Autumn

This course surveys a variety of scholarly approaches to the study of popular music in East Asia since 1900, including questions of authenticity, gender, media technologies, circulation, and translation. The course will introduce a variety of musical genres from China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, ranging from forms considered 'traditional' to contemporary idol and hiphop music. All readings will be available in English, and no background in music is required or expected

For course description contact East Asian Languages.

Studies of media in recent years have increasingly turned toward questions about ecologies and environments, energy and elemental forces, relational theories and non-discrete objects.  The first aim of this seminar is to introduce some of the key problematics associated with this ‘turn’ in media studies. At the same time, due to the proliferation of turns (elemental, environmental, ecological, energetic), objects (media forms, devices, platforms, networks, infrastructures) and concerns (more-than-human life, settler colonialism, indigenous struggles, migration), this seminar aims to provide a practical focus for doing media ecology or thinking media ecologically. The problematic for fall 2022 is Plant Media or “thinking with plants through media.” Topics includes contemporary research on plant intelligence, which raises questions about intelligence without physical correlates, forcing us to deal with intelligence in terms of the whole plant as an ecology.  We will also consider the mediating role of media, from self-writing plants to time-lapse audio and video to parse movement as intelligence. Finally, this ecological approach encourages a reconsideration of eco-agriculture and alternative paths of cultivation.

Fulfills translation requirement for EALC graduate students. Must be arranged with individual faculty member. Register by section with EALC faculty.

Independent reading course.

For course description contact East Asian Languages.

After a brief introduction to Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, we will focus on Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. The choice of inscriptions to study will depend on the interests of the students in class.

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.  This course will be team-taught by me and historians of the PRC from other institutions, and will be open to selected students from outside the U of C. Non-Chicago students and teachers will participate via video conference. The course is meant for graduate students who are preparing for archival research in China or already working with archival documents. Advanced undergraduates who are doing archival research may enrol with the instructor's permission.

For this course students are required to obtain a “College Reading and Research Course Form” from their College adviser and have it signed both by their faculty reader and by the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Two quarters of this sequence may count as one credit for the EALC major, and are required for any undergraduate writing a B.A. Honors Thesis in EALC. It is highly recommended that students take this sequence autumn and winter, but a spring quarter course is offered for unusual circumstances.

This course will change the way you think about politics. One of the most urgent political questions for any modern society is what economic activity to leave to private actors and what economic activity to place under state control. Today we hear much political debate over whether capitalism or socialism is superior, and what these terms mean. This debate can obscure the historical fact that many different ideological systems around the globe have experimented with highly centralized, state-directed economic organization. In what contexts have these experiments succeeded and failed? What counts as success and failure? To what extent has one experiment in central planning studied and/or learned from examples that preceded it? This course pursues these questions beginning with the origins of modern central planning in Prussia and later during World War I. It goes on to assess other experiments in central planning, including the New Deal, the Soviet Union and Maoist China; the Axis Powers of Italy, the Third Reich, and Imperial Japan; and later in the postcolonial global south from India to Ghana. The class ends by contemplating the Green New Deal and the role of central planning in the future of the United States.