Spring

This course will consist of the close reading and discussion of primary texts (in translation) of the Chan and Zen Buddhism of China and Japan, with a few secondary descriptions of Zen institutions and cultural influences. This will be done both with an eye to the historical development of these schools of thought and practice within the context of East Asian Buddhism in general, and for whatever transhistorical valences we care to derive from the texts.

Timed to coincide with the Busan Biennale's Chicago Chapter, a series of events and exchanges with artists and organizers of the project, this interdisciplinary class will examine the context of the biennale and respond to works in the show-- giving special attention to the interplay between sound, text, and image. Using Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Picture at an Exhibition as inspiration, artists, musicians, and writers from South Korea and around the world were invited to respond to both the city of Busan and to each other's work. Similarly, we will likewise read, listen, and look at the work and create projects while considering our own context here in the city of Chicago. Students will be asked to complete one short writing assignment, one short creative piece, and develop a larger project. Weekly reading assignments will be discussed, drawing mainly from the Biennale reader and other artist writings that will guide our thinking about artistic practice across mediums and the nexus of artistic writing and conceptual art more broadly. What kind of artworks will emerge from this encounter with an international biennale? What is the meaning of interdisciplinarity and experimental form when conventional forms of exhibition making that have been so upended by the pandemic? These are just a few of the questions that will guide our inquiry during the seminar.

This course introduces students to the history of the Cold War through the comparative study of its front lines: divided Korea and Germany. Germany and Korea shared little in common—culturally, geopolitically, and historically—before 1945. And yet for both nations, the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War brought with it the near parallel division of their societies into two mutually antagonistic states, each allied with the opposing ideological camp. To what extent did the experience of division and marginality in the bifurcated world order give both Germanys and Koreas simultaneously unique and yet similar experiences of the conflict? To answer this question, we will examine how the Cold War shaped conflicts over culture, consumption, and power in all four states while following how each positioned themselves on the international stage vis-à-vis each other, the superpowers, and the "Third World." This course requires neither background knowledge of Korean or German languages, nor these regions' histories, nor previous coursework in history.

This course surveys new archaeological evidence for the early development of Chinese landscape representations from the 5th century BCE to the 10th century CE, and explores the relationship between such representations and various cultural and religious trends. Possible topics include the origins of landscape representation, religious significance of landscape images, construction of landscape environment, and landscape aesthetic and the notion of transcendence. Students are encouraged to explore these and other topics, and are expected to produce papers based on focused research.

Icons belong to the most important category of sacred objects in Buddhism, and they were indispensable for transmitting the religion across East Asia. The ontological status of icons, however, remained polemical throughout most of the religion’s premodern history. While scholars in religious studies have since the 1960s been attentive to the ritual and cultic functionality of Buddhist icons, art historians did not move past style-oriented methodologies and fully engage Buddhist icons as such until the 1990s. This course investigates different methodologies devised by scholars in the past to study Buddhist icons with various theoretical premises and from diverse historical perspectives and focuses. We will pay particular attention to how the field, Chinese Buddhist art history, bears those different approaches to Buddhist icons in its development of the past decades. 

The course will review anthropological literature and case studies of craft production and craft specialization in ancient civilizations. It also takes a multi-disciplinary approach by adopting perspectives developed in history and art history. Topics discussed in the course include organization of production, craft production and the elite, chaîne opératoire, status and identity of artisans, and political economy and craft production. Students are expected to become familiar with prevalent theoretical discussions and are encouraged to apply, adopt, or revise them in order to analyze examples of craft production of their own choice.

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.

Thousands of Chinese manuscripts dating between the fifth century B.C. and the tenth century A.D. have been discovered since the beginning of the twentieth century, with new discoveries continuing to the present. This seminar addresses theoretical and methodological approaches to engaging in research on the manuscripts.

The eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber occupies an unparalleled place in Chinese literary culture. This story of a peculiar boy born into a wealthy family in decline was an instant hit when first published and remains the subject of innumerable studies and adaptations to this day. A novel of philosophical complexity, emotional richness, and lush materiality, Dream of the Red Chamber offers an affecting portrait of the psyche of a young misfit, a reflection on memory and the act of writing, and a sprawling, encyclopedic view of Qing dynasty society. Our reading of the novel will pay close attention to the text itself while also situating it within the social, cultural, and intellectual history of late imperial China.  

“Bronze Age” in China conventionally refers to the time period from ca. 2000 to about 500 BC, during which bronze, an alloy of copper and other metals such as tin and lead, was the predominant medium used by the society, or to be more precise, the elite classes of the society. Bronze objects, in the forms of vessels, weapons, and musical instruments, were reserved for the upper ruling class of the society and were used mostly as paraphernalia during rituals and feasting. “Bronze Age” in China also indicates the emergence and eventual maturation of states with their bureaucratic systems, the presence of urban centers, a sophisticated writing system, and advanced craft producing industries, especially metal production.  This course surveys the important archaeological finds of Bronze Age China, and the theoretical issues such as state formation, craft production, writing, bureaucratic systems, urbanization, warfare, and inter-regional interaction, etc.  It emphasizes a multi-disciplinary approach with readings and examples from anthropology, archaeology, art history, and epigraphy. This course will also visit the Smart Museum, the Field Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago to take advantage of the local collections of ancient Chinese arts and archaeology.