Spring

This course invites students to engage critically with the materials and mediums used to create East Asian artworks, spanning from antiquity to the contemporary era. In addition to exploring subject matter and iconography specific to various historical periods, we will approach these works as physical, image-bearing objects and architectural structures—considering how their material forms shape both their creation and reception.

As a COSI Mellon Museum Seminar, the course meets once weekly in a three-hour session held at local collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, Heritage Museum of Asian Art, and the Smart Museum of Art. Each session focuses on a major art medium—such as metalwork, scroll painting, albums and bound books, folding screens, stone carvings and rubbings, and woodblock prints. Students will read selected primary sources in translation alongside modern scholarship, and participate in close, in-person examination of objects. Over the quarter, students will build a historically grounded understanding of prominent East Asian art forms, gain hands-on experience in object observation and handling, and develop a critical sensitivity to various visual media in the contemporary world.

This course provides a survey of the history of popular music in East Asia since 1900, with a focus on questions of media technologies and their impact, practices of circulation and translation, political uses of music, and ideologies of authenticity and liveness. The course introduces a wide variety of musical genres from China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, ranging from forms considered 'traditional' to contemporary J-Pop, K-Pop and C-Pop. All readings are in English, and no background in music is required or expected. This course is open only to Masters students at the grad level.

This course will investigate the various understandings of the nature of consciousness—its extent and function, its grounding or groundlessness, its relation to body and will, its distinction from or identity with experienced physical entities and envisioned ethical ideals--in pre-modern Chinese philosophies. Readings will include early Confucian, Daoist and syncretic speculations (Mengzi, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Huainanzi), medieval Buddhist idealisms and omnicentrisms (Tiantai, Huayan, Chan), and the representative thinkers of the various branches of Neo-Confucian thought (Zhang Zai, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming). All readings will be done in English, with optional supplemental reading sessions of the original texts for students proficient in classical Chinese.

Are there too many people in the world? Is human reproduction a right, a duty, or an interest? In 1798, a pamphlet titled An Essay on the Principle of Population was published anonymously in London. The author claimed that a growing population increases the supply of labor, inevitably lowering wages and living standards. The author warned that future improvements for humanity would be hindered if governments failed to address the issue of overpopulation. What is now known as the Malthusian Law of Population sparked continuous debate among politicians, economists, statisticians, and philosophers for over two centuries.
Today, however, the global population debate has shifted. While concerns over overpopulation remain in some contexts, many parts of the world are now grappling with a fertility crisis. Declining birth rates have become a pressing issue, raising urgent questions about aging populations, shrinking workforces, and the sustainability of economic and social systems. Historically accounting for approximately one-fifth of the world's population, China holds a unique position in demography and politics. In the current landscape of falling birth rates across East Asia—affecting China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—and rising skepticism toward globalization, this course offers essential insights into the historical and ongoing dynamics of population control, economic inequality, and shifting global demographics.

Few people would doubt that the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) was an empire, or that the People’s Republic of China, occupying the vast majority of Qing territory, is a nation-state, or at least a national state. But what do those differences mean? Are there legacies of the Qing as empire that shape the way citizenship, legitimacy, and politics more generally work in the PRC? And how did “China” wind up roughly reproducing the Qing borders when it looked at many points during the late 19th and early 20th century as if it might lastingly splinter into multiple states? We will consider these issues through a series of weekly readings and discussions – mostly of works by historians, but also by historically minded political scientists, sociologists, and others. Students will have the option of writing 2 medium-length papers (7-10 pages) from a given list of choices, or of writing one longer paper on an historiographic or research topic selected in conversation with the instructor.

Focusing on roughly 1200-1900 CE in East Asia, this course considers the social functions of East Asian paintings and craft objects in conjunction with their subject matter, materiality, and style. Art historian Timon Screech has observed that the function of most paintings in early modern Japan was to radiate positivity and auspiciousness --a fact also connected to Wu Hung's observations about the absence of 'ruins' in traditional Chinese art. How can we put a finer point on a painting's auspicious qualities, and what were some other functions that paintings were fulfilling during this time period, either in tandem with auspiciousness or in place of it?

This course examines theoretical and empirical issues in the modern history of labor, conceived on a global scale. The class is organized around the development of major debates, including: skill, deskilling, and the labor process; gender and the labor of social reproduction; the spectrum between free and unfree labor; the science and measurement of work and the conception of the laboring body; race, ethnicity, and migration at work; the meaning and experience of labor in colonial societies; the meaning and experience of labor in socialist societies; and the relationship between labor processes and workers' ideology and political activity and organization. The class will strike a balance between reading historiographical and theoretical classics and new research that can be put into conversation with those classics.

KORE 42216 is designed for learners of Korean who seek to deepen their linguistic proficiency while critically engaging with modern and contemporary Korean society and culture through literature. The course aims to further develop students’ proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing at an advanced level through analysis and discussion of authentic materials. The core materials focus on Korean literary works by women writers that explore women’s lives and their roles as daughters, mothers, wives, and individuals in various historical and social contexts. Students will refine linguistic accuracy, fluency, and stylistic sophistication while strengthening their ability to articulate complex ideas and critical perspectives on gender, identity, and broader cultural, historical, and social issues in Korea.

This course examines the most influential Chinese romantic comedy of all times, "The Western Chamber" (Xixiang ji) in light of its multiple literary and visual traditions. Over 100 different woodblock editions, many of them illustrated, were published during the Ming and Qing dynasties alone. The focus of the class will be on close readings of the original texts in classical and vernacular Chinese. We will concentrate on the earliest extant edition of 1498 and Jin Shengtan's expurgated, annotated edition of 1656, along with visual treatments of the play in various mediums.

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.