Global Arc

This course tells the epic story of the people, ideas, and institutions that made the first Chinese empires, ca. third century BCE to the first century BCE. The course looks at the rise and fall of the Qin empire as well as the way Qin institutions and ideas reverberated through the succeeding Han dynasty--and beyond. Course will cover most recent archeological materials and excavated texts (in translation), including ongoing excavations of the terracotta warriors, funerary art, excavated legal codes, legal cases, religious and philosophical texts, and much more. Finally, we ask: did the Qin empire ever end?

In telling histories of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, various groups of nomadic people often loomed large in the background and served as the foil to the travail of their sedentary neighbors. In this course we put the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia front and center, and ask how the nomadic way of life and mode of state building served as agents of change in pre-modern Eurasia.

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.