Courses

From K-pop and K-drama to K-beauty, “Korea” is spreading across the world as a brand through popular culture.However, Korean popular culture’s heterogeneous forms and styles, varying responses to different sociopolitical stakes, and constant negotiations with global agents demonstrate the need to think critically about the use of “Korea” as a category or a method. This introductory level course aims to recognize and address this issue by examining a selection of materials including film, television, literature, music and fashion from the 20th and 21st centuries that are associated with Korea. While gaining knowledge of Korea’s modernization and developing an understanding of popular culture’s involvement in and reflection of society, students will put Korea at the center to reassess the various traditions and contentions in global popular culture. All required readings will be in English and all viewing materials will be available with English subtitles. Undergraduate students of every level and major with an interest in Korea or film and media more broadly are welcome.

This course will look at four of the most famous novels of premodern China: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Plum in the Golden Vase. Deeply self-conscious about the process of their own creation and their place within the larger literary canon, these novels deploy multiple frames, philosophical disquisitions, invented histories, and false starts before the story can properly begin. By focusing on the first twelve chapters each novel, this course will serve as both an introduction to the masterworks of Chinese vernacular literature and an exploration of the fraught beginnings of a new genre that took shape over the course of the sixteenth century. All readings will be in English, though students with reading ability in Chinese are encouraged to also read the original.

The third quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence covers the emerging nation-states of China, Korea, and Japan in the context of Western and Japanese imperialism and the rise of an interconnected global economy. Our themes include industrialization and urbanization, state strengthening and nation-building, the rise of social movements and mass politics, the impact of Japanese colonialism on the homeland and the colonies, East Asia in the context of US-Soviet rivalry, and the return of the region to the center of the global economy in the postwar years. Similar to the first and second quarters, we will look at East Asia as an integrated region, connected by trade and cultural exchange even when divided into opposing blocs during the Cold War. As much as possible, we will look beyond nation-states and their policies to explore the underlying trends shared by the three East Asian nations, such as mass culture,  imperialism, and the impact of the cold war . 

This course engages with the various techniques and practices associated with sound in Japanese culture, ranging from the 18th century through the contemporary era. The media covered will include literature, language reform movements, theater, cinema (both silent and sound), recorded music, radio broadcasting, manga, video games and anime. We will also read recent sound-oriented approaches to literary and cultural studies from scholars from both Japan and elsewhere. No previous knowledge of Japanese history or sound studies is required; all readings will be in English.

This course explores the cinema of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998). We will screen a number of his best-known films, including "Stray Dog" (1949), "Rashomon" (1950), "Ikiru" (1952), "Seven Samurai" (1954), "High and Low" (1963), and "Ran" (1985). In addition to introducing basic tools of formal analysis of cinema, we will study the historical and cultural context of Kurosawa's filmmaking in postwar Japan, his place in the global history of film discourse, the director's own writings on the theory of cinema, and questions of literary adaptation.

What can the body tell us about religion? How do people use their bodies in ritual? Can the body escape death? What happens to the body after death? In this course, we explore how medieval Chinese Daoists and Buddhists imagined, disciplined, and transcended the body. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources, we will look at practices such as food and sexual abstinence, visualization, body sacrifice, mummification, and the gendered quest for immortality or enlightenment. Along the way, we will notice both similarities and differences between these traditions, helping us better understand the rich diversity of Chinese religious experience.

This course will introduce theories and practices of performance that center East Asian forms and experiences. Through readings and primary materials as well as workshops and artist visits, we will engage with East Asian performance not as essentialized and static cultural displays but as sites for disciplinary intervention and innovation. The aim is not simply to integrate additional forms into the concept of performance but to use the challenge offered by East Asia to motivate more capacious performance theories capable of accounting for particularity across time and space. Areas of discussion will include: Peking opera, kabuki, pansori, puppetry, K-pop, Chinese classical dance, butoh, and drag.

