East Asian Languages and Cultures

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
The course is designed for students who are of non-Chinese origin and were not raised in a Chinese-speaking environment; or who are of Chinese origin but do not speak Chinese and whose parents do not speak Chinese. The course develops beginning learners’ functional language ability—the ability to use Mandarin Chinese in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways at the beginning level. It helps students acquire communicative competence in Chinese while sensitizing them to the links between language and culture.
Elementary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Chinese 1B (5 units) is designed for students who have successfully completed Chinese 1A or the equivalent. A good command of the Chinese phonetic system (pinyin) and knowledge of 300-400 Chinese characters are the prerequisites for this class. The class will continue to focus on training students in the four language skills-- listening, speaking, reading, and writing with a gradually increasing emphasis on translingual and transcultural competence. By the end of this semester, you are expected to reach the proficiency levels of intermediate low in the listening, speaking, reading, and writing four areas stated in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines.
Elementary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course is designed specifically for Mandarin heritage students who possess speaking skill but little or no reading and writing skills in Chinese. The course utilizes students’ prior knowledge of listening and speaking skills to advance them to the intermediate Chinese proficiency level in one semester. Close attention is paid to meeting Mandarin heritage students’ literacy needs in meaningful contexts while introducing a functional vocabulary and a systematic review of structures through culturally related topics. The Hanyu Pinyin (a Chinese Romanization system) and traditional/simplified characters are introduced.
Accelerated Elementary Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The course is designed for students who have had exposure to a non-Mandarin Chinese dialect but cannot speak Mandarin and possess little or no reading and writing skills in Chinese. The course helps students gain a fundamental knowledge about Mandarin Chinese and explore their Chinese heritage culture through language. Students learn ways and discourse strategies to express themselves and develop their linguistic and cultural awareness in order to function appropriately in Mandarin-speaking environments.
Elementary Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Elementary Cantonese 3A is designed for non-heritage learners with no prior knowledge of Cantonese, a regional variety of Chinese, introducing students to its use through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. Topics include meeting people, shopping, leisure activities, telling the time, discussing daily routines, describing people and family members, and transportation, and students will compose texts in Cantonese that show the relationship between language and culture. Finally, the course develops students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use and their ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture.
Elementary Cantonese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Elementary Cantonese 3B is designed for non-heritage learners who have successfully completed 3A or equivalent. The course encourages students to construct meanings in oral, written and visual texts related to daily life topics such as locating things and places, food and clothing, weather, giving advice, telephone conversations, and arranging meetings, and to compose such texts. The course continues to develop students’ ability to understand the relationship between language and culture and to develop students’ awareness as to how social and cultural situations affect language use, encouraging students to explore multiple meanings and better understand the nature of their interpretations based on their attitudes, belief, and experiences.
Elementary Cantonese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Elementary Cantonese for Heritage Speakers 3X is designed for native and heritage Mandarin speakers. These students share the knowledge of standard Chinese writing system with Cantonese speakers. They have an interest in speaking Cantonese and learning a Chinese subculture shared among Cantonese speakers. This course will introduce students to its use through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. Topics include meeting people, shopping, leisure activities, telling the time, discussing daily routines, describing people and family members, transportation, and students will compose texts in Cantonese. Students will focus on vocabulary, linguistic knowledge, culture through expression analysis, and practical use of language.
Elementary Cantonese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
Elementary Taiwanese–Language, Culture, and Society in Taiwan (Chinese 4A) is designed to allow learners with no prior knowledge of the Chinese language to build familiarity with Taiwanese (or Southern Min), a variety of Chinese, through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. This is the first part of a two-semester sequence designed to equip students with the basic language skills needed in everyday life situations. There are no prerequisites for this course. The course uses various authentic materials and adopts a communicative approach to develop students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use and ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture.
Elementary Taiwanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025
Elementary Taiwanese (Chinese 4B) is the second semester of a one-year sequence designed to allow learners with no prior knowledge of Chinese language to build familiarity with Taiwanese (or Southern Min), a regional variety of Chinese, through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. This two-semester sequence is designed to equip students with the basic language skills needed in everyday life situations. The course aims to develop students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use along with their ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture. Prerequisite: Chinese 4A or permission of instructor
Elementary Taiwanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The first in a two-semester sequence, introducing students to Chinese literature in translation. In addition to literary sources, a wide range of philosophical and historical texts will be covered, as well as aspects of visual and material culture. 7A covers early China through late medieval China, up to and including the Yuan Dynasty (14th century); the course will also focus on the development of sound writing.
