Global Arc

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.

This course examines the nature of state and society in an age of turmoil, with a focus on patterns of allegiances, ways of waging war, codes of conduct, norms of etiquette, social and political structure based on primary and secondary sources. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Kagemusha shall provide the thematic foundation for this course.

Since the 19th century, the spy genre has crossed national boundaries to become a global literary and cinematic form of mass entertainment. This class examines one national form, the Chinese spy novel/film and its cross-cultural translations and appropriations. We historicize the development of the spy genre in China, by interrogating how the Chinese subgenre interacts with other national traditions and by placing its development in the socio-historical context of WWI, WWII and the Cold War.We also examine the media technologies--secret codes, spy cameras, fake mustaches--that allow cinematic and literary spies to wage their hidden wars.

This class is an introduction to the unusual and strange in late imperial Chinese literature through digital analysis. We will focus on works that engage with the nature of evidence and reality: stories about crime and detection, ghosts, encounters with foxes, and other odd narratives. The stories we read, mostly written in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, are found across a wide array of textual genres popular in early modern China. Students will also learn to leverage a variety of digital methods to analyze these stories, covering approaches from textual analysis and mapping to network analysis and the public humanities.

This seminar is an introduction to leveraging the processing power of modern computers to study Chinese culture. This course will introduce you to a variety of newly developed digital tools, algorithms, and datasets that allow us to pursue new insights into traditional Chinese literature and culture. You will engage with new scholarship being published in the rapidly expanding field of the digital humanities and learn how to create digital research projects from scratch.

This course covers the history of Tibet from the seventh century until the present. Students will be introduced to themes such as: the changing domains of the Tibetan cultural areas; Buddhism's historical and historiographical conquests of Tibet; the usefulness of the vocabulary of "Golden" as well as "Dark" ages in linear historical narratives; the process of consecration of historical persons such as Songtsen Gampo and the Dalai Lamas; the subjugation of and resistance to Tibet as a part of a "Chinese" history; and the highly contextual representations of Tibet and Tibetan history in the west.

Junior Independent Work requires students to complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. The work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the semester. See below for details on works-in-progress submissions and due dates.

This course explores the representation, performance, and conceptualization of the body across a wide range of East Asian film and media forms. From the liminal spaces of horror, the visceral aesthetics of action films, to the speculative possibilities of cyborgs, we examine how bodies function as archives and motors of cultural, social, and political transformations. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks, including film theory, cultural studies, and media archaeology, we will engage with themes such as affect, sexuality, labor, disability, postcolonialism, and digital embodiment from the Cold War to the present.

This course uses cognition and embodiment to analyze texts that span literature, film, manga, anime, virtual reality, and video games. Through the Japanese horror genre, we examine how Japanese cultural elements translate and are transmitted through the global spread of popular media. The course features three units: adaptations of works (novel-to-film, manga-to-anime), embodiment in virtual reality and video games, and eco-horror and issues of scale, comparing fictional work against real-world disasters. An embodied approach attunes problems of language and representation, especially from the perspectives of gender, race, and ethnicity.

This course explores the art and history surrounding The Tale of Heike, Japan's great literary epic about the rise and fall of the Taira clan, from its origins and into the present. It will first focus on the history of twelfth century Japan, its culture, society, and politics, before exploring the Tale itself, and how the work is best understood as an oral performance, examining the numerous art forms which arose from the tale, including screen paintings, narrative handscrolls, woodblock prints, noh and kabuki theater, to film, anime, and manga.