2023-2024

Welcome to Buddhist Life in Pre-Modern East Asia. Like playing life simulation games The Sims andThe Game of Life, in this course you will learn about lives of Buddhist practitioners from different social backgrounds in pre-modern East Asia. Some overworlds we will cover are Dunhuang and Chang’an in Tang China, Kyoto and Nara in Kamakura Japan, the Khitan Empire and Goryeo Korea. For the final project, you will choose your virtual Buddhist, research your own expansion pack, and tell the story of their life (and death). This course is an introduction to Buddhism as a practiced religion in pre-modern East Asia, with a special focus on the experience of the practitioners. Students will take on the role to be royal patrons, cultural elites, traveling monks, or common people who did not necessarily self-identify as Buddhist. We will learn about various Buddhist practices through reading text and manuscripts, viewing Buddhist art and architecture and reconstructing rituals and religious exchanges among these places. All readings are in English and no previous knowledge of Buddhism is needed to participate.

How does our understanding of the past change when our understanding of what history is changes? This seminar examines how people in premodern China, Japan, and Korea interpreted and recorded their past prior to the twentieth century. From official histories, canonical texts and authors to iconoclastic genres and hermit scholars, we will examine the different forms that history took in different times and places while exploring the connections and similarities of different traditions of history writing. Topics to be touched upon include objectivity, morality, the role of politics, genre, narrative, and time.

Many historians have termed the rising attention to materials and materiality as a "material turn." In this course, we will explore how materials and materiality can shape and influence our understanding of history.

Japan's imperial expansion in East Asia in the late nineteenth and twentieth century have drafted influenced social, political, technological, and environmental relations between different areas in this region. In recent years, we have seen a growing number of scholarship that discusses the influences and process of Japan's imperial expansion in Asia. Besides focusing on the political and social influence of Japan's imperial domination, these scholarships also show new ways to research empire and imperialism through the lens of technology, material culture, immigration, and transnational history. With a focus on recent scholarship on Japanese imperialism and Japan's empire-building, this course will familiarize students with the current debates and discussions on this topic and facilitate students to generate their own research topic. In this course, alongside analyzing and dissecting the current scholarship and their analyses and perspectives on Japan's empire, students will have the chance to build up skills to write a research paper from analyzing primary documents to drafting annotated bibliographies, outlines, proposals, and the final paper.

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 at underlying trends shared by the three East Asian nations, such as demographic change, changes in gender roles, and the rise of consumer culture.

The second quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence covering what are now China, Japan, and Korea from roughly 1600 to 1895. Major themes include demographic and economic change; the social and cultural effects of widespread but uneven commercialization; state formation, rebellion, and political change; migration, urbanization, and territorial expansion; changes in family and gender roles; changes in the "natural" environment, particularly as related to agricultural expansion; changes in religion, ideology, and relationships between "elite" and "popular" culture; and increasingly consequential encounters with Western Europeans, Russians, and Americans, especially in the nineteenth century. The course aims to treat East Asia as a single interacting region, rather than as three (or more) sharply separated proto-nations; however, it will also call attention to the enormous diversity both among and within China, Japan, and Korea, treating those differences as constantly evolving and as something to be explained rather than assumed.

This course examines the politics, society, and culture of East Asia from ancient times until c. 1600. Our focus will be on examining key historical moments and intellectual, social, and cultural trends with an emphasis on the region as a whole. Students will read and discuss culturally significant texts and be introduced to various approaches to analyzing them.

This course will introduce the major forms and works of Chinese drama from the 16th–18th centuries. Drama occupied a central place in the culture of the Ming and Qing dynasties, its tremendous popularity felt throughout the spaces of everyday life: from the lavish playbooks perused in the scholar’s study to the performances of household actors in wealthy residences and of itinerant troupes in the marketplace. We will read a variety of northern and southern dramas that tell of lovesick girls returning from the dead, anti-government protests in the streets, queer romances, and treks to foreign lands, paying attention to their narrative richness and complexity as well as their diverse histories of reading and performance. All readings in English and no background required.

This seminar will introduce students to the drama, fiction, poetry, and essays of the early Qing. Topics will include: reclusion and resistance, everyday theatricality, courtesans and gendered voice, trauma and memory, palace culture, ethnicity and the body, technologies of seeing and representation, and the economic imaginary.

How have insects affected ways of knowing and relating to the world?

This course opens a dialogue between insects and Japanese audiovisual cultures, including fiction, poetry, visual art, manga, anime, and film. We aim to address the important and profound challenge that recent trends in animal studies, environmental humanities, and eco-criticism pose to received ways of studying human cultures and societies. The challenge lies in offering alternatives to the entrenched reliance on a nature-culture divide, which gives culture explanatory preference over nature. In the case of Japan and insects, for instance, there exists a fairly significant body of scholarship on how Japanese people respond to, interact with, and represent insects, and yet priority is generally given to culture, and Japan is treated monolithically. To offer alternatives to this monolithic culturalism, in this course we will (a) open dialogue between culture accounts of insects and scientific accounts and (b) explore different forms of media offering different milieus where human animals and more-than-human insects come into relation without assuming the ascendency of one over the other.