Located at the crossroads of the ancient Silk Road, Dunhuang is one of the richest Buddhist sites in China with nearly 500 cave temples constructed between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries. The sculptures, murals, portable paintings, and manuscripts found in the caves represent every aspect of Buddhism, both doctrinally and artistically. This course will explore this visual material in relation to topics such as expeditions, the role of Dunhuang in the study of Buddhist art and Chinese art in general, Buddhist ritual practices, image-text relationships, politics and patronage, and contemporary attitudes toward Dunhuang.

Focuses on reading and discussing selections from Feng Menglong's Sanyan, the most popular and well-known collection of Classic Chinese short stories published in the late sixteenth century. One class, two hours of discussion, conducted in Chinese.

This course explores the role of American Christianity in canonical and popular Korean and Korean-American novels and films. While the references to Christianity in these novels and films serve to indicate the active presence of American Christian missionaries in 20th century Korea, we will pay attention to the ways in which the figures of American Christianity function in these narratives.

This course will expand your structures and knowledge of the Vietnamese language and multifaceted culture through idioms, proverbs, dialogues, and stories. Classroom activities and practices will help you communicate effectively and absorb meaning through speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

How does a historical general become a god? How does an exemplary emperor turn into an evil villain? Is a warrior in a novel the same as a figure made of pixels in a video game? This course investigates the central element to animate the famous Chinese tale Romance of the Three Kingdoms: its heroes. We explore these characters in terms of political ideology, gender norms, and religious needs. We compare how a character's physical attributes, personality, and life stories change across media, from storyteller tale, to novel, to video game. By doing so we ask how notions of individuality and identity change across times and cultures.

This class expands the conceptual boundaries of fashion beyond designer labels and celebrity trends toward an address of the socio-technological function of fashion in East Asia. The central aim of the course is to engage thinking about fashion as a multilayered site where East Asia's media infrastructure, gender politics, labor systems, and non-human entities intersect. Scrutinizing the role of the state as well as the industry's racialized grammars, we will examine how fashion articulates with presumed binaries of class, ideology, gender, age and race in understanding East Asian national and diasporic formations.

This seminar explores law in Japan, and the social, administrative, and judicial functions of law across different premodern societies. It uses centuries-old records of divorces, inheritance conflicts, and even murders as case studies mainly from precedent-based legal systems in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. The chief focus is medieval Japan, seen in comparison to medieval England, whose 1215 Magna Carta inspires analogies to Japan's classic 1232 code (The Joei Formulary), and to the Mongol Yuan legal system in China.

This course examines "dangerous bodies" - bodies that transgress existing gender and racial norms in Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Situated at the intersection of literary, film, performance, gender and ethnic studies, this course provides an introduction to the shifting social meanings of the body in relation to historical masculinity, femininity, and Chineseness. We examine different cross-dressed figures, ranging from Mulan, cross-dressed male opera singer, WWII Japanese/Chinese spy, to experimental queer cinema, in a study that unpacks whether these transgressive bodies represent social change or a tool for restoring traditional norms.

Whether we look at its speed, connectivity and convergence, the geographic reach of its exports, or the contradictions that characterize its relationship to social reality, contemporary Korean media poses provocative questions about conditions of life in Korea and the mechanisms of communications and cultural technologies globally. Through examination of a range of practices across the mediascape (TV dramas, music, webtoons, films, advertisements, etc.) and phenomenon that have arisen from them (the Korean Wave, the rise of national sports heroes, etc.) the class will consider the force of contemporary media in shaping the very idea of Korea.

Knowledge about the world transformed over history: civilization, empire, East-West encounter, and postcolonial homelessness are frames that link identity and space. Reading travelogues by Koreans and about Korea, we will pursue two goals. We will analyze the epistemic coordinates of travelogue that produces knowledge about self and other. And we will note the changing historical contexts around Korea, which defined the modes of mobility for shipwreck survivors, prisoners of war, Christian missionaries, Japanese colonial officials, and communist guerilla fighters. Korea will provide us with a concrete vantage point upon the larger world.

The seminar explores brainwashing and conversion in media discourses and practices, with a focus on Asia. Brainwashing and conversion are approached as contingent and exploitable figures spanning religious doctrine, forces of economic mobility, cross-cultural encounters, states of political subjectivity and gender and sex formations. Media forms include portrayals of brainwashing, control of networks and content, and ideas about media's hypnotic power.

For three decades, Mao Zedong presided over one of the most ambitious social experiments in human history. This course explores everyday life in China in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: the radical reordering of economic, political, and social relations; the shattering experiences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; and the evolution of a party-state which governs China up to the present. While Maoist ideology and policies were homogenizing in intent and often in effect, this course will emphasize the ways in which the experiences of the Mao era were mediated through categories like gender, social status, and ethnicity.

