Global Arc

This is a broad historical examination of Korean cinema from both sides of the DMZ. We start with some rare surviving colonial period films and work our way to the very recent films of the "Korean wave" era. Our thermatic focus will be post-coloniality, ideological division, war, national reconstruction, democratization, and intensified global capitalism; our critical focus will be on problems of nation, class, and gender. At the heart of work for the course will be attention to the films themselves, where we will try to account critically for shifts in style and form.

This course aims to familiarize students with some of the basic questions and debates surrounding Korean history from its "beginnings" to its modern engagement/encounter with the international community in late nineteenth century. This course explores the relationship between theory and writing of history, and investigates the development of Western historiography of Korea. We will address questions of narrative, representation, truth and accountability. By evaluating how historical narratives participate in the construction of the nation and the state, we seek to facilitate critical reflection about history and the production of history.

A survey of modern Korean history. The main emphasis will be placed on the transformation witnessed in the twentieth century, and will cover the following major themes: modernism, colonialism (1910-1945), war (1950-1953), industrialization, and the politics of gender and class. Course materials include literary works, historical writings, and other cultural forms, such as art and film.

Over the course of history Korean women assumed a variety of roles that reflected the specific cultural, social, and political realities of their lives. While the organization of this course is more topic-oriented and not strictly chronological, we will cover the period that spans from the seventeenth century to the 1930s. Focusing our attention on such aspects of women's lives as family roles, literacy, work, sexuality, and activities in the public space, we will look into the circumstances that allowed women to become queens, courtesans, nuns, modern girls, writers, and workers in different historical contexts.

Whether we look at its speed, connectivity and convergence, the geographic reach of its exports, or the contradictions that characterize its relationship to social reality, contemporary Korean media poses provocative questions about conditions of life in Korea and the mechanisms of communications and cultural technologies globally. Through examination of a range of practices across the mediascape (TV dramas, music, webtoons, films, advertisements, etc.) and phenomenon that have arisen from them (the Korean Wave, the rise of national sports heroes, etc.) the class will consider the force of contemporary media in shaping the very idea of Korea.

Knowledge about the world has assumed a variety of forms over history. This course, centered on travel writings by Koreans and about Korea, pursues two interrelated goals. First of all, we will look into the epistemic coordinates that structure travelogue as a genre of perception. Secondly, we will learn about the changing political and cultural contexts around ¿Korea,¿ which defined the modes of mobility and experience of travel in different historical periods. This, in turn, provides us with a concrete historical location, from which we can look out onto the structures of the larger world.

The seminar explores conversion in media discourses and practices of the Cold War, with a focus on Asia. Conversion is approached as a protean figure spanning religious doctrine, forces of economic mobility, cross-cultural encounters, and states of political subjectivity. Its media forms include portrayals of brainwashing, control of networks and content, and ideas about media's hypnotic power. The seminar inquires into how conversion attained heightened conceptual force during the Cold War and will examine quasi-scientific notions of brainwashing, the proliferation of religious cults, and the hardening of ideological binarism.

Using family as a lens and a theme that brings together an array of vastly different literary, filmic, and theoretical works, this class will examine key moments in the history of Korea from 2019 to old times. We will look into disenchanted families, violent families, cyborg families, mixed race families, immigrant families, South and North Korean families, royal families, and more. Maintaining the longue-durée historical perspective, we will ponder on the ethical and aesthetic premises of kinship and family as modes of configuring human reciprocity and ways to imagine and live life.

This course explores the 'rise' of the warrior culture of Japan. In addition to providing a better understanding of the judicial and military underpinnings of Japan's military 'rule' and the nature of medieval warfare, this course shows how warriors have been perceived as a dominant force in Japanese history, and will explore how the samurai myth was created in more recent times. This course culminates in an extended research paper. The goals of this course are to examine the role of warriors in Japanese history, to introduce historical debates concerning this topic, and to explore the use of primary sources in translation.

Participants will develop multi-sensorial approaches to the study of diverse media. The workshop fosters new conceptual and aesthetic vocabularies for tracing the trans-disciplinary circulations of media today. Assembling the works of Japanese female artists, writers, and musicians together with scholarly perspectives on Afro-Asian intimacies, decolonial epistemologies, feminist cartographies, posthuman subjectivities, urban ecologies, and more, students collaboratively forge novel understandings of media thinking/making at the edges of the "legible" territories of knowledge.