Introduction to Premodern Chinese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The second of a two-semester sequence introducing students to Chinese literature in translation. In addition to literary sources, a wide range of philosophical and historical texts will be covered, as well as aspects of visual and material culture. 7B focuses on late imperial, modern, and contemporary China. The course will focus on the development of sound writing skills.
Introduction to Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
The course is designed for students who are of non-Chinese origin and were not raised in a Chinese-speaking environment, or who are of Chinese origin but do not speak Chinese and whose parents do not speak Chinese. The course deals with lengthy conversations as well as narrative and descriptive texts in both simplified and traditional characters. It helps students to express themselves in speaking and writing on a range of topics and raises their awareness of the connection between language and culture to foster the development of communicative competence.
Intermediate Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course further develops students’ linguistic and cultural competence. In dealing with texts, students are guided to interpret, narrate, describe, and discuss topics ranging from real-life experience and personal memoire to historic events. Intercultural competence is promoted through linguistic and cultural awareness and language use in culturally appropriate contexts.
Intermediate Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
The course continues to develop students’ literacy and communicative competence through vocabulary and structure expansion dealing with topics related to Chinese heritage students’ personal experiences. Students are guided to express themselves on complex issues and to connect their language knowledge with real world experiences.
Accelerated Intermediate Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Going beyond satisfying basic communicative needs, students would learn to use Cantonese to complete more complicated tasks such as elaborating, comparing, analyzing, defending, debating, etc. Students would be frequently exposed to discussions regarding broader societal issues such as housing, food culture, fashion, safety, recreation, education, etc. Assuming basic competence of Cantonese, the course attempts to relate the learners to Chinese subculture through analyzing the link between Cantonese expressions and societal phenomenon in the Cantonese speaking society. Difference between Cantonese and Mandarin expressions and its cultural implications, as well as the social position of Cantonese globally and regionally.
Intermediate Cantonese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
This course examines the complex worldviews of China’s Han period, the centuries that follow its unification and the establishment of its empire. The momentous changes of this period shaped traditional and contemporary views of history and society, philosophy, and religion, and as a result are still relevant today. This course will look at Han “thought,” a word chosen for its range, including religion, state ritual, social conventions, moral philosophy, and thinking about the natural world. It covers both elite and popular culture, and pays particular attention to two works of the second century B.C.E.: the Shiji (i.e., Records of the Historian) or the Huainanzi.
Chinese Thought in the Han Dynasty: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The course takes students to a higher level of competence in Chinese language and culture and develops students’ critical linguistic and cultural awareness. It surveys social issues and values on more abstract topics in a changing China. Through the development of discourse and cultural knowledge in spoken and written Chinese, students learn to interpret subtle textual meanings in texts and contexts as well as reflect on the world and themselves and express themselves using a variety of genres.
Advanced Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course continues the development of critical awareness by emphasizing the link between socio-cultural literacy and a higher level of language competence. While continuing to expand their critical literacy skills, students interpret texts related to Chinese popular culture, social change, cultural traditions, politics and history. Through linguistic and cultural comparisons, students understand more about people in the target society and themselves as well as about the power of language in language use to enhance their competence in operating between languages and associated cultures.
Advanced Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course advances students’ linguistic and cultural competence through the development of critical literacy skills. It guides students to become more sophisticated language users equipped with linguistic, pragmatic, and textual knowledge in discussions, reading, writing, and translation. Students reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of the target language and culture and become more competent in operating between English and Chinese and between American culture and Chinese culture. Students learn to recognize a second version of Chinese characters.
Advanced Chinese for Heritage Learners: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Advanced Chinese 100XB is designed for Chinese heritage language learners who have taken Chinese 100XA or an equivalent level of Chinese. It further develops students’ linguistic and intercultural competence through working with texts that deal with cross-strait relations, Chinese people’s style of living, their changing lifestyles and mindsets as well as with migrant workers who have been deeply involved in the economic reforms that have taken place in mainland China. The texts also include a survey of China’s modernization in its early modern times and as well three historical figures from this period.
Advanced Chinese for Heritage Learners: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course is designed to assist students to reach the advanced-mid level on language skills and to enhance their intercultural competence. Students read the works of famous Chinese writers. Movie adaptations of these writings are also used. In addition to reading and seeking out information, students experience readings by interpreting and constructing meanings and evaluate the effect of the language form choice.
