What was the role of women in Chinese art? How did Chinese people think about this life and the afterlife? Why and how is calligraphy considered an art form in China? These are but three of the questions this course asks and endeavors to explore. Focusing on ten important and provocative topics, this course aims to provide a comprehensive but spotlighted picture of Chinese art and culture. Together the ten point to the interrelated nature of the visual and Chinese philosophical thought, aesthetic values, religious beliefs, social life, political expression and commercial practices.

Direct and regular contact between China and Europe in the early modern period brought new artistic forms and expressions to China and reconfigured the entire picture of Chinese art. Even though China appeared to have been the recipient of European art, it did not play a passive role; in fact, Chinese agents, including emperors, artists, literati, and merchants, appropriated European artistic resources according to their own agendas. This seminar will tackle the multiple dimensions of how European art worked at the Chinese imperial court and in local societies from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

ART 425 examines Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th - 19th century. We will consider the following: formal and technical aspects of prints; varied subject matter, including the "floating world" of the brothel districts and theatre; Japanese landscape and urban centers; and links between literature and prints, especially the re-working of classical literary themes in popular prints. The seminar will emphasize the study of prints in the university's Art Museum. Students will research Japanese prints from an art gallery in New York and recommend one for purchase for the Museum's collection.

This course introduces the core texts of Japanese narrative, lyric, and thought, ca. 700-1800, with reference to visual and material culture. Topics include performance and the self; gender, marriage politics, and transgressive love; folk arts, transnational influences, and appropriation; ritual, religious transcendence, and death. All readings in English. No previous background required.

This course focuses on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Monkey), some of its central themes, and its long history of adaptation across media, regional and historical boundaries. We read a good part of the 100-chapter novel, investigate some of the texts that preceded it, and look at the illustrations, comics, rewritings, films, and videogames that it inspired. If Monkey represents the spirit of play and the ability to change at will, how does remediation ask us to think about this in terms of media and philosophy, politics and language? When and how does adaptation turn into appropriation?

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.

The course offers an introduction to moving image cultures in modern Japan with a focus on how technological aesthetic media has transformed the experience and understanding of action. While emphasis is placed on the production and reception of popular action film genres from Japan, the course also explores the relationship of those films to international film cultures in the context of broader historical transformations in media practices and in modes of distribution and reception. We will engage with ethical and political questions concerning issues such as gendered and racialized representations of action and the aesthetics of violence.

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?

This course will survey jidaigeki--Japanese period films--from its prehistory to its return in the 21st century. We will pay attention to the works of geniuses of Japanese period film such as Masahiro Makino and Kurosawa Akira, but we will also study film in relation to broader political, economic, social and cultural contexts. In particular, we will consider various ways in which filmmakers, critics, and cultural policy makers of different backgrounds and ideological orientations have turned to jidaigeki in order to interrogate their historical present.

The seminar introduces the manuscript culture of ancient and medieval China from the 4th century BCE to the advent of printing in around 1000 CE. We discuss the creation, uses, purposes, and the visual and material aspects of writings on bamboo, wood, silk, and paper. Examining texts buried in ancient tombs, left in watchtowers, or stored in desert caves, we look at writings to accompany the dead; personal letters; calligraphic masterpieces; copies of the classics; and carriers of medical, legal, administrative, or mantic knowledge cherished by the cultural and political elite and soldiers and peasants alike. With two museum visits.

This course offers an introduction to writing by and about women in China from the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE) to the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). We will read both literary and historical sources to understand the development of representations of women as subjects in the early period, but the focus of the semester's readings will be on the innovations of women as writers from the Song through the Qing.

An introduction to the methodologies and theories in the study of East Asian literatures and histories

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. Readings are selected from the three ritual classics (so-called San Li), historical writings, and excavated manuscripts relating to ritual, broadly construed. Secondary readings selected from the theory of ritual and the use of ritual texts and commentaries in Chinese intellectual, social, and cultural history.

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.

Through close readings of original sources in classical Chinese, we analyze the Classic of Poetry (Shijing) in its aesthetic, historical, and hermeneutic dimensions from pre-imperial manuscripts through modern scholarship. In addition to reading the actual poetry and its classical commentaries, we discuss in detail its origins of composition and its reception as the master text of early Chinese cultural memory and identity, drawing on the relevant scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, English, and other languages.

This course covers a history of textual artifacts in premodern Japan and hands-on training in analyzing extant materials. Topics covered include bindings, paper, glosses, colophons, fragments, paleography, publishing, xylography, movable type, collation, literacy, and cataloging, making use of materials from Princeton's East Asian Library Rare Books Collection.

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.

The course concerns Japan studies in the context of theories of capitalism, personhood, democracy, gender, and modernity. We consider the emergence of Japan as a place to think within the American social sciences after World War II and the development of ideas about area studies in the context of the Cold War and post Cold War conjunctures. Additionally the course considers topics in which Japan is relevant to thinking about global issues, including global capitalism, temporary labor, biopolitics, environmental consciousness, media culture and consumer culture, work-life balance, and the demographic crisis related to rapid aging.

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 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.

Second in the two-semester sequence on East Asian literary humanities, this course begins in the seventeenth century and covers a range of themes in the history, literature, and culture of Japan, Korea, and China until the contemporary period. Looking into the narratives of modernity, colonialism, urban culture, and war and disaster, we will see East Asia as a space for encounters, contestations, cultural currents and countercurrents. No knowledge of East Asian languages or history is required and first-year students are welcome to take the course.

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.

What makes a beautiful voice? How does spoken and sung language relate across cultural spaces? How are musical and bodily gestures codified differently across music theatrical traditions? This course takes a deep dive into these questions through a comparative exploration of two global manifestations of opera: Italian opera and Sinitic (Chinese-language) xiqu. We will consider such topics as gender and sexuality; nationalism and identity; scenic design, gesture and choreography; transmission and global circulation. Students will have the opportunity to attend at least one performance at the Metropolitan Opera or other venues in the area.

A thematic introduction to Chinese religion, ranging from ancient to contemporary. The first half focuses on classics of Chinese philosophy (Book of Changes, Analects of Confucius, Daoist classics, etc.). The second half utilizes journalism, ethnography, films, social media, and author interviews to consider contemporary China, popular movements, state control of religion, cosmology, gods, saints, divination, gender, and ritual.

Our world is filled with stuff. Some people have too much. Others want more. Advertisers promise happiness through possessions, while psychologists tell us there's a limit to how much pleasure wealth can bring. Meanwhile trash heaps overflow, creating environmental disasters. How do we live in a material world? Do objects bring us happiness or cause hardship? What is the value of stuff? This class explores how Buddhists have responded to these questions over the last 2,500 years through readings as well as hands-on learning using rare books and precious works of art in the Princeton University Art Museum and Library collections.