Asian Studies (ASIA)

A seminar for graduate students in the Asian Studies dual-degree PhD programs.

Introduction to theories, methods, and disciplines of Asian Studies.

This course provides students with a comprehensive overview of key philosophical issues in the East Asian traditions. It aims to familiarize students with the most prominent critical debates and philosophical concerns, as well as the latest state of the field. Students will read philosophical texts alongside the critical literature in order to deepen knowledge of and evaluate philosophical discourse in East Asia from ancient times to the present. The course exposes students to the general philosophical canon as well as a range of current philosophical scholarship on how East Asian philosophy is being pursued today. Critical analyses and philosophical texts are chosen so as to illuminate each other and highlight key areas concerning ethics, metaphysics and cosmology, political philosophy, and culture. At the end of the course, students will have gained a sound grasp of East Asian philosophy and its historical dimensions, and they will have developed a critical understanding of the current challenges and directions in the field. No prior knowledge of Classical Chinese is required, as all texts will be read in translation.

This course provides a thorough grounding in the state of the field of book history in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It will begin with an overview of book history in general and East Asian book history¿s place within the larger field, followed by an overview of the history of reading and reading practices. Subsequent topics include technologies of book production, from oracle bones to xylography; the social and economic impact of printing; reading practices; the spread of knowledge and techniques across East Asia; and changes to the archive occasioned by born digital materials. Students will read secondary materials in English and use the library¿s special collections to examine material objects. Students will come away with sufficient knowledge to teach courses in the history of the book or conduct original research. It will be useful to students interested in alternative career paths, such as librarian or curatorial work. Knowledge of an Asian language is not required.

This course provides students and overview of key texts and trends in modern Korean literature and culture from a global perspective. It examines the most prominent literary and visual works that articulate the intricacy of modern Korean culture at the intersections of major historical, ideological, and environmental forces and issues in the twentieth century such as colonialism, cultural imperialism, Cold War politics, democratic movement, feminist movement, environmental injustice, etc. Students will also read texts on modern Korean history as well as literary and cultural criticism and theories to improve their analytical ability that will be demonstrated in their writings.

This course provides students with an overview of the core texts and main critical paradigms of modern Chinese literary studies. This course provides students with a comprehensive overview of the main critical approaches to modern Chinese literature, by placing these paradigms into historical perspective and linking them with key texts that illuminate the authors' arguments and demonstrate exemplary readings that have proven influential in the field, past and present. The particular focus of the course may vary according to the instructor (e.g. themes, genres, regions etc.), but the course will generally cover critical interventions and debates, helping students to understand the emergence of the field in its present form; they will also scrutinize major trends that are providing new directions for the study of modern Chinese literature. In addition to the critical literature, students will read a range of key literary texts, from the late Qing to the twenty-first century, that provide insights into the forces (aesthetic and intellectual, as well as social and historical) that have shaped the canon of modern Chinese literature. Critical analyses and literary texts are chosen in a way so as to illuminate each other. At the end of the class, students will have gained a sound grasp of the field and its literary and historical dimensions, and develop a critical understanding of the current challenges and directions of the study of modern Chinese literature. Cross Listings: CMLIT 577 will be added as a cross-listed course.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, that are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

This seminar will function as a workshop and laboratory for sampling, exploring, and experimenting with a variety of computer-based technologies that are currently being applied to (typically) large corpuses for the purposes of algorithmic criticism. Our focus will be hands-on experimentation with software for network analysis (gephi); stylistics (R); topic modeling (mallet), and mapping, with attention paid to foundational ideas of information theory, visualization, spatial humanities, etc. Exploration of further topics and methods according to student interests, preparation, and usefulness for specific research agendas.