2020-2021

Anyang is one of the most important archaeological sites in China. The discoveries of inscribed oracle bones, the royal cemetery, clusters of palatial structures, and industrial-scale craft production precincts have all established that the site was indeed the last capital of the Shang dynasty recorded in traditional historiography. With almost continuous excavations since the late 1920s, work at Anyang has in many ways shaped and defined Chinese archaeology and the study of Early Bronze Age China. This course intends to examine the history of research, important archaeological finds, and the role of Anyang studies in the field of Chinese archaeology. While the emphasis is on archaeological finds and the related research, this course will also attempt to define Anyang in the modern social and cultural contexts in terms of world heritage, national and local identity, and the looting and illegal trade of antiquities.

This seminar serves as an introduction to theories of media and mediation in the context of scholarship on East Asia. “Media” has come to be a ubiquitous term in how we think not just about technologies of communication and dissemination, but about literature, music, film, digital art, and other forms of cultural production. We will look at how the concept has been taken up in recent scholarly work on China, Japan, and Korea, and raise questions about how this research draws on media theories from elsewhere; how it seeks to develop or recover locally inflected theories of media; and how we might distinguish between the two. Specific media covered include writing, the book, music, television, film, and digital platforms. A portion of the course will also be dedicated to thinking and learning about how to acquire and analyze materials from online sources using digital tools. The past and present intersection of media history with area studies concerns will thus be as much of a focus as the future this dialogue holds.

This course will provide an overview of Chinese unearthed documents of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, including both bronze and stone inscriptions and also bamboo and silk manuscripts. By reading selections from these materials, we will seek to gain a general sense of both how they were produced and used at the time and also how their modern study has evolved.

This seminar probes the interplay of history, politics, and theatricality in Kong Shangren's Peach Blossom Fan, his dramatic masterpiece of 1699, which brilliantly depicts the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644-1645 on multiple social, cultural, and ritual fronts, from the pleasure quarters and the imperial court to the Confucian Temple and the battlefield.  Issues to be addressed include: the representation and reassessment of late Ming entertainment culture--courtesans, actors, storytellers, musicians, booksellers, painters; metatheatricality; memory and commemoration; props and material culture; the dissemination of news and (mis)information; the reenactment of the past on the stage, as we contextualize Peach Blossom Fan within the early Qing literary and theatrical world in which it was created and performed. We'll also examine the interplay of history, politics, and theatricality in the modern reception of the play by analyzing its modern and contemporary incarnations in spoken drama, feature film, and different operatic genres.

In this in-depth introduction to modern Chinese literature we will combine close readings of texts with a survey of the ideas, media, and institutions that shaped literary practices from the 1900s to the early 1940s. We will discuss authors, literary circles and associations, journals and publishers, as well as notions of self, language, and community. In doing so, we will pursue the following questions: What is a “modern Chinese literary text,” and what are its relevant “contexts”? How to connect literary writing—per se a highly individualized and largely solitary activity—with the forms of sociality and the collaborative practices in which it is embedded? How did various communities and institutions affect, and how were they affected by, the writing and reading of literature? Our focus will be on the ways in which authors and groups redefined the functions of literature in times of upheaval, the transformations in language and media that shaped their efforts, and the ways in which they conceived of and sought to reach out to readers. Our explorations will be both historical and historiographical, and will touch on the main debates in modern Chinese literary studies today. All assigned readings are in English translation, but students who read Chinese are encouraged to read the original texts.

The course examines the multiple religious traditions spread across the Japanese archipelago, their tenets, rituals, values, and their intimate ties to literature, politics, social structures and economy. The goal will be to arrive at a substantive understanding of Japanese religions and the state of the field of religious studies, and explore potential directions for future research. We will consider both the openness of Japanese religion to incorporate new ideas and its proclivity for relational and amalgamative theories and practices, and also cases of outright rejection of certain Sinitic and pan-Asian ideas. Accordingly, this course will focus not only on the religions of Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, but also their interactions with other traditions such as Onmyōdō, Shugendō, and popular religion (minkan shūkyō).

Each week we will read a recent monograph and analyze the main arguments and its methodological contribution to the field of religious studies and Japanese religion. Students will be asked to reflect critically on the central arguments of the books, as well as their discussion of doctrine, practice and cultural trends examined in the readings. The topics that we will discuss each week are diverse and include: Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō), original enlightenment thought (hongaku), religious readings of literature (narrative and poetry), visual culture in Pure Land Buddhism, Kuroda Toshio’s Marxist and political theory, State Shinto and nationalism, cross-cultural transmissions between Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen, mountain worship and maritime religiosity, and Japan’s imagination of South Asia. We will pay close attention to how scholars use various methodologies and theories in their examinations of religious phenomena, such as ritual theory, literary and critical theory, feminist and queer theory, among others. Over the course of the quarter, students will build their own methodological and theoretical toolkits and put them into practice by writing a research paper.

An introduction to Buddhism in China, examined through lenses of texts, thought, and art. We will explore the major currents of Chinese Buddhist practice with a focus on the premodern tradition through around the 13th century (with some attention to modern connections), giving special consideration to major textual and artistic monuments, such as translated scriptures, Chan literature, and the cave-shrines of Dunhuang.   

This course centers on yōkai (monsters or fantastic creatures) and theories of the fantastic in cinema and media. Historically, it spans the range from medieval emaki and Edo chōnin culture through 20th and 21st century manga and anime. Inquiry into yōkai and the fantastic is intended to develop new strategies for putting cinema and media into dialogue with theories of political sovereignty and capitalism in the context of everyday life and its urban myths.

Introductory studies of Chinese history and culture often ignore religion, treating Confucius’s alleged agnosticism as representative of mainstream culture. But ideas about supernatural entities—souls separated from bodies, ancestral spirits, demons, immortals, the vital energies of mountains and rivers, and many more—and practices aimed at managing those spirits were important elements in  pre-1949 life. Spirits testified in court cases, cured or caused illnesses, mediated disputes, changed the weather, and made the realm governable or ungovernable. After declining in the 1950s–1970s, various kinds of worship are immensely popular again today, though usually in altered forms. This course traces changes in the intersection of ideas about spirits and daily social practices from late imperial times forward, focusing on attempts to “standardize the gods,” resistance to such efforts, and the consequences for cohesion, or lack of cohesion, across classes, territory, ethnicity, and other differences.