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 course surveys the history of art-making in Japan, from prehistory to the present. We will explore a broad range of media, including paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, ceramics, and photography by focusing on the life stories of individual things. Over the semester we will strengthen and refine our ability to translate what we see into a language of form, and to give form meaning through awareness of methods of making, and by interrogating historical and contemporary contexts. The course includes study of original works of art in campus collections.

The Song Dynasty has long been considered the high point of Chinese painting, representing a classical period to which later artists consistently looked back. This seminar will explore the artistic qualities and development of landscape, figure, and flower-and-bird painting and will consider main issues concerning these genres. Such issues include the relative importance of different genres, the relationship between the natural and the human world, the roles of the court and literati in producing art, and the materiality and visuality of Song painting.

This course is designed for students who have had advanced training in modern Chinese. The focus of readings is modern Chinese intellectual history. Topics that will be discussed include language reform, women's emancipation, the encounter of western civilization, the rise of communism, etc.

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.

This course is designed to introduce the culture and history of Japan, and to examine how one understands and interprets the past. In addition to considering how a culture, a society, and a state develop, we will try to reconstruct the tenor of life in "ancient" and "medieval" Japan and chart how patterns of Japanese civilization shifted through time.

In telling histories of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, various groups of nomadic people often loomed large in the background and served as the foil to the travail of their sedentary neighbors. In this course we put the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia front and center, and ask how the nomadic way of life and mode of state building served as agents of change in pre-modern Eurasia.

This seminar teaches the research and writing skills needed to produce a thesis as an East Asian studies major. Through mini-projects and guest lectures, the class introduces the various disciplines and methodologies used to study East Asia, including history, anthropology, political science, history, literature, and media studies. In addition, the class teaches techniques of research and writing: how to formulate a research question, find and use appropriate sources, write a research proposal, craft a compelling introduction and convincing conclusion.

This course explores the interplay between genre and gender in 20th and 21st century Japanese cinema. This task entails, as described by Christine Gledhill, reconfiguring their relationship "not in terms of social reflection, ideological misrepresentation, or subject positioning but as cinematic affect and discursive circulation between society and story, public and imaginary worlds." We will study how various film genres translate gender discourses and ideologies into aesthetic experiences, and how gender's aesthetic and imaginative power brings genres to life as dynamic processes of cultural production and social transformation.

This course examines the uses of poetry in Chinese films and media products from the early twentieth century to the present. We will focus on how poetry and cinema work with each other to expand imaginations of the Chinese-speaking world. How do filmmakers juxtapose traditional Chinese verses with modern settings? How does poetry in other languages cast an unexpected light on Chinese homes, villages, rivers and mountains, and outer space? How might cinema illumine hidden aspects of Chinese cities by capturing underground poetry scenes? The course ends by considering the impact of current fast media consumption on how we enjoy films and poems.

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.

This class introduces students to the tradition of monstrous imagination in Japanese history, from the earlier texts of the 8th century to the most recent films. Students will be exposed to a vast array of sources depicting different monstrous creatures. Monsters will function as the meaning-making devises through which students will understand different aspects of Japanese culture through twelve centuries of its history. Far from being simply figures of imaginations, the vast coterie of monstrous creatures and phenomena 'interacted' in very concrete ways with people, influencing their political, economic, and social life.

This course convenes experiences of watching and thinking about contemporary Asian American film. The syllabus is built around narrative films made by and about ethnicized Asians that have crossed the threshold of commercial viability or popular visibility in America. The central critical theme: how can the structure, flow, and mood of film, diminished in cultural capital but still vital as a form of imaginative storytelling, inspire incisive modes of seeing, feeling, and thinking what it means to be Asian in the world today? Core methods of film analysis and surveys of Asian American history inform the meditations on that central theme.

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.

This course explores feminist pedagogies and praxis across East Asia, focusing on historical practices of political and social activism, collective action, community work, and healing, care and self-discovery. It investigates how these practices, whether explicitly framed as feminist and/or pedagogical, have constituted powerful forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power, particularly those of masculinity and hetero-patriarchy. By studying historical contingent and concretized forms of pedagogy, we aim to gain a greater understanding of feminist pedagogies as complex, embodied and social processes of knowledge-making.

Readings in the Shangshu and its traditional commentaries, with a review of its history of scholarship from antiquity to the present. Specific issues of discussion include the role of the Shangshu in Warring States and Han political and philosophical discourse, the formation of its different chapters in terms of language and ideology, its relation to bronze inscriptions and the Shijing, its presence in recently excavated manuscripts, and its place in Zhou political and religious ritual.

This seminar has two main goals. The first is to offer a survey of the philosophical production of Japan from the Tokugawa period to the end of the Second World War, with a focus on the socio-political and intellectual conditions that favored the development of sophisticated philosophical discourses, their terminology, recurring themes, and changing authorizing/legitimating strategies. The second is to investigate on the heuristic adequacy of the Western term "philosophy" to understand forms and style of speculative thinking in Japan.

A confluence of research in literature, linguistics, and the history of writing has encouraged new approaches to Literary Sinitic (wenyan) as a transregional and interliterate medium. This seminar introduces core debates in this emerging field on vernacularization, influence, glossing, disciplinarity, "extraterritorial" Chinese texts (yuwai Hanji), and the Sinographic cosmopolis. We further read examples of reception, commentary, and local composition in Literary Sinitic from the Japanese context to consider how these theories can be applied or contested.

