primary texts in translation. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6697Monsoon Kingdoms: Pre-Modern Southeast Asian History4
This course examines Southeast Asia's history from earliest times up until the mid-eighteenth century. The genesis of traditional kingdoms, the role of monumental architecture (such as Angkor in Cambodia and Borobodur in Indonesia), and the forging of maritime trade links across the region are all covered. Religion - both indigenous to Southeast Asia and the great imports of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - are also surveyed in the various premodern polities that dotted Southeast Asia. This course questions the region's early connections with China, India, and Arabia, and asks what is indigenous about Southeast Asian history, and what has been borrowed over the centuries. Open to undergraduates, both majors and non-majors in History, and to graduate students, though with separate requirements. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6705Gateways of Tokugawa Japan: Global Encounters and Reframing the “Closed Country”3
This seminar offers an examination of Japanese foreign relations and engagements during the Tokugawa Period (1603?1868). This period has traditionally been organized through the frame of Japanese isolationism (sakoku, lit. ?closed country?). A retroactive application of Englebert Kaempfer?s conception of Japanese foreign politics, the term sakoku remains entrenched in twentieth-century understandings of the period?s transregional and transcultural dynamics. This course guides students through a reconsideration of the isolationist historiography of early modern Japan, known to famed Japanologist Donald Keene as the ?world within walls.? Upon further study of the four gateways, which facilitated trade with the Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Ryukyuans, and Ainu, recent scholarship has moved towards a pluralistic understanding of sakoku, with the corrective terminology ?maritime prohibitions? serving to highlight the multifocal, dynamic, and diachronic aspects of the concept. By examining historical documents, world maps, cosmographic writings, and literary evidence, we will explore the various modalities by which Japanese agents imagined, encountered, and ordered the outside world. No knowledge of Japanese required. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6707Scale, Size, and the Politics of Expression in Asia3
When Beijing hosted the summer Olympics in 2008, its opening ceremony left viewers, journalists, and visitors impressed and sometimes alarmed by its enormity, encompassing a massive cast of dancers, musicians, and other performers led by iconic film director Zhang Yimou. It was judged as not just a celebration or an artistic achievement, but as a message: China was ready to overwhelm the world. Size mattered, likely in the moment's design, and certainly in its reception and interpretation. This interdisciplinary seminar takes an innovative approach to politics in Asia, considering size and its meanings: from the small and the close-knit to the expansive and powerful. We will consider especially the varied techniques of their political, public, and pop cultural representations. (ASIAN-SC)
Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6844The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New Art3
An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards-from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video-quickly came to be known as contemporary Chinese art. This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts. (ASIAN-SC)
ASIAN 6845Contemporary Performance Art in East Asia, 20th -21st Century3
Since the mid-twentieth century, artists based in and across East Asia have turned to performance art, using bodily actions to blur the boundaries between art and everyday social life. This course analyzes performance art’s sociocultural underpinnings by treating it as an artistic medium and a critical practice shaped by interrelated histories of geopolitical conflict, colonialism, modernization, authoritarianism, and globalization in the East Asian context. Students will examine a range of approaches including happenings, body art, durational pieces, site-specific practices, and socially engaged performances to consider broader theoretical issues such as performance’s paradoxical dependence on visual documentation, censorship and the politics of visibility, gender and sexuality, temporality, and spectatorship. Attention will be given to local contexts while also tracing transnational networks and art festivals that influence how East Asian performance art circulates and is interpreted.
ASIAN 7489Theory and Anthropology from Below: Special Topics3
This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political.
ASIAN 7713Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia4
This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity.