How does Liking mukbang videos on YouTube or submitting danmu comments on Bilibili impact who we are and where we belong? In this course, we dive into the world of East Asian digital media to explore how algorithms, interface designs, and virtual characters shape our identities, our dynamics with others, and how we perceive the world around us. Instead of looking at users or viewers in isolation, we’ll use digital ethnographic methods to study how people, platforms, and content evolve together through social interactions.

Focusing on East Asian media content and platforms as sites of investigation, we will also challenge geo-national labels like “Japanese anime,” “K-pop,” and “Chinese platforms” to rethink how digital media redefine and complicate cultural borders of nations. Starting in Week 2, our sessions split into two parts: a theory seminar to discuss big ideas like agency and sociality, and a hands-on media lab where you’ll work in groups to analyze real-world digital activities. By the end of the course, you will be equipped with digital ethnographic and micro-sociological methods to analyze how digital content and architecture shape political discourses and social identities in today's world. All materials are in English. No prior background is required.

This course examines the cultural, political, and technological dimensions of digital technologies in East Asia, with a specific focus on digital media. Through readings in media theory, cultural studies, and science and technology studies, as well as screenings and hands-on digital labs, students will explore the intersection between regional histories and the forms and practices of digital culture. Analytical topics include the Internet, platform economies, video games, digital culture, and emerging debates around AI. Alongside theoretical inquiry, the course also introduces digital humanities methods such as text mining, network analysis, and visualization, asking students to critically engage both the media they study and the tools that may be constitutive to new kinds of research projects. By the end of the quarter, students should gain an understanding not only theories and methodologies of digital technologies in general, but also their sociocultural development in the region of East Asia.

This seminar will introduce students to the materials and methodologies of East Asian studies. What are the ways one might make sense of an Anyang wine vessel, a Bashō haiku, a line from the Analects, a pansori performance, a short story by Akutagawa, or a K-pop ballad? Through a range of approaches to diverse objects of inquiry, we will explore the interdisciplinary breadth of EALC as well as the history and future of area studies. Assignments based around students’ interests will also work towards developing field-specific research and writing skills.

The cataclysmic civil war fought during the “Three Kingdoms” period of China (220 – 280 C.E.) inspired one of the richest literary and artistic traditions in world history. For centuries, these events have been used to think about life in all its contradictoriness: exploring honor, brotherhood, violence, and transience. In this class we will read in translation the 17th-century version of the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi yanyi), a foundational text of East Asian culture. Part sober chronicle, part thriller, part tactical manual, part lyrical meditation, it variously portrays warfare as something glorious, distasteful, necessary, or entirely pointless. But the “Three Kingdoms” tradition extends far beyond this work. We will read premodern Chinese works retelling this story in poetry, history, hagiography, and drama, and also think about how these texts were transformed into the Three Kingdoms media that now dominate global culture—reading the novel against video games, manga, and web novels from China, Korea, and Japan. No knowledge of Chinese language or culture is required.

What can a horse tell us about power? In ancient China, horses made empire possible: they carried messages, moved armies, and connected distant frontiers. But horses were not machines. They got sick, died, and sometimes refused to cooperate. The more the state depended on them, the more it faced a basic problem: how do you build reliable power on something alive and unpredictable?  Using manuscripts, legal texts, tomb images, and movies, this course explores how people tried to manage that tension. All primary sources and readings (including excavated manuscripts) will be provided in English or in English translation. No prior background is required.  Graduate enrollment limited to MAPH students only.