A study of selected major authors and literary trends in modern Japan, with an emphasis on the Meiji and Taisho periods.

This course is designed to introduce fundamental themes and debates about ancient and medieval Japanese history, and how conceptualizations of Japan have changed over time from the third century CE through 1600. Approximately two books, or a comparable number of articles, are required each week, and wherever possible, a brief passage of Japanese scholarship is presented as well. Reading knowledge of modern Japanese is desirable.

This seminar considers the issues of language, writing, and inscription in a broad comparative perspective that brings together critical theory and recent scholarship on Korea and East Asia. It traces the issues of language and inscription against the frameworks of semiology (Derrida, Irigaray), discursive order (Foucault, Kittler), folds of matter and power (Deleuze), and ideological control (Althusser). The class also uses this theoretical framework to build our understanding of Korean (and, when applicable, East Asian) writing systems, from calligraphy, to the development of print and digital culture. All readings available in English.

This course explores the late-sixteenth-century novel Jin Ping Mei in its historical and cultural context. Textually, we read all one hundred chapters, compare different editions and textual predecessors (through DH tools), explore illustrations and issues of visuality, and ask questions about authors and commentaries. Contextually, we investigate crucial aspects of late-Ming culture, print culture, medicinal knowledge, monetization, news and gossip, gender, and game culture. and discuss the way these cultural discourses structured the text in terms of content, form, and ideology.

Covering 1868 to the present, this course emphasizes Japan's dramatic rise as the modern world's first non-Western power, imperialism, industrialization, social change, gender relations, democracy, World War II, the U. S. Occupation, the postwar "economic miracle" followed by slow growth, and the preoccupation with national identity in a Western-dominated world. We will think about post-1945 developments in terms of continuities with prewar Japan. We will also hold Japan up as a "mirror" for America, comparing how the two capitalist societies have dealt with inequality, urbanization, health and welfare, and intervention in the economy.

Who were the Manchu people, who once ruled the mighty Qing empire (1636-1911) over China? Alternatively celebrated and villainized in Sinocentric historiography, the Manchus have become a complex symbol for imperial China's last glories and humiliations. This seminar questions the dominant narratives of racialization and cultural assimilation by exploring the formation of Manchu ethnicity over four hundred years. Using revisionist scholarship and primary sources, the course seeks to de-mystify Manchu history and culture by critically examining the ideological scaffolding of ethnic identity and its constitutive human experiences.

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

Readings in Japanese political, social, and economic history. Topics include transwar continuity and change, political economy, labor, gender issues, culture and state, religion, Japanese expansion and colonialism, the Allied Occupation of Japan and "social management." Some readings in Japanese (optional for those who do not specialize in Japanese history).

This seminar introduces students to major historiographical issues and methodological issues in China's twentieth-century history. The content is divided evenly between the Republic period and PRC history, with occasional forays back to the Qing dynasty. Topics reflect theoretical debates and empirical questions, including: nationalism, civil society, urban life, gender and sexuality, war and revolution, science, law.

An introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1600. Readings focus on primary texts in translation and are complemented by museum visits and supplementary materials on the course website. The course aims to allow students to explore the unique aspects of East Asian civilizations and the connections between them through an interactive web-based platform, in which assignments are integrated with the texts and media on the website. No prior knowledge of East Asia or experience working with digital media is required.

This course is targeted to students whose Japanese proficiency is at an advanced higher level. Students will discuss various issues using short novels, essays, editorials and films. They are also expected to use the Japanese language to communicate people outside of class. Through these activities, students will develop critical thinking skills as well as Japanese language skills.

This sixth-year Korean course is designed to advance students' reading and writing skills to the superior level and to promote a deeper understanding of the Korean language, culture, society, and history. Readings cover various types of authentic materials (e.g., newspaper articles, editorials, think pieces, essays, and contemporary literary short stories). Discussion and presentation skills in formal settings (e.g., academic, professional) are also emphasized. Class discussions are conducted in Korean.

This course provides an overview of China's political system. We will begin with a brief historical overview of China's political development from 1949 to the present. The remainder of the course will examine the key challenges facing the current generation of CCP leadership, focusing on prospects for democratization and political reform. Among other topics, we will examine: factionalism and political purges; corruption; avenues for political participation; village elections; public opinion; protest movements and dissidents; co-optation of the business class; and media and internet control.

Concepts of reincarnation - rebirth as a god, human, animal, hungry ghost, or hell being -have been central to Buddhism. How have Buddhists imagined the afterlife? Are men and women treated differently? What does cosmology imply about vegetarianism and animal welfare? Is Buddhism possible without belief in the otherworld? This course surveys the Buddhist otherworld across history, from ancient to modern, Asia to the West. Sources include paintings of heaven and hell, philosophical tracts, meditation manuals, tales of the Buddha's past lives, ghost stories, anime, Buddhist theme parks, and modern ethical debates.

Translation is at the core of our encounters with East Asia. From translations of the literary classics to contemporary novels and poetry, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to national identities to East-West travels of works in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on the classical principles of translation and problematizing what the "translation" of "original works" even means anymore in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.