Graduate

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.

This course aims to provide a comprehensive social science perspective on contemporary China. Here, contemporary Chinese society is loosely defined as the society that emerged after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating readings from various social science disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, and law.

This seminar examines a selection of modern and contemporary Korean fiction in dialogue with East Asian and Western literary traditions and critical theory. Students analyze how Korean literature engages with and can be interpreted through literary movements and theoretical frameworks developed in other contexts, while exploring its distinctive characteristics.  Through these investigations, the course explores how linguistic, cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic factors—along with readers' individual perspectives—shape the reading experience and understanding of concepts like "national literature," "world literature," and "global literature," and ultimately, the nature of literature itself. While all required readings will be available in English, students who can read Korean are encouraged to engage with original texts at their level of proficiency.

In this course, we will survey contemporary Western Sinologists' major works concerning early Chinese civilization. For each class we will consider one major scholar who has contributed to our understanding of ancient China, reading one or more of their representative works. Scholars to be considered may include Roger Ames, Sarah Allan, William Baxter, Erica Brindley, Constance Cook, Scott Cook, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Paul Goldin, Marc Kalinowski, Maria Khayutina, Donald Harper, Martin Kern, Mark Lewis, Li Feng, John Major, Dirk Meyer, Michael Nylan, Yuri Pines, Michael Puett, David Schaberg, Roel Sterckx, Wu Hung, and Robin Yates, though not necessarily in that order. All readings will be in English. Students will also be expected to select one scholar not treated in the course, to make a class presentation and to write a term-paper introducing the scholar and her contributions to the field

China's first discovery of ancient texts in a tomb took place in 279 CE, in Ji Commandery, near Weihui County in present-day northeastern Henan province. Although the tomb was opened by tomb-robbers, most of the bamboo-slip texts that had been placed in the tomb were preserved and transported to the Western Jin capital at Luoyang, where they were edited by a committee of high-ranking scholars. The texts, including especially the Mu tianzi zhuan (Biography of the Son of Heaven Mu) and the Zhushu jinian (Bamboo Annals), were an immediate sensation, and were cited and quoted for centuries thereafter, much in the way that discoveries of ancient manuscripts today have stimulated great interest. With the experience gained from editing these new discoveries of ancient manuscripts, it is an opportune moment to turn our attention anew to this first discovery of manuscripts and to try to reconstruct both the editorial process to which they were subjected and also the original structure of the texts themselves.

This will be a two-quarter course. We will begin with a consideration of the tomb, its robbing, and the work done to edit the texts. We will then move on to consider the texts themselves. In the first term, we will focus on the Mu tianzi zhuan. Then in the second term, we will move on to the Zhushu jinian.

A seminar exploring the ways that ritual practice in China has been understood as an embodied and fully sensory activity. We will read across the disciplines (of religion, art history, ethnogaphy, area studies, archaeology, etc) and examine the images and objects featured in this scholarsip, both from its perspectives and in light of theories of ritual, embodiment, and material culture.

In this course, we will survey Western Sinologists' major works concerning early Chinese civilization, from the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Each week we will consider one or two major scholars who have contributed to our contemporary understanding of ancient China, reading one or more of their representative works. Scholars to be considered will include James Legge, Marcel Granet, Henri Maspero, Bernhard Karlgren, Herrlee Creel, Peter Boodberg, A.C. Graham, K.C. Chang, Noel Barnard, David Keightley, and Michael Loewe. All readings will be in English. Students will also be expected to select one scholar not treated in the course, to make a class presentation and to write a term-paper introducing the scholar and his contributions to the field.

This course will consist of close readings, in Classical Chinese, of commentarial expansions on the Yijing (Zhouyi) developing its ontological, metaphysical, cosmological, epistemological and ethical implications. Readings will include some or all of the following: the “Ten Wings” (including the “Xicizhuan”), the works of Wang Bi, Han Kangbo, Wei Boyang, Dongshan Liangjie, Shao Yong, Zhang Boduan, Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi, Wang Fuzhi, Ouyi Zhixu, and Liu Yiming. PQ: Proficiency in Classical Chinese required. 

This course will explore contemplative practices from nontheistic thinkers and traditions that focus on the experience of timelessness, and the relationship of these practices to each system’s conception of time, experience, knowledge, suffering, beauty and beatitude. Readings will be drawn from the works of Plotinus, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Santayana, Tiantai Buddhism, and Dōgen.

This course will explore the philosophical doctrines of classical Tiantai Buddhism and their extensions and reconfigurations as developed in the ideas of later thinkers, both Tiantai and non-Tiantai, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Readings will be drawn from the classical Tiantai thinkers Zhiyi, Zhanran and Zhili, followed by writings of early Chinese Chan Buddhism, Japanese Tendai “Original Enlightenment” thought, Kamakura Buddhist reformers including Dōgen, Nichiren and Shinran, the 20th century Confucian Mou Zongsan, and contemporary Anglophone “Neo-Tiantai” thinking.