Undergraduate

Forbes Magazine has styled the Tibetan Buddhist monk Mingyur Rinpoche, “the happiest man alive.” Like no other religion, Buddhism in the public imagination is associated with providing us with an accessible way towards leading a good and happy life. But what is the “good life” according to the Buddhist tradition, and what is “happiness” supposed to lead us towards? In this course, we will explore these questions through a close reading of Buddhist sources in translation. Through these readings the course will introduce the doctrinal and practical foundations of the Buddhist traditions and serve as a gateway to more specialized studies. Course Note: This course counts as a Gateway course for RLST majors/minors.

What is Zen? Impossibly, seemingly, everything to everybody. In this course, we will explore Zen’s protean transformations through a close reading of primary sources in translation. Rather than asking what Zen is, we will focus on how in these materials the Zen traditions are continually de/re-constructed as contingent religious identities from medieval Japan to the contemporary United States and Europe. The focus of the course will be the premodern Japanese Zen tradition, its background in Chinese Chan, and its reception in the West. The course will include field trips to Zen communities in the Chicago area. Students wishing to take this course are strongly encouraged to also take Prof. Ziporyn’s course on Chan during the fall quarter. 

This course is part of a two-sequence series, to be followed by a course on Japanese Zen Buddhism taught by Professor Stephan Licha in Winter 2025.  "Chan" is a partial Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word "Dhyana," meaning meditation practice; the same Chinese character is pronounced "Zen" in Japanese.  This course will consist of the close reading (in English translation) and discussion of both the Indian Buddhist scriptures and indigenous Chinese sources that form the core of the tradition spanning Chan and Zen, with a few secondary descriptions of Chan institutions and cultural influences.  Our focus will be on the development of ideas concerning the nature of sentience and the implications this has for understanding the existential predicament of sentient beings, touching on central themes of dependent co-arising, non-self, Emptiness, consciousness-only, Buddha-nature and original enlightenment, and the methods of realization (doctrinal, non-doctrinal, and indeed anti-doctrinal) proposed to redress this existential predicament at each stage of Chan history. This will be done both with an eye to the historical continuity of these sometimes seemingly contradictory forms thought and practice, and also to extract from them whatever transhistorical philosophical and spiritual valences we care to derive from the texts.

The term pilgrimage is usually associated with journeys to ancient religious sites such as the Vatican or Mecca. But why do superfans who travel to Disney World often describe this in terms of a pilgrimage? Why is it that when anime fans visit real-life sites from their favorite shows, this is frequently called a “journey to sacred sites” (seiichi junrei)? In this course we will discuss these and other questions about pilgrimage in its religious and secular forms. We will consider examples such as the Islamic Hajj, the Crusades, and a 750-mile Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan, alongside journeys to Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross, Elvis’s Graceland, and the sets of Hobbiton. After first exploring theories of travel, tourism, and pilgrimage through a global array of examples, the second half of the course consists of a deep dive into connections between anime tourism, religious travel in Japan, and the worldwide boom of Japanese pop culture. At the end of the course students will present a small research project on a pilgrimage/tourist destination of their own choosing. No prior coursework on religion required. 

This course aims to go through recent English-written monographs in the Korean Studies field each week and to learn how scholarship addresses South Korean politics and socioeconomic changes in terms of class, gender, modernization, and development politics. By reading and discussing significant scholarly works, this course will help students extend their understanding of modern South Korean society and its relationship to the family, the state, civil society, popular culture, class, and the economy in both local and global contexts.

“Everyday” is easily perceived as too trivial to discuss its importance or mundane to have no historical value. In contrast, postcolonial, postmodern, poststructural, and even posthuman seem to have attempted to deconstruct pre-existing systems, social structures, our relationships with other people, objects (either living or not living), environment, and cultures (from ideology to affects, you name it). Yet, what we easily call macro-level or meta-narratives feels too heavy to lift. We will try to learn how to fill the gap between abstract and concrete and try to understand history as something specific and commonplace: Everyday. Using modern Korea as a lens, this course will address topics related to everyday—from what we do everyday (housing, eating, and clothes) to how we do everyday (earning, spending, meeting, thinking, feeling, etc.) How does food reflect the history of any society’s culture? What historical situations have created so-called “the Apartment Republic” in South Korea? Why did the Korean public become crazy about dancing in the 1950s? How has SPAM become a popular holiday gift set?  Likewise, we can ask various questions about our notions of everydayness and discuss the multiple meanings of everydayness, the politics of everyday, and its relationships in modern Korean History.