EAS 502 examines problems and possibility of research peculiar to the fields of East Asian Studies across the macro-region of East Asia, in an attempt to overcome nation-centric narratives and scholars' isolation in hyper-specialized research. The seminar maintains a transnational and transcultural approach, but also explores the possibility of methodological and theoretical reflection that transcends disciplinary divisions among students in East Asian Studies independently of their specialization.

Readings in the major historiography texts of early China, including Shangshu, Zuo zhuan, Shiji, and Hanshu, with further attention to recently excavated texts. Analysis of the defining features of early Chinese historiography in relation to early intellectual history. Comparison with selected works from ancient Mediterranean historiography (Thucydides, Herodotus, Sallust), and discussion of historiographic thought.

This course is a research and writing seminar that introduces major historical methods of research in ancient and medieval Japan. In addition to weekly research assignments, students identify a research topic by the third week of the class, and complete a research paper at the end of the semester (entailing 15-20 pages). Instruction focuses on research methods and topics, although some reading of sources also occurs.

Introduction to the basics of reading Chinese-style Classical Japanese and its related forms. Texts: Literary and historical texts from both China and Japan.

The course explores issues in medicine and global health with a focus on ethics. We address both ethics in the context of clinical decision-making and also the social, cultural, and economic "ethical field" of health care. Ever-expanding technological possibilities re-shape our social lives, extending them, giving greater control but taking it away. Treatments such as living donor organ transplantation, stem cell therapies, and physician-assisted suicide transform our understandings of life, death and what we expect from one another. Technologies such as glucometers bring new inequalities.

The second half of the two-semester course, which trains students in reading the particular style of Japanese academic writing. The second semester particularly focuses on academic writings from Meiji to the 1950s, including brief introduction of necessary Classical Japanese Grammar for this purpose. Course conducted in English.

This course problematizes the ideas of "modern" and "literature" which were no more than hypotheses in turn-of-the-20th-century Korea. We trace the aesthetic and intellectual transformations in lineage novels, hybrid novels that test the boundaries of traditional form, sinsosol, essays, and early textbooks of Korean literature. As a result, rather than viewing the emergence of modern literature in Korea as a self-certain trajectory within the teleological timeline of the nation-state, we note the zones of ambiguity, hybridity, and dialog around it.

As a vital medium of relation and exchange among mental and material worlds, photography has inflected the entangled conditions of possibility for literary and visual media in Japan in untold ways. This course examines the evolving contours of thought, sensation, and materiality provoked by the photographic encounters among a diverse set of textual and visual practices. Drawing on primary materials and criticism from literary and artistic contexts as well as secondary scholarship, this course explores the changing relations among media and moments of critical reflection afforded by photography in Japan.

This course is an introduction to the history of modern East Asia. We will examine the inter-related histories of China, Japan, and Korea since 1800 and their relationships with the wider world. Major topics include: trade and cultural exchanges, reform and revolutions, war, colonialism, imperialism, and Cold War geopolitics.

This course provides graduate students with a comprehensive introduction to the historical study of China from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Readings address major historiographical and methodological issues of the field, with a focus on recent literature produced in the United States.

This course explores East Asia in the global context of imperialism, colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberalism. We will traverse a wide range of materials (literature, film, photography, installation art) to understand how they are connected by historical forces. Open to anyone interested in a critical understanding of modern East Asian cultures, this course offers an interdisciplinary introduction that draws upon methods from film and media studies, art history, literary studies, and critical race studies.

This course is targeted to students whose Japanese proficiency is at an advanced or superior level. While reading is under focus, speaking, listening, and writing are intensively practiced. Materials include novels, essays, articles, and films.

This course focusing primarily on the Confucian tradition. Roughly half of the course will be spent on classical Chinese Philosophy from Confucius through to Hanfeizi. The second half of the course will begin with a very brief look at Chinese Buddhism, and go on to discuss in detail the development of Song and Ming Dynasty Neo-Confucianism. Students will acquire a basic knowledge of standard philosophical tools (how to reconstruct an argument from a text, how to assess the validity and soundness of an argument). They will also gain a working knowledge of the ideas of some of China's greatest philosophical thinkers.

A thematic introduction to Chinese religion, ranging from ancient to contemporary. The first half focuses on classics of Chinese thought (Book of Changes, Analects of Confucius, Daoist classics, etc.). The second half utilizes journalism, ethnography, and history to consider topics such as contemporary China, state control of religion, cosmology, gods and saints, divination, gender, and ritual.

Translation is at the core of our engagement with China, Japan, and Korea. From translations of the classics to contemporary literature, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to cross-cultural references in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on what "translation" of "original works" means in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.