In this thematic introduction to the role of painting in Chinese cultural history, we will attend to the critical questions discussed within the field of Chinese painting in particular and art history in general. These questions, revolving around the dynamic between aesthetics and politics, include the influence of class, gender, political changes, and social behavior on painting; the formation of painting canons and lineages; and how local and global elements interacted in early modern, modern and contemporary Chinese painting. Students will have the opportunity to study Chinese painting first hand.

This seminar teaches PhD students how to develop research topics and exhibition themes from their first hand experiences with actual art objects. It makes extensive use of PUAM's excellent collection of Chinese art, which includes diverse genres and categories of paintings that span more than one thousand years. The course also incorporates new scholarly trends that tackle how to interact with art objects and contemplate their visuality and materiality.

This course examines the comic book as an expressive medium in Japan. Reading a range of works, classic and contemporary, in a variety of genres, we consider: How has the particular history of Japan shaped cartooning as an art form there? What critical approaches can help us think productively about comics (and other popular culture)? How can we translate the effects of a visual medium into written scholarly language? What do changes in media technology, literacy, and distribution mean for comics today? Coursework will combine readings, written analysis, and technical exercises. All readings in English. No fine arts experience required.

An introduction to some of the most important texts, writers, and topics of Classical Literature from antiquity through the Song dynasty. All readings are in English, and no previous background in Chinese or Asian culture is required. Topics include: nature of the Chinese language; the beginnings of poetry; development of narrative and historical writing; classical Chinese poetics; literature of protest, dissent, and political satire; love poetry; religious and philosophical ideas in Chinese literature.

This course is an introduction to contemporary Chinese cinemas in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. From postwar musicals and pan-Asian blockbusters, to new wave avant-garde films and experimental documentaries, the diversity of Chinese cinemas reflects cinema's relations to global capitalism, Asia's democratization movements, financial crises, and the arrival of (post)socialism. Creating urban nomads, songstresses, daydreamers, travelers, and terrorists, Chinese cinemas put on full display the forces of globalization in shaping the aesthetics and politics of film. Selections broadly include popular commercial films to rare art house productions.

This course focuses on the images of women in Korean cultural production, spanning from contemporary to pre-twentieth-century periods. Analyzing the historical variations in the notions of femininity that appear in literary and filmic texts, we will use these feminine images as access points to the aesthetic conundrums produced at crucial historical junctures. These feminine images, produced locally and globally, will allow us to examine the experiences of immigrant diaspora, Korea's neo-colonial relationship with the United States, the Korean War, colonial modernity, and Confucian patriarchal kinship.

This course tells the epic story of the people, ideas, and institutions that made the first Chinese empires, ca. third century BCE to the first century BCE. The course looks at the rise and fall of the Qin empire as well as the way Qin institutions and ideas reverberated through the succeeding Han dynasty--and beyond. Course will cover most recent archeological materials and excavated texts (in translation), including ongoing excavations of the terracotta warriors, funerary art, excavated legal codes, legal cases, religious and philosophical texts, and much more. Finally, we ask: did the Qin empire ever end?

The course addresses ethical issues in medicine, health, and health care. How are medicine and ethics shaped by cultural beliefs and social institutions? Topics include: mental illness and care; the politics of disability; notions of life and death; organ transfer; end-of-life care; citizen science; reproductive technologies; prognosis and disclosure; alcoholism and co-dependency; and health care allocation. The course explores the relationship of health care to other forms of social care (such as the family).

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.

This course examines postwar Japanese experience through major literary, cinematic, and intellectual achievements. The objective is first to analyze a multitude of struggles in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, and then to inquire into the nature of post-industrial prosperity in capitalist consumerism and the emergence of postmodernism. The course will cover representative postwar figures such as, Oe Kenzaburo, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, as well as contemporary writers such as Murakami Haruki. Topics include the rise of democratic ideas, unsolved issues of war memories, and the tension between serious and "popular" fiction writing.

The seminar is structured around engagement with Korean films and reflection on theory, history and form. We will watch at least two films per week, one of which will be screened in theater. These include works of the colonial and war periods, but the majority are recent productions. Our thematic focus will be on the material and epistemic transformations wrought by the global neoliberal order and on new forms of racialized, gendered and techno-socialized subjectivity. Our core principle, and therein our method, is that the films peculiar insights into contemporary Korea can only be captured through careful attention to their forms.

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.

Using family as a lens and a theme that brings together an array of vastly different literary, filmic, and theoretical works, this class will examine key moments in the history of Korea from 2019 to old times. We will look into disenchanted families, violent families, cyborg families, mixed race families, immigrant families, South and North Korean families, royal families, and more. Maintaining the longue-duree historical perspective, we will ponder on the ethical and aesthetic premises of kinship and family as modes of configuring human reciprocity and ways to imagine and live life.