The course introduces both women’s history and theories concerning production and reproduction in modern China, Japan, and Korea. By bringing both production and reproduction into the discussion, the course extends the definition of “work” from workplaces to households, from formal work settings to informalities. We will read and analyze women’s economic engagements in different contexts and localities (e.g. factories, households, political mobilizations, global trade, and sex work) together with scholarships from socio-economic historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars.

Historians have provided a broad chronological framework and empirical studies, such as the birth of feminist movements in twentieth-century East Asia, the pattern of gendered and highly specialized economic development, and women’s work as handicraft makers, factory employers, and sex workers. Anthropologists have established such analytical categories as “skill,” “practical knowledge,” and “gynotechnics” that were largely overlooked when discussing women’s work. Recent Marxist feminist scholars have extended Marxist examination of value to female labor, and contributed to our understanding of social reproduction by theorizing capitalism and its supporting system. With different concepts and frameworks, students are encouraged to reassess the complex meanings of differences outside of contemporary Western feminist theories.

Whether it is the tonalities and idiosyncracies of individual speech and dialogue in the polyphonic novel, the depiction of urban sounds and noises in Eileen Chang’s prose about 1930’s Shanghai, the borrowing of folk songs in political lyrics during the Mao era, or Western pop and rock music in experimental fictions from the 1980s, sound culture in its various forms and transformations has long left its imprint on modern literary imaginations. Sound is inseparable from technologies and ideologies of listening; in this course, we will use literary texts as aural technologies to approach historical sonic cultures, and read them as archives of sonic experiences. Through reading modern Chinese literary works together with the history of Chinese sound cultures, we ask: how does literature from different historical periods capture transient sounds? What can literature tell us about how sound is experienced in different historical periods? What are the strengths and limits of language as a medium of articulating aural experiences? How is the difference between sound and noise, listening and other senses, drawn in different historical periods, and what role does literature play in it?

Performance exists in repetition. Theater is a space where we continue to bring the past to the present, making new moments while maintaining old memories. In this class, we will explore the relationship between performance and repetition by looking at how classical performance in East Asia continue/discontinue on modern stages. From Royal Shakespeare Company’s translation and adaptation of Yuan drama to avant-garde Japanese theatre’ artists recycling of classical performance training techniques, from museum performances that breathe life into the collected theatrical objects to underground variety theater that revives Edo-kabuki––all the materials in the class center on the ways in which modern East Asia negotiates with the disruption of traditions as well as social and personal dislocations that modernity has brought about. By closely looking at a variety of cases, we will consider: How does performance provide us alternative lens to probe into the changing cultural values, historical backgrounds, and social identities in East Asia? What are some ways that we can rethink the premodern/modern divide in East Asian Studies? How can the studies of East Asian performance, both classical and modern, enrich our understandings of the interplay between theater, history, and memory?

This course focuses on the idea of the modern in Japanese literature, how it is envisioned, construed, complicated, and debated through the century from 1840 to 1945. We will read texts from decades before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which is commonly seen as the starting point of “modern Japan,” up until the end of WWII in 1945. This course introduces key texts, both literary and critical, and asks the students to critically think about what the “modern” means across different time periods, from different points of view, and against different historical, political, and cultural backgrounds.

The purpose of this course is threefold: 1) to familiarize students with the knowledge of Japanese literature and Japanese cultural history of this time; 2) to prompt students to think about literary and cultural history in a critical and informed manner, especially in the case where they are not familiar with the culture; 3) to train students with skills in close reading and in critically examining scholarly discourses. All required readings will be provided in English. Proficiency in the Japanese language is not required.