2023-2024

This course explores modern Korean history through the lens of gender as a critical analytical tool. In studying social, historical, and cultural changes shaping gender relations, we will extend our understanding of gender dynamics and its relationship to the family, the state, civil society, class, and the economy. By reading and discussing significant scholarly works, this course will help students understand Korean women’s history in both local and global contexts. The course will be divided into two parts. The first section will address women’s issues and identities, such as women as mothers, wives, and citizens in the framework of family and social institutions, by looking at postcolonialism, patriarchy, and nationalism. Next, the latter half will examine various aspects of women and the economy, including labor, consumption, market economy, governmentality, and class and status. 

Korea has a rich and dynamic history in terms of historical coherence and distinctiveness but is often restricted to just a one-note idea, such as North Korea’s nuclear threats or BTS. This course explores modern Korean history from Japanese colonial rule to the contemporary era, covering major historical events such as Korean War, the Kwangju democratization movement, and two Korea’s reunification efforts, as well as contemporary sociocultural dimensions such as the industrialization of plastic surgery, drinking culture, classified expansion of Korean popular culture as written and called with Capital K (K-pop, K-film, K-drama, etc.), and mukbang (food casting). Weekly topics address major socioeconomic, political, and cultural issues such as postcolonialism, capitalism, developmentalism, neoliberalism, governmentality, gender, sexuality, and family. Students will gain a fuller understanding of Korea’s place in the world through engaging with Korean cultural heritage and historical transformations. They will also learn how to critique contemporary media representations of Korea and enable critical reading of texts and films to build their own perspectives.

What the heck does art have to do with death? Most obviously, this course examines artifacts manufactured and used specifically for mortuary purposes in pre-modern China. It investigates how art is defined through the context and space of the dead and what significance art had when produced and when it functions as such. Less obviously, this course will also study how and why art was ever produced in relation to death, asking: In what ways does art express, convey, or discourse on abstract notions and ideas of death, and can we come to an understanding of a visual and material culture, or cultures, of death in pre-modern China from such a study? Finally, what is the mortality of art itself in the context of Chinese art history?

Combining close reading and viewing with historical surveys, this seminar examines an assortment of popular literary and television dramatic texts whose production involved female writers and directors of modern or contemporary Korea. Its aim is to explore the ways in which the gendered and generational identity of the textual producers contribute to generating notable  imprints within the chosen genre in question, responding to the social, cultural, and political calls that arise from their own present time. The texts include, among others, prose fictions by Na Hye-sŏk (1897-1948), Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ) and television drama series such as The Hourglass (1995; written by Song Jina), Mr. Sunshine (2018; written by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021 dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; original novel by Kang Mi-kang, 2017), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). No Korean proficiency is required.

This course explores the possibility of listening closely to Korean popular music through literary fiction. Each week students learn about the histories and cultures of a different Korean musical genre (minyo, trot, military songs, rock, folk, K-pop, etc.) from the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) to the present. The class engages with music through celebrated and lesser-known works of modern and contemporary Korean fiction, films, and critical essays on media, popular culture, and listening. Guiding these inquiries, we consider how popular songs intersect with, inform, or diverge from modern Korea's history of political upheaval, rapid modernization, and mass social movement; and the ways in which popular musical languages, cultures, and histories inform understandings of literary style, form, and narrative. It is expected that upon completion, students will be able to articulate critical and informed responses to such scholarly discussions as those surrounding cultural hybridity, collective memory, and the power of song; and apply the interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches they've learned in class to their understandings of popular song cultures more broadly. All readings are in English. No prior knowledge of Korean is necessary.

A survey of recent work in the study of premodern Chinese religion, with an emphasis on questions of method. This quarter we’ll focus on methods for the use of archaeological reports in the study of ritual and other forms of religious practice, from Eastern Han tombs to excavations of sites in Gansu and the Tarim Basin dating to later periods. A significant percentage of the readings will be in (modern) Chinese, so reading competence in that language is required.

In this course we will explore the full range of Japanese books including both manuscripts and printed books ranging from daunting Chinese texts to beautiful illustrated books. We will also be looking at printed maps from the Edo period (1600-1868) and single-sheet ephemera, and we will be considering questions such as the role of censorship, the differences between wood-block printing and typography and why people continued to produce manuscripts during the age of print. We will mostly focus on materials produced in the Edo period and the Meiji period (1868-1912), ending up with the introduction of newspapers and magazines in the 1860s. There will be images available on the course website, but we will also be handling and closely examining books and manuscripts from the Regenstein Library and from my own collection. If you have never seen an old Japanese book before, you will learn how to make sense of the layout and organisation of a premodern Japanese book and to appreciate the craft and design skills that went into their production: even if you can’t read them, they have beauty and appeal as hand-made artefacts. Some of the sessions in the course are accessible to those with no knowledge of Japanese but since script choice and calligraphy inevitably need to be discussed as well, those without any knowledge of Chinese characters will be at a disadvantage.

This course explores the history of one of the world's largest cities from its origins as the castle town of the Tokugawa shoguns in the early seventeenth century, to its transformation into a national capital and imperial center, and concludes in the postwar era as Tokyo emerged from the ashes of World War II to become a center of global capital and culture. Our focus will be on the complex and evolving interactions between the natural and built environments of the city and politics, culture, and social relations.

This graduate seminar course aims to introduce what is arguably the most complex product of society and Japanese society in particular — the city, and to concentrate on the city of Tokyo. Our study will encompass a range of issues concerning the city and the consequences of urban development under modern and contemporary conditions. We will observe how the city has defined, and has been defined by, a particular reality at a particular time, beginning in Edo period and concluding in the present. Such approach emphasizes a need to examine the city within a certain context, particularly its social, cultural, and political circumstances. Thus, we will look at the creation and recreation of the city’s physical texture, at architecture, urban landscape, infrastructure, and technology, and at the same time observe the city as a social product determined by everyday life and habitual practices, organization of the immediate surrounding, personal rites and the micro-politics of life in the city. In the same manner, we will look at buildings and neighborhoods per-se, as a material construct guided by geometry and legal code, but at the same time recognize how the pragmatics of this built environment interrelate with cultural expressions such as literature and film, and thus examine the mechanisms that relate the city to culture. Also, we will see how the city is not merely a reflection or expression of politics, but rather an intricate political apparatus in and of itself, influencing relationships and encouraging change.

This course centers around the Smart Museum’s preparations to host the exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan. Reading primary and secondary sources in Japanese and European languages, we will assess the history of collecting and exhibiting Meiji art and debate the relevance of a long nineteenth-century approach that emphasizes continuities across the Edo-Meiji divide. Ample attention will be paid to craft, three dimensional objects, and the built environment in addition to paintings and prints. Themes include: gender and the body; the development of a metalanguage through which to discuss art; the changing position of Chinese art and culture; issues of “orientalism” and “occidentalism;” and the designation of “craft” and “calligraphy” as new fields on the margins of the beaux-arts.