What did it mean to be Korean in an era defined by colonialism, revolution, and various upheavals? What might it have been like to live the modern era as a Korean in East Asia, with acute vigilance and enduring hope? This course explores these questions through a close reading of Song of Arirang, the collaborative (auto-)biography of Kim San (1905–1938), "a Korean revolutionary," as co-written by Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow, 1907–1997), an American journalist and aspiring novelist. Based on oral interviews conducted in Yan'an, China, around the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the work takes the form of Kim San's autobiography, tracing a life that spanned the turbulent landscapes of early twentieth-century East Asia—shaped by capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, communism, modernization, and diaspora.  We treat Song of Arirang both as a historical narrative and as a literary work, examining it as an unusually rich treasury layered with the voices and perspectives of modern East Asians whose lives and stories traversed China, Korea, Japan, Manchuria, and the United States. Working through a recent, densely annotated edition over the course of the quarter, students will explore a wide spectrum of life trajectories, aspirations, despairs, and struggles—both individual and collective—experienced by Koreans and other East Asians during these transformative decades. No prior knowledge of Korea or East Asia is required.  Open to MAPH students.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the histories, methodologies, and practices foundational to Korean visual, literary, oral, and performing traditions. Its central concern is how historical overlaps, ruptures, and interactions among diverse media and various cultural origins have shaped Korean artistic and cultural production—and contributed to its contemporary global visibility. The first half surveys Korean history, writing systems, and philosophical thought from ancient to modern periods, organized around the thematic framework of "heaven (ch'ŏn; hanŭl), earth (chi; ttang), and people (in; saram)." This triad has underpinned the Korean vernacular script (han'gŭl), indigenous belief systems, and artistic practices from antiquity to the present. The second half turns to intertwined studies of visual and literary sources ranging from the late Chosŏn period (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) through the pre-digital contemporary era—the era in which Korea was richly and irrevocably exposed to the world outside. Designed for undergraduate and graduate students with limited or no prior exposure to Korea who wish to incorporate Korean materials into their studies or deepen their understanding of Korean culture, the course requires no prior knowledge of Korea or the Korean language. 

In an era of globalization and rapid technological innovation, “adaptations” are becoming increasingly widespread and diverse. In addition to discussions of an adapted work’s fidelity to the prior material, this advanced seminar aims to develop multiple approaches to adaptation by conceptualizing it as a process of negotiating with changes across time, space and medium. By examining a variety of selected media objects including films, TV series, animations, short stories, theater performances and online games from or about East Asia, students will practice analyzing a cultural product’s narrative and form in relation to the sociopolitical contexts of its production, circulation and reception. In the course of the quarter, students will de-Westernize adaptation studies while generating nuanced understandings of Korea, China, and Japan as relational constructs emerging as a result of negotiating with other cultures and wielding various technologies. All required readings will be in English, either originally or in translation, and all viewing materials will be available with English subtitles. This seminar is for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies, and the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

Each week will focus on a particular sense or sensation (sound, touch, horror, wonder, etc.) in works of premodern Japanese theater and fiction, paying particular attention to performance (broadly defined to include noh, kabuki, and puppet theater as well as comic storytelling and spectacle shows) as a public site for the exploration of intimacy and alienation, the circulation of feelings, and the staging of somatic difference. Considering, for example, anti-theatrical bias and discourses of contagion, scenes of possession and physical transformation, and the psychologizing of emotion and the senses, the course will engage with theories of embodiment, emotions, disability, and wonder.

All readings will be available in English. Previous experience in Japanese literature or history is not required. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.    

China has been in the "post-Mao" era for 50 years (or 48 years, if we take 1978, not 1976, as the turning point) - longer than the Mao or Republican eras (27 and 38 years), respectively). The post-Mao years have seen unprecedented economic growth, the transformation of a predominantly rural into an advanced industrial society, the lifting of millions out of poverty, the formation of a new working class composed of rural migrants and laid-off urban workers, and the rapid rise of inequality. China went through several severe crises: it is easy to forget that in the 1990s, the central government seemed to be losing control over the coastal provinces and observers predicted the imminent breakup of the country. Topics covered include the socialist legacy (state owenership of enterprises, the danwei and hukou system), the events around Mao's death, rural economic reforms (household responsibility system, township and village enterprises), urban reforms (SPecial Economic Zones, new labor laws, privatization), rural-urban migrations and its consequences, the Tiananmen protests, China's accession to the WTO, the 1997 and 2008 financial crises, and the recentralization of economy and society under Xi Jinping. While the focus is on large structural changes in society and economy, we will also discuss changes in gender norms and family life, and cultural change more broadly. All readings will be in English.