Participants will develop multi-sensorial approaches to the study of diverse media. The workshop fosters new conceptual and aesthetic vocabularies for tracing the trans-disciplinary circulations of media today. Assembling the works of Japanese female artists, writers, and musicians together with scholarly perspectives on Afro-Asian intimacies, decolonial epistemologies, feminist cartographies, posthuman subjectivities, urban ecologies, and more, students collaboratively forge novel understandings of media thinking/making at the edges of the "legible" territories of knowledge.

This seminar offers a unique perspective in understanding Chinese history through the lens of intellectual movements and scholarly debates. Students will be familiar with the key ideas, historical dynamics, and cultural significance of major intellectual trends before China's modernization. Special attention will be given to the manifestation of thought in a wide range of interconnected realms, such as natural studies, art practice, self-cultivation, family management, and statecraft.

This course examines classical Chinese texts and their commentary traditions, with commentary selections and additional readings from the earliest periods through the early twentieth century.

This course focuses on the vernacular novel, Journey of the West, some of its central themes, and its long history of remediation. We read a good part of the novel, investigate the biographies and histories that preceded it, and look at the films, manga, and video games based upon it. We will compare editions, illustrations, and commentaries, and trace multi-media adaptations across national boundaries. In addition, we investigate concepts crucial to Ming dynasty literature: religious practice and self-cultivation, spatial/temporal imaginations, notions of humor and festival, and concepts of the monstrous.

Readings in selected texts in modern Japanese literature.

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.

This seminar explores the confluences among Japanese, Black, and Indigenous thought in both creative and critical modalities. Through the uncharted encounters among Pacific and Caribbean discourses of ecological reimagining, the course surfaces the generative potentials of a planetary and comparative humanities. Participants develop creative/critical engagements with diverse scholarly approaches and collaborative experimentations with textual, audio-visual, and place-based forms of expression. Together, we trace the speculative archipelagoes that sound out shared but disparate genealogies of anti-colonial inquiry.

With a walled city of thirty square miles and a population of more than one million, Chang'an, capital of the Tang dynasty, was the largest city in the world at the time. Through reading texts in different genres including official history, governmental documents, literary collections, anecdotes, legal codes, and stone inscriptions along with secondary scholarship, this course introduces the political, ritual, and economic structures of the city, and explores the lives of its citizens that in different ways either maintained or challenged these structures.

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 seminar introduces major genres, terminology, and historical transitions in the pre-1900 history of literature in Japan, including poetry, prose, and theater. Particular attention is given to the central scholarly debates that have shaped Anglophone scholarship on the subject, in the context of larger trends in literary criticism. This seminar is provided for researchers in other literary traditions or other disciplines within East Asian studies who wish to develop a basic grounding in Japanese literature.

The course offers a comprehensive history of books in China, with reference to relevant developments in Korea and Japan and to parallels in the West, from the advent of actual books in East Asia during the first millennium BCE until the introduction of virtual books at the end of the 20th century. It covers the physical evolution of traditional Chinese books as well as their crucial role in the transmission of text and knowledge throughout China's long and complex history, especially for the period of 9th to 19th century. Visual images and actual specimens are used to reinforce presentations and stimulate discussion.

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 is an introduction to the history of modern China, from imperial dynasty to Republic, from Red Guards to red capitalists. Through primary sources in translation, we will explore political and social revolutions, transformations in gender relations and intellectual life, and competing explanations for events such as the rise of the Communist Party and the 1989 democracy movement. Major themes include: the impact of imperialism, tensions between governance and dissent, the rise of nationalism, the political stakes of historical interpretation, and the significance of China's history for its present and future.

This course aims to provide an introduction to Southeast Asia and its prominent place in global history through a series of encounters in time; from Marco Polo in Sumatra to events in such buzzing cities as Bangkok, Jakarta and Hanoi. For the early modern period we will read various primary sources, before turning to consider a series of diverse colonial impacts across the region (European, American and Asian), and then the mechanisms underpinning the formation of some of the most vibrant, and sometimes turbulent, countries on the world stage.

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 is designed (1) to advance students' literacy skills to the Superior level; (2) to promote a deeper understanding of the Korean language, literature and history; (3) to further develop their critical thinking through reading and writing in Korean; and (4) to encourage intercultural interaction through outreach projects. Focusing on change in the Korean language in relation to history, society, and culture, the course covers a wide range of sociocultural and political as well as sociolinguistic issues presented in classic short stories, poems, and historical texts.

Myths are powerful. The stories we will read were first recorded around 1,300 years ago and continue to be told in the present day. We will ask why people -- both in Japan and humans more generally -- tell these types of tales. To answer this question, we will explore comparative approaches that search for universal patterns, myths as "ideology in narrative form" used as tools of legitimization, and appropriation of myths for new purposes in original contexts including feminist critiques.

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.