Fourth-Year Chinese Readings: Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
The course is designed to further develop students’ advanced-mid level language proficiency and intercultural competence. It uses authentic readings on Chinese social, political, and journalistic issues, supplemented by newspaper articles. To develop students’ self-learning abilities and help them to link the target language to their real world experience, students’ agency in learning is promoted through critical reading and rewriting and through comparing linguistic and cultural differences.
Fourth-Year Chinese Readings: Social Sciences and History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The first half of a one-year introductory course in literary Chinese, introducing key features of grammar, syntax, and usage, along with the intensive study of a set of readings in the language. Readings are drawn from a variety of pre-Han and Han-Dynasty sources.
Introduction to Literary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The second half of a one-year introductory course in literary Chinese, continuing the topics from the first semester, and giving basic coverage of relevant issues in the history of the language and writing system. The use of basic reference sources is introduced.
Introduction to Literary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This fast-paced course improves students’ abilities to use advanced language forms to read and discuss a wide range of abstract subjects and issues. This includes literature, philosophy, law, economics, history, cross-Strait relations, geography, and movie criticism. The course also develops students’ ability to read articles that contain both formal and informal and modern and classic Chinese usages. Students learn to identify and explain the classical Chinese allusions used in the articles and compare them to their modern counterparts. Students use the Chinese language in their fields of study and are directed to write a professional paper in their academic field.
Fifth-Year Readings: Reading and Analysis of Advanced Chinese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2019
This course is an introduction to the history of Buddhism in China from its beginnings in the early centuries CE to the present day. Through engagement with historical scholarship, primary sources in translation, and Chinese Buddhist art, we will explore the intellectual history and cultural impact of Buddhism in China. Students will also be introduced to major issues in the institutional history of Buddhism, the interactions between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese religions, and the relationship between Buddhism and the state. Previous study of Buddhism is helpful but not required.
Buddhism in China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2020
Modern Chinese Buddhism emerged from a variety of reactions to the challenges posed by modernity. The course aims at introducing students to the ways in which Buddhists in China have engaged and continue to engage with a modern society and a globalized world. The course will follow the trends of Chinese Buddhism from the early twentieth century down to the most recent developments in the present. In exploring modern constructions of Buddhism in China, we will distinguish between modernism and modernity, and investigate how Chinese Buddhists introduced reforms and innovations, while also attempting to maintain continuity with traditional ideals and modes of practice.
Buddhism in Modern China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012, Fall 2006, Fall 2004
Readings in historical, religious, and philosophical texts of the Zhou, Han, and later periods from both printed and manuscript sources.
Ancient Chinese Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2014, Fall 2007
Readings from the Shijing (book of Odes), the Chuci (song of Chu), and selections from other early compilations of poetry.
Ancient Chinese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2015
Readings in printed and manuscript sources that relate to early Chinese popular religion, the Celestial Masters tradition, medieval Daoist revelations (e.g., Shangqing and Lingbao texts), Daoism and the state, interactions with other traditions, liturgy, alchemy, drama, and modern Daoist practices in China and the diaspora.
Topics in Daoism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
Introduction to the forms and subtypes of classical poetry, focusing on both learning to read poems in the original as well as developing the critical and analytical tools to discuss and respond to them in an informed way.
Readings in Classical Chinese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2013, Spring 2013
Thematic focus and range of readings will vary. The course will deal with readings from one or more genres of classical Chinese prose, such as essays, epigraphical materials, historical works, classical tales, administrative documents, scholars' notes, geographical treatises, or travel diaries.
Readings in Medieval Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2016
This course is an introduction to the study of medieval Buddhist literature written in classical Chinese. We will read samples from a variety of genres, including early Chinese translations of Sanskrit and Central Asian Buddhist scriptures, indigenous Chinese commentaries, philosophical treatises, and sectarian works, including Chan (Zen koans). The course will also serve as an introduction to resource materials used in the study of Chinese Buddhist texts, and students will be expected to make use of a variety of reference tools in preparation for class. Readings in Chinese will be supplemented by a range of secondary readings in English on Mahayana doctrine and Chinese Buddhist history.
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
This course is an intensive introduction to Taiwanese literature and media culture.
Reading Taiwan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2019
A critical study of pre-modern Chinese fiction.
Readings in Vernacular Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2019
This course will introduce students to selected works of modern Chinese literature produced in the first half of the 20th century, as well as their cultural and historical context. How did writers such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and others attempt to make themselves "at home" in a world profoundly dislocated by the forces of colonialism, war, and revolution? We will examine the politics of literary style, questions of nationalism, representations of gender, and the problem of colonial modernity in these texts. All primary texts are presented in the original Chinese, supplemented by critical and biographical articles in English.
