2021-2022

This hands-on reading and research course aims to give graduate students the linguistic skills needed to locate, read, and analyze archival documents from the People's Republic of China. We will begin by discussing the functions and structure of Chinese archives at the central, provincial, and county level. Next we will read and translate sample documents drawn from different archives. These may include police reports, personnel files, internal memos, minutes of meetings, etc. Our aim here is to understand the conventions of a highly standardized communication system - for example, how does a report or petition from an inferior to a superior office differ from a top-down directive or circular, or from a lateral communication between adminstrations of equal rank? We will also read "sub-archival" documents, i.e. texts that are of interest to the historian but did not make it into state archives, such as letters, diaries, contracts, and private notebooks. The texts we will read are selected to cast light on the everyday life of "ordinary" people in the Maoist period. The target group for the course are graduate students and advanced undergraduates with good Chinese reading skills.

The late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the intensification of nationalist and anti-colonial movements in Asia. What understandings of imperialism did these different movements develop? How and why did those movements take such divergent paths in their anti-colonial struggles? And despite these divergences, what similar political, social, and economic trends animated them? This class will explore the connections and disparities between emergent nationalisms in India, China, and Japan. Instead of accepting distinctions between East and South Asia or between colonialism and semi-colonialism as proof of incomparability, this class will use the differences between these three countries to develop a comprehensive understanding of the various ways that societies responded to the threat of foreign rule and encroachment. By reading a combination of primary and secondary sources, students will discover the indelible influence that resistance to imperialism had on the development of nationalist thought in these three societies, even as that resistance took on increasingly different forms as time passed. Beginning with efforts in the late-nineteenth century to categorize their position in a global hierarchy vis-à-vis the Western powers, this course then tracks the ways that Japanese, Indian, and Chinese nationalisms took on similar shapes in different contexts before rapidly diverging in the early twentieth century.

This course surveys new archaeological evidence for the early development of Chinese landscape representations from the 5th century BCE to the 10th century CE, and explores the relationship between such representations and various cultural and religious trends. Possible topics include the origins of landscape representation, religious significance of landscape images, construction of landscape environment, and landscape aesthetic and the notion of transcendence. Students are encouraged to explore these and other topics, and are expected to produce papers based on focused research.

Icons belong to the most important category of sacred objects in Buddhism, and they were indispensable for transmitting the religion across East Asia. The ontological status of icons, however, remained polemical throughout most of the religion’s premodern history. While scholars in religious studies have since the 1960s been attentive to the ritual and cultic functionality of Buddhist icons, art historians did not move past style-oriented methodologies and fully engage Buddhist icons as such until the 1990s. This course investigates different methodologies devised by scholars in the past to study Buddhist icons with various theoretical premises and from diverse historical perspectives and focuses. We will pay particular attention to how the field, Chinese Buddhist art history, bears those different approaches to Buddhist icons in its development of the past decades. 

How does architecture engage people visually, physically, or spatially? In what ways can we talk about architecture acting upon viewers, cultivating their bodily knowledge and shaping their spatial experiences? In a figurative sense, this course explores ways in which architecture is not confined as the backdrop of a performance but a critical constituent of it. Yet, rather than using the power of “performance” only as an explanatory metaphor, the course takes it as an essential quality of architecture, investigating what constitutes Chinese traditional architecture’s performativity—its agentic power that engages and thus transforms viewers both affectively and intellectually. The goal is to situate China’s architectural tradition in an unconventional framework of analysis to explore issues, materials, topics, etc. that have thus far not been fully or appropriately studied. Language proficiency in classical Chinese is required.

For the past century, the artist’s monograph –the ‘life and works’ account- has been a mainstay of museum research and art historical publication, even though the genre has been garnering criticism for some time. In the wake of the deconstruction of the author and the emergence of new theories of subjecthood, what is to be gained by writing an extended study of a single artist? Is the model hopelessly encumbered by assumptions about the artist as (white, male) creator-genius, or is there still something important to be accomplished by the intimate study of an individual and her works? How is this project affected as we turn our attention to artists in different centuries and locales?

This course asks a basic question: Of what does China’s built environment in history consist? Unlike other genres of art in China, a history of China’s built environment still waits to be written, concerning both the physical structure and spatial sensibility shaped by it. To this end, students will be introduced to a variety of materials related to our topic, ranging from urban planning, buildings, tombs, gardens, and furniture. The course aims to explore each of the built environments—its principles, tradition, and history—based on existing examples and textual sources, and to propose ways and concepts in which the materials discussed throughout the quarter can be analyzed and understood as a broader historical narrative of China’s built environment.

This experimental seminar examines how medical knowledge is constituted and disseminated in texts, images, and performances in early modern Japan and China (roughly 1600-1850). This period saw an explosion in the number of doctors, print and visual materials, and a new centrality of medical, pharmacological, and bodily knowledge and practices. Looking beyond established national, cultural, and political boundaries, we will study how shared medical traditions converge and diverge over time and space. How did literary genre shape and constrain the forms medical knowledge took and vice-versa? Who has access to and who has control over technologies of health and sickness, including learned medicine, vernacular healing, and self-care?  How was efficacy understood, contested, and proven in a medical and legal context? Primary sources to be read include medical and crime cases, forensic reports, plays, novels, biographies, imperial encyclopedias, almanacs for daily life, illustrated pharmacopeia, religious tracts, printed advertisements, and shops signs. Film and tv episodes will be screened to explore contemporary narratives of early modern medical knowledge in the very different political and media economies of post-war China and Japan.

Thousands of Chinese manuscripts dating between the fifth century B.C. and the tenth century A.D. have been discovered since the beginning of the twentieth century, with new discoveries continuing to the present. This seminar addresses theoretical and methodological approaches to engaging in research on the manuscripts.