This course examines how politico-ideological and environmental discourses have shaped cities and their architectures in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Paying close attention to select cities including Almaty, Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Islamabad, New Delhi, Pyongyang, Phnom Penh, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, Tashkent and Tokyo, it aims to provide a preliminary answer to the increasingly urgent questions: what are the specificities of `Asian' modernity, and how was this modernity embraced and contested in urban contexts throughout Asia? For each city under study, a notable work of architecture will be singled out and subjected to close reading.

This course examines major themes in the visual cultures of China, Korea, and Japan from the Neolithic period to the present and provides a basic introduction to art historical methods. Through a series of case studies and the analysis of key artifacts and monuments, we will reflect on such central questions in East Asian art as: What are the cultural factors that give rise to iconographic and stylistic traditions? In what ways do objects and designs reflect religious and philosophical beliefs and ideas? How do structures of authority limit or further self-expression? Precepts will focus on key objects in the Princeton University Art Museum.

The history of art making in Japan is populated with an enormous cast of characters who inhabit the lively moving surfaces of a wide variety of artistic media, from medieval handscroll format paintings to contemporary manga and anime. This class will take its own part in animating these stories by exploring the ways in which words and pictures are inextricably linked to create meaning in these artistic forms. We will analyze the formal characteristics of images and texts in these immersive narrative worlds, placing them in their contemporary contexts as we reflect on their ongoing lives in our own.

This course explores the visual and material culture during the century of turmoil in China (1840s to 1940s) while considering critically how modernity was defined and how it operated. In this class, we will examine a wide array of visual mediums, such as painting, calligraphy, prints, sculpture, photography, and cinema. While doing so, we will reflect upon issues crucial to our understandings of modern Chinese art in particular and "modernity" in general, such as globality, coloniality, nationalism, gender, popular culture, and cultural heritage among others.

Calligraphy is one of the most highly regarded artistic accomplishments in China and is crucial to understanding Chinese art and culture in general. This course is a critical review of the studies of Chinese calligraphic paradigms, focusing on the period from the 7th to the 14th centuries.

How does stone become sacred, or lumber enlivened? Where is the Buddha Body in a decorated sutra? Why were so many ink paintings produced in the name of Zen, which declares images unnecessary? This seminar examines the history of Buddhist art-making and visualization practices from the earliest representations of the Buddha to the curatorial practices of modern museums. We foreground sensorial qualities and modes of making as we investigate the roles of aura, iconicity, and (in)visibility in the lives of efficacious objects. The class includes field trips to collections on campus and beyond to examine original works of art.

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. Class is conducted in Chinese.

Weekly three-hour seminar, focused on the concept Yugen from aesthetics of the noh theater, with considerations of earlier theories in wake poetics.

This course examines the nature of state and society in an age of turmoil, with a focus on patterns of allegiances, ways of waging war, codes of conduct, norms of etiquette, social and political structure based on primary and secondary sources. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Kagemusha shall provide the thematic foundation for this course.

Since the 19th century, the spy genre has crossed national boundaries to become a global literary and cinematic form of mass entertainment. This class examines one national form, the Chinese spy novel/film and its cross-cultural translations and appropriations. We historicize the development of the spy genre in China, by interrogating how the Chinese subgenre interacts with other national traditions and by placing its development in the socio-historical context of WWI, WWII and the Cold War.We also examine the media technologies--secret codes, spy cameras, fake mustaches--that allow cinematic and literary spies to wage their hidden wars.

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.

The seminar will encourage students to think critically about the documentary as artistic medium and as socio-political practice. Some important questions will focus on the form itself: who has produced and watched these films and through what sorts of technologies? What are the codes through which documentaries make sense of their subjects and how do these change? Other questions will have wider scope: how can filmmaking impact politics and culture? How does it deal with the gap between reality and representation? What are the ethical issues of such work? What, if anything, is distinct about the life of documentary films in East Asia?

This course will examine modern Japanese fiction and film that engaged with Japan's shift from "empire" to "nation" (roughly from 1930s to 1960s) with a specific focus on identity formation via race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

In this seminar we closely study ancient and medieval Chinese poetry, with emphasis on the formative stages of the Chinese textual tradition. While all texts will be read in translation, we also explore the ways in which the classical Chinese language shaped this poetry in its unique characteristics and possibilities of expression. In addition, we discuss in depth key texts of Chinese literary thought in their aesthetic, philosophical, social, and historical dimensions. Knowledge of the Chinese language is neither required nor expected.

