Winter

This experimental seminar examines how medical knowledge is constituted and disseminated in texts, images, and performances in early modern Japan and China (roughly 1600-1850). This period saw an explosion in the number of doctors, print and visual materials, and a new centrality of medical, pharmacological, and bodily knowledge and practices. Looking beyond established national, cultural, and political boundaries, we will study how shared medical traditions converge and diverge over time and space. How did literary genre shape and constrain the forms medical knowledge took and vice-versa? Who has access to and who has control over technologies of health and sickness, including learned medicine, vernacular healing, and self-care?  How was efficacy understood, contested, and proven in a medical and legal context?

Primary sources to be read include medical and crime cases, forensic reports, plays, novels, biographies, imperial encyclopedias, almanacs for daily life, illustrated pharmacopeia, religious tracts, printed advertisements, and shops signs. Film and tv episodes will be screened to explore contemporary narratives of early modern medical knowledge in the very different political and media economies of post-war China and Japan.

During the winter quarter, students write a paper on defined topic, based on the secondary literature and primary sources studied during the autumn. The seminar meets every week to discuss the progress of each student’s paper.

This course aims to review theories and case studies of regional and inter-regional interaction in the anthropological archaeology literature. The course will examine chronologically important theories and topics in the field, such as interaction sphere, peer polity, circumscription theory, world systems theory, center and peripheries, prestige goods exchange, warfare, colonial encounter, network society, etc. Areas of cases studies discussed in the course include Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, American Southwest, Central Asia, China, and Southeast Asia. The goal of the course is to establish understanding of the existing theoretical discourse and to provide perspectives from wide geographic scope.    

This seminar is designed to introduce the student to the use of bronze inscriptions in interpreting the history of the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.). While much of the seminar will be spent in attaining the methodological skills necessary to read the inscriptions, historical issues will also be discussed.

This course explores the development and narrative of contemporary Chinese art. Through examining original documentation and analyzing existing narratives and interpretations, students explore the major trends and issues in this art since the late 1970s and reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts.

This graduate seminar explores relationships between bodies and boundaries in the context of premodern Japanese cultural production. We will theorize the politics of  embodiment across literary, theatrical, and art historical texts, paying close attention to the ways in which these texts inscribe bodies' movement through space. Emphasis on reading original materials in conjunction with contemporary scholarship on embodiment, performance, and territory in Japanese and English. 

During the winter quarter, students write a paper on defined topic, based on the secondary literature and primary sources studied during the autumn. The seminar meets every week to discuss the progress of each student’s paper.

This course will survey works of Japanese fiction and poetry revolving around issues empire, ranging from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period. We will also read theoretical works on the problem of imperialism and culture, as well as recent scholarship on the problem of empire in Japanese literature. Advanced reading ability in Japanese is required; a large number of the assigned texts will be in Japanese.

It is well known that skill in the arts (particularly music, poetry, painting, and games) was a prerequisite for successful courtesans in China and that interactions between courtesans and their clients played an important role in generating the literary and musical forms that lay at the heart of Chinese entertainment culture. Courtesans in turn were a perennially favorite topic for literary and visual representation while books related to the pleasure quarter constitute a significant branch in the history of publishing. This course will concentrate on the history of the very rich late imperial period, studying a wide range of primary sources, including stories, poetry, plays, popular song, encyclopedias of daily life, and memoirs.  Students may work on any period or any of the arts for their final papers.

This seminar (required for all East Asian majors) is intended to expose students to the different disciplines and areas represented in the study of East Asia at the University of Chicago. Students should take this chance to meet fellow majors in the various areas of East Asian Studies and to familiarize themselves with the work of faculty members. Third year students should be already thinking about finding a topic and a faculty advisor for a senior thesis. Conventionally, the Concentrators Seminar is organized around a theme. The goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to expose students to a range of important problems and methods across time and space in the study of China, Japan and Korea. Guest lecturers and reading assigned by different University of Chicago faculty members are an integral part of the course. Students work on an individual research project tailored to their own interests, which they may subsequently develop into a B.A paper. This course is offered every year; however the quarter may change.Religion and Politics of East Asia.