2025-2026

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.

Whether it is the tonalities and idiosyncracies of individual speech and dialogue in the polyphonic novel, the depiction of urban sounds and noises in Eileen Chang’s prose about 1930’s Shanghai, the borrowing of folk songs in political lyrics during the Mao era, or Western pop and rock music in experimental fictions from the 1980s, sound culture in its various forms and transformations has long left its imprint on modern literary imaginations. Sound is inseparable from technologies and ideologies of listening; in this course, we will use literary texts as aural technologies to approach historical sonic cultures, and read them as archives of sonic experiences. Through reading modern Chinese literary works together with the history of Chinese sound cultures, we ask: how does literature from different historical periods capture transient sounds? What can literature tell us about how sound is experienced in different historical periods? What are the strengths and limits of language as a medium of articulating aural experiences? How is the difference between sound and noise, listening and other senses, drawn in different historical periods, and what role does literature play in it?

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

What is comedy, where is comedy, and to what end? This course foregrounds the function of comedy as a critical lens on and political catalyst for social change. We will explore how comedy and laughter emerge across both media and location, centering on Mainland Chinese moving image history. Rather than studying “China” and “comedy” as pre-established entities that then interact, the course investigates how area, genre, and media each come into being through their dynamic relations.

Each week centers on theoretical readings that conceptualize the functional definition of comedy and/or media. These readings are paired with primary texts ranging from films and animation, to television shows and Internet shorts, organized chronologically from the early 20th century onwards. By the end of the course, students will have learned to (1) identify and engage a genealogy of Chinese comedy in moving image media, (2) articulate intricate relationships among area, genre, and media, and (3) produce their own critical position on the global-situated sociopolitical functions of comedy.

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 explores the multifarious entanglements between shamanism—as a religious phenomenon, as an anthropological imaginary, and as a mode of existence—and global modernity. How did shamanism as a concept emerge in the age of colonial expansion and ethnological racialization, how did it affect modernity's understanding of human history, and how do shamanic (dis)articulations of historicity, personhood, sexuality, trauma, translation, and the "nature/culture divide" intervene in modernity's politics? In contemplating these questions, we will consider a variety of "shamanic" artworks ranging from shamanic liturgies to travelogues, music recordings, film, performance art, contemporary literature, and beyond. We will attend both to the spiritual worlds of the "original" shamans of Northeast Asia (through texts from the Evenki, Khakas, Manchu, Tuvan, and other Siberian languages) and to a much broader corpora of (Anglophone, Chinese, German, Greco-Roman, Indigeneous American, Japanese, Tibetan, etc.) works that can be generatively thought of as shamanic in some way. In doing so, we will reflect on the limitations and powers possessed by the figure of the shaman in various broader contexts, both in the history of ideas and in the contemporary world.

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.