This lecture course surveys the history of the island of Taiwan from the 16th through 21st Centuries. Beginning during the period of European mercantile expansion, we explore the successive regimes that have sought to control the island, as well as the historical arguments and narratives that constitute the cultural identity of this diverse and contested place. The course also seeks to understand Taiwan’s place as a seafaring part of the Pacific world and to consider legacies of different layers of colonial encounter. Concluding in the 21st century the course engages with questions of contemporary sovereignty, social movements, political party formation, as well as economic and technological innovation. Students can anticipate reading across disciplinary genres and learning how to develop evidence based historical arguments through brief writing assignments.

The recent popularization of “true crime” in film, television shows, and podcasts has prompted critical discussions about the ethics of mixing documentary with entertainment and fact with fiction, as well as concerns about whose narratives are given public attention as others are ignored. Using these considerations as a starting point, this course examines some of the mainstays of the genre of “true crime”—scandal, violence, disaster, law, and the supernatural—in fiction and theater in early modern Japan in order to trace the fluctuating relationship between news, fiction, and performance over the course of the Edo period. This course examines the many ways that works of literature and stage were already deeply invested in these tropes of rumor, scandal, sensation, spectacle, and documentary long before the advent of regularly circulating printed newspapers in Meiji Japan, as well as how these existing configurations of sense and sensationalism informed later developments in media and fiction. The goal of this course is for students to gain not only a breadth of knowledge about various literary and theatrical forms in early modern Japan but also a critical awareness of how early modern spectacles of infamy or violence intersected with categories of class, gender, sexuality, and disability to transform some figures into targets of sympathy and others into paragons of villainy or horror.  All course readings will be available in English. The course is designed for undergraduate students but graduate participation is welcome with advanced consultation.

Past scholarship has often reduced the history of Chinese labor to the history of the Chinese labor movement or the history of the Communist Party in its function as “the leading core” of the proletariat. The factory proletariat, however, was never more than a small segment of the Chinese labor force – less than five percent under the Republic, less than ten in the People’s Republic. Recent work has been more inclusive, looking at work outside the formal sector, in agriculture, handcrafts, and service industries; at the work of women in formal employment and at home; at sex work and emotional work; at unemployment and precarious work; at the work of internal migrants; at Chinese workers abroad; at coerced work in private industry (the 2007 “black kiln incident”); and at carceral labor in Xinjiang and elsewhere. Most of the readings will deal with work in the Mao and post-Mao years, right up to the present. We will combine readings on Chinese labor history with more general texts on the relationship between productive and reproductive work, wage work and non-wage work, male and female work, autonomous and heteronomous work. The guiding question throughout the course is if a new Chinese labor movement is necessary, possible, or probable, and if it is not, under which conditions it might become so.  Format: This course is primarily addressed at advanced undergraduate and M.A. students. Tuesday classes will begin with a short lecture, follow.

Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly (Ferguson 2020, p. 9). Women’s underpaid work in textile factories and other industries subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households continue to keep wages low.We know, at least in outline, how gender roles and family forms changed in the industrializing West. Little research has been done so far about this process in the three East Asian countries. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and care work was marked female. We’ll also see that the specific gender roles that emerged in these countries differed from each other and from those in western countries.

This course explores the styles and functions of Chinese independent documentary since the 1980s, with particular attention to the sociopolitical and technological contexts that underpin its flourishing in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We will focus on the aesthetic strategies whereby Chinese documentaries advance claims of truthfulness, and explore the expanded documentary practices of the digital age. The course will include meetings and discussions with directors. All readings are in English and all films have English subtitles. Students with knowledge of Chinese, however, are encouraged to consult Chinese sources.

This course is an experiment in rethinking what has conventionally been studied and taught as "postwar Japanese culture" as instances of global Cold War culture. We will look at celebrated works of Japanese fiction, film and popular music from 1945 through 1990, but instead of considering them primarily in relation to the past events of World War Two, we will try to understand them in relation to the unfolding contemporary global situation of the Cold War. We will also look at English-language writing on Japan from during and after the Cold War period. Previous coursework on modern Japanese history or culture is helpful, but not required. All course readings will be in English.

