Global Arc

Designed to introduce departmental majors, in the fall of their junior year, to the tools, methodologies, and topics related to the study of East Asian history and culture. The focus of the course will vary each year, and will be cross-national and multidisciplinary, covering both premodern and modern periods. One three-hour seminar.

The seminar will encourage students to think critically about the documentary as artistic medium and as socio-political practice. Some important questions will focus on the form itself: who has produced and watched these films and through what sorts of technologies? What are the codes through which documentaries make sense of their subjects and how do these change? Other questions will have wider scope: how can filmmaking impact politics and culture? How does it deal with the gap between reality and representation? What are the ethical issues of such work? What, if anything, is distinct about the life of documentary films in East Asia?

Study of contemporary Japan through major works of film, photography, and visual culture. The course will explore defining transformations in urban and media ecologies, experiences of development and disaster, and the contentious environmental histories that inform contemporary Japan. The course will foster critical skills in interdisciplinary methods and transnational approaches to the study of film and visual media from Japan in regional and global contexts.

This course will examine modern Japanese fiction and film that engaged with Japan's shift from "empire" to "nation" (roughly from 1930s to 1960s) with a specific focus on identity formation via race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

The seminar will examine key concepts of the mind, the body, and the nature-culture distinction. We will study these issues in the context of Japanese beliefs about the good society, making connections between "lay culture," Japanese notions of social democracy, and "science culture." Topics include: styles of care for the mentally ill, the politics of disability, notions of human life and death, responses to bio-technology, the management of human materials (such as organs), cultural definitions of addiction and "co-dependency," and the ethics of human enhancement.

This course examines "dangerous bodies" - bodies that transgress existing gender and racial norms in Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Situated at the intersection of literary, film, performance, gender and ethnic studies, this course provides an introduction to the shifting social meanings of the body in relation to historical masculinity, femininity, and Chineseness. We examine different cross-dressed figures, ranging from Mulan, cross-dressed male opera singer, WWII Japanese/Chinese spy, to experimental queer cinema, in a study that unpacks whether these transgressive bodies represent social change or a tool for restoring traditional norms.

A critical survey of important literary, critical, and popular texts in postwar Japan. Readings and discussion of translated texts by writers and thinkers such as Kawabata, Oe, Maruyama, and Abe as well as by lesser-known women writers, avant-garde poets, and comic writers. Topics include the impact of war and urbanization, existentialism, ethnicity, postmodernism, and feminism. One three-hour seminar.

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.

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.

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.