Graduate

This course is designed for students aiming to advance their Korean proficiency through close reading and analysis of selected texts from Korean short stories and novels. Students will engage in discussions, compositions, and presentations to critically reflect on these works. By exploring themes such as love, gender, family, human rights, and relationships, the course offers deeper insights into the customs, values, and beliefs that shape Korean society and culture, as well as the universal human experiences conveyed through literature.

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the “material turn” in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

In this course, we will delve into “big problems” created by the movement, relocation, or displacement of objects that are assigned special cultural, artistic, and historical values in new contexts. We will follow the movement of artifacts across both geographical and disciplinary boundaries, challenging established notions of cultural heritage and art. We often study and read ancient texts as primary sources, but we don’t always pause to consider that those texts were written on physical objects like pieces of wood, leaves, or animal skin. Similarly, we’re familiar with the display of ancient artwork inside museums or galleries, but have we wondered about the journey of individual objects to those new locations? How do objects move from their original place to modern collections? How do they become art? And how do they become historical sources? Guided by an art historian and a social historian, this course presents different ways to look at “objects that move”, both as sources about past societies and as mirrors for contemporary ones. Through studying examples from the history of China and the Middle East, we will reconsider concepts such as cultural heritage, national patrimony, or even art that have been taken for granted. We will learn about the different histories of the dispersal of cultural heritages in those two regions, from nation-building and colonial projects in the twentieth century to the illicit trade in antiquities and the creation of digital replicas today.

Designed for non-heritage advanced learners of Korean with fourth-year proficiency or equivalent (as approved by the instructors), this course uses Korean songs as a focal point to enhance language skills while engaging with relevant cultural and historical knowledge of modern and contemporary Korea. By implication, we closely read and listen to selected songs so that we probe to reach a better and deeper understanding of the Korean language as played out in a verse and musical form, on the one hand, and we study the contexts in which the lyric and music are produced, performed, and distributed.

Designed for non-heritage advanced learners of Korean with fourth-year proficiency or equivalent (as approved by the instructors), this course uses Korean songs as a focal point to enhance language skills while engaging with relevant cultural and historical knowledge of modern and contemporary Korea. By implication, we closely read and listen to selected songs so that we probe to reach a better and deeper understanding of the Korean language as played out in a verse and musical form, on the one hand, and we study the contexts in which the lyric and music are produced, performed, and distributed. Consent only.

This colloquium is intended for graduate students preparing for a field exam in Japanese history and others interested in reading recent scholarship on the social, political, and cultural history of modern Japan.

After its modern discovery, Dunhuang—the home of Buddhist grottoes constructed between the 4th and 14th centuries—had been a site of intensive research that paved the way for the rise of Dunhuang Studies later in the twentieth century, including research in cave art and retrieved manuscripts. While these earlier endeavors made an indelible contribution to our knowledge of Dunhuang, this course posits a complexity in building the site into the discourse of modern China and a dialectic relationship between modern Dunhuang and the research of historical Dunhuang. To better understand this complexity, this course foregrounds how Dunhuang came to be known and studied in the politics of Western colonialism and the restructuring of modern China. The course will also trace the trajectory in which modern Dunhuang developed through a spectrum of different “representations” –architectural diagrams, photographs, paintings, exhibitions, etc. By focusing on these representations, students will analyze the agenda in the conception of Dunhuang as a site of national pride and heritage and consider its role in narratives of twentieth-century East Asian Art.

This class will survey the constructions of a variety of Others in Cold War Japanese media and literature, including questions of ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, and species. We will cover primary sources, including literary texts, films, and music, and we we will also read recent secondary scholarship in both English and Japanese relevant to the topic.  A substantial portion of the course readings will be in Japanese.   

The tantric or esoteric traditions exerted a profound if often covert influence on the development of East Asian Buddhism as a whole and on Japanese Buddhism in specific. In this course, we will trace their development through a close reading of selected sources in translation, focusing on the Ben kenmitsu nikyô ron attributed to Kūkai (774–835), the first systematizer of esoteric Buddhist thought in Japan. We will pay especially close attention to how the label of the “esoteric” or “tantric” is used to define specific religious identities. Students wishing to take this class should have a grounding in (East Asian) Buddhist thought. 

This course will explore Henri Bergson's philosophy as set forth in Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, and its reception in late Imperial and early Republican China (late 19th and early 20th centuries). Of special interest will be the role played by Bergsonian ideas in the Yogacara revival and the formation of New Confucianism during this period, with particular focus on figures like Zhang Taiyan, Xiong Shili and Liang Shumin. This will require us to deeply engage Bergson's idea of "duration" (durée) and its interpretation, particularly in relation to a reconsideration of the Yogacara Buddhist notion of ālaya-consciousness (storehouse consciousness) and the Confucian idea of ceaseless generation and regeneration (shengsheng bu xi) as derived from interpretive traditions centered on the Book of Changes (Yijing).