Spring

Over the last several decades, reality television has become a central ingredient in media diets all across the world. One can practically trace a line from early hits like Survivor and Big Brother, which were quickly formatted for global circulation, to the recent viral success of Squid Game, a fictionalized account of a death-game tournament that spawned its own reality show. Why do audiences everywhere find reality TV so entertaining? What moral lessons do viewers take away from these shows? And what might scholars learn by taking this popular aesthetic form, in all its cultural variation, seriously? This course brings together media studies, aesthetic criticism, area studies, and the sociology of religion to try to answer some of these questions. The course will help students to think about the moral and spiritual beliefs embedded in popular cultural forms, but also to understand how these forms are now circulated and consumed in our contemporary media environment and what they tell us about late-stage global capitalism. Course readings will introduce students to scholarship in television studies, aesthetic criticism, religious studies, and cultural studies, providing them with the necessary foundations to analyze reality TV from multiple disciplinary perspectives. We will also screen examples of reality TV and its offshoots, with a specific focus on East Asian shows and the competition or elimination format. Students will develop skills in visual analysis, interpretation of secular religion and belief structures, social theory, and basic research and writing methods.

Selected readings in pre-modern Chinese literature from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. The course covers important works in topics ranging from philosophy, history and religion to poetry, fiction and drama. Specific content varies by instructor.

Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) is often celebrated as modern Japan's greatest novelist. This course will cover several of his major novels, as well his short stories and works of literary theory, looking at questions of selfhood, gender, property ownership, and empire. We will also look at critical studies of Sōseki from Japan and elsewhere. All readings will be available in English.

This is the second part of the East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine series. In this series, we will read major works on the history of STM in East Asia and constantly are in conversation with studies of this history in the globe.

This course discusses the history of major energy sources in East Asia with a focus on coal, hydropower, and nuclear power plant. We pay close attention to both the technological side of the history of energy and how different energy sources interact with the social and political environment in Japan, China, and Koreas.

Although food is an essential part of human existence, it has only recently become the object of historical analysis, and historical research has drawn attention to its significance in relation to issues of health, gender, class, technology, and culture.  This course explores the history of food in Japan in the period from c. 1600 to the postwar era.  Topics to be examined include changing practices of consumption and production, medical discourse and conceptions of a proper diet, the impact of introduction of new foods and new methods of preparation, the rise of nutritional science, the development of a “national cuisine,” and the impact of war and defeat upon food culture.

This course explores modern Korean history through the lens of gender as a critical analytical tool. In studying social, historical, and cultural changes shaping gender relations, we will extend our understanding of gender dynamics and its relationship to the family, the state, civil society, class, and the economy. By reading and discussing significant scholarly works, this course will help students understand Korean women’s history in both local and global contexts. The course will be divided into two parts. The first section will address women’s issues and identities, such as women as mothers, wives, and citizens in the framework of family and social institutions, by looking at postcolonialism, patriarchy, and nationalism. Next, the latter half will examine various aspects of women and the economy, including labor, consumption, market economy, governmentality, and class and status. 

Korea has a rich and dynamic history in terms of historical coherence and distinctiveness but is often restricted to just a one-note idea, such as North Korea’s nuclear threats or BTS. This course explores modern Korean history from Japanese colonial rule to the contemporary era, covering major historical events such as Korean War, the Kwangju democratization movement, and two Korea’s reunification efforts, as well as contemporary sociocultural dimensions such as the industrialization of plastic surgery, drinking culture, classified expansion of Korean popular culture as written and called with Capital K (K-pop, K-film, K-drama, etc.), and mukbang (food casting). Weekly topics address major socioeconomic, political, and cultural issues such as postcolonialism, capitalism, developmentalism, neoliberalism, governmentality, gender, sexuality, and family. Students will gain a fuller understanding of Korea’s place in the world through engaging with Korean cultural heritage and historical transformations. They will also learn how to critique contemporary media representations of Korea and enable critical reading of texts and films to build their own perspectives.

This course explores the possibility of listening closely to Korean popular music through literary fiction. Each week students learn about the histories and cultures of a different Korean musical genre (minyo, trot, military songs, rock, folk, K-pop, etc.) from the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) to the present. The class engages with music through celebrated and lesser-known works of modern and contemporary Korean fiction, films, and critical essays on media, popular culture, and listening. Guiding these inquiries, we consider how popular songs intersect with, inform, or diverge from modern Korea's history of political upheaval, rapid modernization, and mass social movement; and the ways in which popular musical languages, cultures, and histories inform understandings of literary style, form, and narrative. It is expected that upon completion, students will be able to articulate critical and informed responses to such scholarly discussions as those surrounding cultural hybridity, collective memory, and the power of song; and apply the interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches they've learned in class to their understandings of popular song cultures more broadly. All readings are in English. No prior knowledge of Korean is necessary.

In this course we will explore the full range of Japanese books including both manuscripts and printed books ranging from daunting Chinese texts to beautiful illustrated books. We will also be looking at printed maps from the Edo period (1600-1868) and single-sheet ephemera, and we will be considering questions such as the role of censorship, the differences between wood-block printing and typography and why people continued to produce manuscripts during the age of print. We will mostly focus on materials produced in the Edo period and the Meiji period (1868-1912), ending up with the introduction of newspapers and magazines in the 1860s. There will be images available on the course website, but we will also be handling and closely examining books and manuscripts from the Regenstein Library and from my own collection. If you have never seen an old Japanese book before, you will learn how to make sense of the layout and organisation of a premodern Japanese book and to appreciate the craft and design skills that went into their production: even if you can’t read them, they have beauty and appeal as hand-made artefacts. Some of the sessions in the course are accessible to those with no knowledge of Japanese but since script choice and calligraphy inevitably need to be discussed as well, those without any knowledge of Chinese characters will be at a disadvantage.