In this course, we will focus on the historical figure of Confucius and the book through which he is best known, the Lunyu or, as it is usually translated, Analects. Each week we will devote one class to a close reading of the Analects, with attention to its philosophy. The second class will consider various issues related to Confucius and the Analects: The man, the thought, and the text; this will involve reading and discussing studies written by Western scholars. Knowledge of Chinese is neither required nor expected, though there is the possibility of an extra reading session for students with knowledge of classical Chinese.

This class offers an overview of the history of feminism in China, with a focus on the genres of writing (manifestos, pamphlets, essays, poetry and fiction) and media (journals, posters, zines, digital platforms, hashtags) through which feminist ideas emerged and circulated from the late 19th century to this day. Topics to be discussed include: feminism and the public sphere, feminism and nationalism, the question of women's literature, feminism in the socialist revolution, family laws, feminism and trans and queer rights. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required.  Open to MAPH students.

This course explores the ways in which personhood was constituted in early modern China. Focusing on the years 1500–1800—a period marked by commercial expansion, political rupture, ethnic conflict, social fluidity, and literary experimentation—we will ask how the subhuman, the superhuman, and the nonhuman were used to expand or delimit the possibilities of the human and the humane. Topics of discussion will include gods, ghosts, barbarians, women, eunuchs, animals, and things; readings will come from a wide range of sources, including classical tales, vernacular fiction, official and unofficial histories, travelogues, and materia medica. All readings will be available in English, though students with Chinese reading ability are encouraged to read the original.  

This course examines the operation and consequences of censorship in the Japanese Empire, with focus on those of colonial Korea. The Japanese authorities’ repressive measures and the Korean responses to them exhibit both general characteristics of censorship and distinctively colonial ones. With a larger goal of exploring the relationship between censorship practices and legacies in modern East Asia, it studies the institutions, the human agents, and texts produced by censors as well as by writers, stressing the need of a comparative understanding of censorship. In addressing the institutional aspects of censorship and the reactions by journalists and writers, the course pursues two main objectives. The first aim is to examine the workings and impact of prepublication censorship in particular, one that shaped the journalistic culture of colonial Korea. Secondly, the class seeks a better understanding of censorship-inflected textual matters, not only in terms of the sites of censorship but also in regard to the strategies of counter-censorship, which may or may not be visually inscribed on the printed texts.

This graduate seminar examines key English-language scholarship on Korean film and media from the recent decade. The goal is to cultivate critical insight into the theoretical frameworks, critical debates and historical inquiries of this evolving field. Core readings will include major monographs and edited collections, alongside select critical essays as well as relevant film and media objects.   

The Chinese Bronze Age, ca. 2000 BCE to 500 BCE, marked the rise and the rapid development of ancient Chinese civilizations. While metallurgy, writing, and state-level society began relatively late in comparison to ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, in terms of the amount of metal used and bronzes objects made, we can truly call this period in China the Bronze Age. Through time, the forms of bronze artifacts, especially bronze vessels, became more varied, the quantity dramatically increased, and the function and role of bronze vessels diversified and gradually secularized. Bronzes vessels, therefore, offer a window to understand the art, the technology, the material culture, the cultural practice, the political interaction, and the religious and spiritual realms of ancient China.

This traveling seminar therefore aims to take a group of preselected undergrad and graduate students on museum tours, to study bronzes in exhibitions and to view and examine objects up-close in the context of viewing sessions in study rooms. The course will consist of an on-campus component, during which students will study related research literature, and a museum tour component, during which students will travel to the selected museums and view bronzes on site. The seminar will make one out-of-town trip, while also take advantage of the locally accessible collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Students need pre-approval to take the course.

The course will review anthropological literature and case studies of craft production and craft specialization in ancient civilizations. It also takes a multi-disciplinary approach by adopting perspectives developed in history and art history. Topics discussed in the course include organization of production, craft production and the elite, chaîne opératoire, status and identity of artisans, and political economy and craft production. Students are expected to become familiar with prevalent theoretical discussions and are encouraged to apply, adopt, or revise them in order to analyze examples of craft production of their own choice.