Spring

CHIN 25013 is open to students who have completed fourth-year modern Chinese or have been placed into this level. This course examines contemporary issues in Chinese society and culture through current events, news reports, commentary, and other authentic materials from Chinese-speaking communities. Topics may include social change, family and gender, media, popular culture, and other issues relevant to contemporary life. Students will analyze different perspectives, evaluate arguments, and discuss the cultural and social contexts of current issues. Through reading, listening, discussion, and writing, students will further develop their advanced Chinese language skills, with particular emphasis on expressing opinions, supporting arguments with evidence, and engaging in informed discussion. The course also emphasizes formal expressions, advanced grammatical patterns, complex sentence structures, and academic writing. Students are expected to participate actively in discussions, explain and defend their viewpoints clearly, and write coherent, well-supported essays on contemporary issues in Chinese society and culture.  Prerequisite: Fourth-year Modern Chinese, or placement, or consent of instructor.

This course offers an introduction to media theory in Japan.  We will read major texts of media theory from the 1960s to the present while situating them within larger cultural and philosophical developments in Japan.  At the same time, because media theory increasingly builds on “theory in media objects,” we also will engage with some popular forms of media such as anime, cinema, manga, and music as case studies. Language of instruction is Japanese.

This non-core beginner's course is specially tailored for students who want to learn a new language in a fun and stress-free way. Compared to core courses, this course is more focused on communication activities with hands-on exercises to automatize and internalize simple basic expressions related to their daily lives. This course will provide students with a strong foundation to start learning the language with confidence and comfort. The course meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for fifty minutes.

KORE 21300 is the third course in the fourth-year Korean sequence. Students will learn basic principles, methods, and techniques in translation and apply appropriate strategies to the practice and description of translation. They will watch pre-recorded lecture videos, complete weekly translation assignments (Korean to English and English to Korean), and participate in group or individual sessions to discuss their translation work. Students will also choose a literary work or text of their choice for their final translation project. The materials covered in this class include medical guidelines, campaign flyers, newspaper articles, reports, brochures, resumes, business and academic emails, and editorials. The course meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for eighty minutes.

KORE 20403 is the third course in the third-year Korean sequence. The course aims to develop students’ low-advanced proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing through a variety of authentic materials, including scholarly essays, newspaper articles, short stories, and audio and video resources. Through project-based instruction, students will develop effective communication skills while exploring a range of topics related to the Korean language, society, culture, and history. Students will also have opportunities to apply their language skills in increasingly complex academic and real-world contexts. The instructor primarily uses Korean in class, and students are expected to communicate in the target language as well. The course meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for eighty minutes.

KORE 10300 is the third course in the first-year Korean sequence, designed to continue building a solid foundation in modern Korean language and culture. This course focuses on reinforcing well-rounded proficiency, encompassing interpersonal communication, interpretive skills in listening and reading comprehension, and presentational abilities in formal speech and writing. Through integrated listening, reading, speaking, and writing tasks, students will enhance their ability to navigate real-life scenarios using acquired vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge. The course also offers an exploration of Korean culture, delving into diverse mediums such as media, written texts, and cultural activities. This course meets Monday through Friday for fifty minutes.

The Chinese Bronze Age, ca. 2000 BCE to 500 BCE, marked the rise and the rapid development of ancient Chinese civilizations. While metallurgy, writing, and state-level society began relatively late in comparison to ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, in terms of the amount of metal used and bronzes objects made, we can truly call this period in China the Bronze Age. Through time, the forms of bronze artifacts, especially bronze vessels, became more varied, the quantity dramatically increased, and the function and role of bronze vessels diversified and gradually secularized. Bronzes vessels, therefore, offer a window to understand the art, the technology, the material culture, the cultural practice, the political interaction, and the religious and spiritual realms of ancient China.

This traveling seminar therefore aims to take a group of preselected undergrad and graduate students on museum tours, to study bronzes in exhibitions and to view and examine objects up-close in the context of viewing sessions in study rooms. The course will consist of an on-campus component, during which students will study related research literature, and a museum tour component, during which students will travel to the selected museums and view bronzes on site. The seminar will make one out-of-town trip, while also take advantage of the locally accessible collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Students need pre-approval to take the course.

What did it mean to be Korean in an era defined by colonialism, revolution, and various upheavals? What might it have been like to live the modern era as a Korean in East Asia, with acute vigilance and enduring hope? This course explores these questions through a close reading of Song of Arirang, the collaborative (auto-)biography of Kim San (1905–1938), "a Korean revolutionary," as co-written by Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow, 1907–1997), an American journalist and aspiring novelist. Based on oral interviews conducted in Yan'an, China, around the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the work takes the form of Kim San's autobiography, tracing a life that spanned the turbulent landscapes of early twentieth-century East Asia—shaped by capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, communism, modernization, and diaspora.  We treat Song of Arirang both as a historical narrative and as a literary work, examining it as an unusually rich treasury layered with the voices and perspectives of modern East Asians whose lives and stories traversed China, Korea, Japan, Manchuria, and the United States. Working through a recent, densely annotated edition over the course of the quarter, students will explore a wide spectrum of life trajectories, aspirations, despairs, and struggles—both individual and collective—experienced by Koreans and other East Asians during these transformative decades. No prior knowledge of Korea or East Asia is required.  Open to MAPH students.

How does Liking mukbang videos on YouTube or submitting danmu comments on Bilibili impact who we are and where we belong? In this course, we dive into the world of East Asian digital media to explore how algorithms, interface designs, and virtual characters shape our identities, our dynamics with others, and how we perceive the world around us. Instead of looking at users or viewers in isolation, we’ll use digital ethnographic methods to study how people, platforms, and content evolve together through social interactions.

Focusing on East Asian media content and platforms as sites of investigation, we will also challenge geo-national labels like “Japanese anime,” “K-pop,” and “Chinese platforms” to rethink how digital media redefine and complicate cultural borders of nations. Starting in Week 2, our sessions split into two parts: a theory seminar to discuss big ideas like agency and sociality, and a hands-on media lab where you’ll work in groups to analyze real-world digital activities. By the end of the course, you will be equipped with digital ethnographic and micro-sociological methods to analyze how digital content and architecture shape political discourses and social identities in today's world. All materials are in English. No prior background is required.