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.

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 introduces students to the historiography of China during the Tang dynasty (618-907). The themes covered include politics, state institutions, elite culture, gender relations, civil examination, the development of cities, economic changes, the environment, and the place of the Tang in the medieval world. To consider these issues means that we will occasionally reach back and forward in time beyond the Tang dynasty itself. But the focus is squarely on the Tang. In this process, we will also reflect on the historiographical implications of truncating the history of China into the units of "dynasties."

Explores the "rise" of the warrior culture of Japan, as well as how warriors governed and fought in medieval Japan, before explaining how the samurai status was created and idealized in Japan.

This class explores the relationship between literary writing and the senses. It investigates the abstraction of thought and its connection with embodied modes of perception. It studies the way texts capture, convey, or suppresses the pleasures and the pains of the senses. It offers an overview of the major works and theories of the senses since the 1990s and discusses a host of classic Chinese literary texts in philosophy, poetry, opera, the novel, and the short story from roughly 500 BCE until 1949. Knowledge of Chinese recommended, but not necessary.

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.

This course covers key issues in Japanese cinema and media studies, reading seminal and recent English-language scholarship on modern technological media's role in Japan's evolving political, social, and cultural contexts. Topics include Japanese cinema's influence on U.S. film studies, the "historical turn," integration of recent critical methods, and shifts in media production, circulation, and consumption. We also examine the formation of the global anime fan community and Japan's role in the development of the platform economy.

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.

This gateway course to the study of history will be an immersive exploration of sources written in and about Asia between 1500 and 1900 CE. Students will study major scholarly debates in Asian history on the nature of early modernity, the agency of marginal actors, and the interpretive work of modern researchers. We will focus on India and China by dwelling on the themes of kingship and court culture, Jesuit writings, women and gender, and the tea and opium trades. Students will write three short papers: one on methods and two based on close and critical reading of these clusters of primary sources in translation.

The modern histories of Japan and Korea cannot be understood without close attention to the other. This seminar explores major events, starting with the fall of the Choson Dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, the creation of two Koreas, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and decolonization and social revolutions. Students will read primary texts, including memoirs, autobiographies, and novels, and engage with major works and debates on modern Japan and Korea. By adopting a comparative and transnational perspective, the course aims to reveal new ways and approaches to understanding the fraught histories of Japan in Korea, and Korea in Japan.

Second in the two-semester sequence on East Asian literary humanities, this course begins at the turn of the twentieth 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.

Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive and multifaceted feelings of our time; an engine of artistic production, it informs the works of Homer and James Joyce. One can be nostalgic for childhood or for a time when one's country was different. Fashion and music are imbued with nostalgic feelings, as are countless videos on our feeds. This class studies nostalgia from an interdisciplinary and global perspective: leveraging literature, cinema, philosophy, history, and cultural studies, it will explore how nostalgia is formed, and its role in the arts and society.

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.

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 and Buddhist classics, etc.). The second half utilizes journalism, ethnography, films, social media, and author interviews to consider contemporary China, atheism, popular movements, state control of religion, cosmology, gods, saints, divination, gender, and ritual.

Most people have heard of Zen Buddhism, but what is it? Who gets to define it? This class looks at Zen in China, Korea, Germany, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States through a range of methods from reading classic texts to studying ethnographic accounts. By considering Zen in different times and places, we explore how a religion is shaped by its political and cultural environs. We examine tensions between romanticized ideals and practices on the ground and grapple with how to study complicated and sometimes troubling traditions. Topics include myths, meditation, mindfulness, monastic life, gender, war, and death.

This seminar explores the visual and material culture of Japanese Buddhism during the eighth century through close examination of objects and documents with a focus on the Shosoin. We read primary sources and secondary scholarship including inventories, bureaucratic records, official histories, and Buddhist scriptures to show how Buddhism in the Nara capital and provinces was mediated by the production and dissemination of devotional objects. Significant time is spent on translation, as well as research methods necessary for the study of premodern Japanese Buddhism and art. Readings require basic familiarity with classical Chinese or kanbun.