Spring

EALC 28102 Sociology of K-pop: Theorizing and Researching Popular Culture

(SOCI 28102)

This course introduces students to sociological approaches to the study of culture, using K-pop (South Korean popular music) as a central case. The course draws from a wide repertoire of disciplines, with a thematic focus on gender and labor and a methodological focus on qualitative methods. Such a design helps students understand the analytical power of different approaches while developing their own sensibilities toward theorizing and researching popular culture from a sociological standpoint. The first half of the course covers foundational frameworks such as the production of culture perspective, art worlds, and field theory, while the latter half engages with newer topics including fandom, branding, aesthetic labor/socialization, celebrity, and platforms. The course does not assume prior knowledge of sociology or K-pop, although they are welcome. Students will be expected to post weekly reflections on the readings, which will eventually help them develop a research proposal or a short research paper. The course will be generally helpful to those interested in sociology of culture or K-pop/Korean popular culture, but it will be especially well-suited for students who are considering a B.A. thesis or want to conduct a pilot study before embarking on a larger project.

So Yoon Lee
2025-2026 Spring

EALC 25867 Sound and Listening in Modern Chinese Literature

Prerequisites

How does literature capture transient sounds? What can literature tell us about how sounds are experienced in different historical periods? What are the limits and potentials of language as a medium of articulating aural experiences? In this class, we pursue the answers to these questions through reading modern Chinese literature alongside the history of modern Chinese sonic cultures. Sonic culture in its various forms and transformations has long left its imprint on modern Chinese literary imaginations, whether it is the depiction of urban sounds and noises in Eileen Chang’s prose about 1930s Shanghai, the imitation of bombing sounds on the printed page in wartime poems, the borrowing of folk songs in political lyrics during the Mao era, or Western pop and rock music in experimental fictions from the 1980s. We will experiment with approaching literary texts as historical archives of sonic experiences, and explore the entanglements between sound and writing in twentieth-century China.

 

Siting Jiang
2025-2026 Spring

EALC 48011 Readings in Korean Film and Media

(CMST 48011)

 

This graduate seminar examines key English-language scholarship on Korean film and media from the recent decade. The goal is to cultivate critical insight into the theoretical frameworks, critical debates and historical inquiries of this evolving field. Core readings will include major monographs and edited collections, alongside select critical essays as well as relevant film and media objects.

Yoonbin Cho
2025-2026 Spring

EALC 20627/30627 Contemporary China: Institutions, Transformations and Everyday Life

(SOCI 20627/30627)

This course aims to provide a comprehensive social science perspective on contemporary China. Here, contemporary Chinese society is loosely defined as the society that emerged after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating readings from various social science disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, and law.

Xiangyi Ren
2025-2026 Spring

EALC 48011 Readings in Korean Film and Media

This graduate seminar examines key English-language scholarship on Korean film and media from the recent decade. The goal is to cultivate critical insight into the theoretical frameworks, critical debates and historical inquiries of this evolving field. Core readings will include major monographs and edited collections, alongside select critical essays as well as relevant film and media objects.

 

2025-2026 Spring

EALC 26800/36800 Korean Literature, Foreign Criticism

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.

2025-2026 Spring

EALC 23003/33003 Philosophical Commentaries on the Book of Changes (Yijing)

(DVPR 53003, RLST 23003)

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. 

Brook Ziporyn
2025-2026 Spring

EALC 24980/34980 Meditation on Time and Timelessness

(DVPR 44980, RLST 24980)

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.

Brook Ziporyn
2025-2026 Spring

KORE 42213 Exploring Korean Society and Culture through Literature

This course is designed for students aiming to advance their Korean proficiency through close reading and analysis of selected texts from Korean short stories and novels. Students will engage in discussions, compositions, and presentations to critically reflect on these works. By exploring themes such as love, gender, family, human rights, and relationships, the course offers deeper insights into the customs, values, and beliefs that shape Korean society and culture, as well as the universal human experiences conveyed through literature.

Prerequisites

KORE 42212, by consent only

2025-2026 Spring

EALC 26611/36611 Materiality and Socialist Cinema

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the “material turn” in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

2024-2025 Spring
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