Modern Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2018, Fall 2014
This course explores popular, realist, and avant-garde literature from mainland China and Taiwan since 1949. We will consider how writers have engaged with the cultural dislocations of modernity by exploring questions such as the presentation of cultural and gender identities and the politics of memory and place. Central to our discussion will be the problem of how literature not only reflects but also critically engages with historical and cultural experience through a variety of genres. A crucial aspect of this course will be the development of skills in close, critical, and historically contextualized reading.
Contemporary Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
Chinese cities are the sites of complicated global/local interconnections as the nation is increasingly incorporated into the world system. Understanding Chinese cities is the key to analyzing the dramatic transformation of Chinese society and culture. This course is designed to teach students to think about Chinese cities in more textured ways. How are urban forms and urban spaces produced through processes of social, political, and ideological conflict? How are cities represented in literary, cinematic, and various popular cultures? How has our imagination of the city been shaped and how are these spatial discourses influencing the making of the cities of tomorrow?
Reading Chinese Cities: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2009, Fall 2005
This course explores one of the most central and potent areas of cultural politics in modern China: the city and its relations to the countryside. We will explore how urban space and native soil became central places of imagination and desire in modernity; how Beijing and Shanghai become mediums of imagining differing meanings of "modernity" and "tradition," "Chinese" and "Western," and cultural authenticity; the repeated reformist and revolutionary desire to return from the city back to the countryside; as well as more recent mass migrations from the countryside during a time of (and as part of) drastic urban destruction and "renewal."
Cities and the Country: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Spring 2010, Spring 2007
Chinese dialects, Mandarin phonology, and Mandarin grammar.
Structure of the Chinese Language: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2009, Spring 2008, Spring 2001
Writing system, early dictionaries, historical phonology, and classical grammar.
History of the Chinese Language: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2020
This course introduces Chinese language cinema since the late 1970s. Depending on the semester, the class will either focus on the distinct new waves in the three regions of Mainland, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or cover all three regions to examine to what extent these “New Cinemas” share similar concerns on questions of gender, politics, remembrance, and urbanization.
Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2014
Ideals of good governance are a core concern of many brands of traditional Chinese thought. The image of the ruler whose authority is exercised in harmony with the desires and interests of the society at large plays a key role not only in theories of governance but also in thought about ethics and psychology. There is also a fascination with the bad ruler. In addition to serving as negative examples just as good rulers serve as positive examples, bad rulers also provide an imaginative space for thinking about extremes of human will, offering an outlet for fantasy and vicarious gratification of desires that normally remain taboo.
Bad Emperors: Fantasies of Sovereignty and Transgression in the Chinese Tradition: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2015
This course introduces the history of traditional Chinese drama from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, covering important works from a wide range of genres (farcical, religious, detective, martial arts, historical, and romantic). We study Chinese theater in the context of pleasure precincts, ad hoc markets, ritual parades, and printed matter. The underlying questions we ask are: how did different kinds of spatial structure historically define performance? And how did these varied spatial configurations orient the relationship of the audience to the performance differently? And what general implications did the theatrical space have for the constitution of the self and for social formation in medieval and early modern China?
Traditional Chinese Drama: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
Vernacular fiction in late imperial China emerged at the margins of official historiography, traveled through oral storytelling, and reached sophistication in the hands of literati. Covering the major genres and masterpieces of traditional Chinese novels including military, martial arts, libertine, and romantic stories, this course investigates how shifting boundaries brought about significant transformations of Chinese narrative at the levels of both form and content.
Exploring Premodern Chinese Novels: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
This course centers around intensive reading and analysis of Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century masterpiece of Chinese fiction (also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber). Students will be introduced to the literary, cultural, philosophical, and material world from which this work emerged, as well as various approaches to the world within the text.
The Story of the Stone: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2021
This course examines the development of Confucianism in pre-modern China using a dialogical model that emphasizes its interactions with competing viewpoints. Particular attention will be paid to ritual, conceptions of human nature, ethics, and to the way that varieties of Confucianism were rooted in more general theories of value.
Confucius and His Interpreters: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course is an intensive introduction in English translation to the history, literature, and media culture of Taiwan.
Literature and Media Culture in Taiwan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
This course is an introduction to media culture in 20th-century China, with an emphasis on photography, cinema, and popular music. The course places these productions in historical and cultural context, examining the complex intertwinement of culture, technology, and politics in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from the turn of the last century to the beginning of the 21st. Students will also be introduced to a number of approaches to thinking about and analyzing popular cultural phenomena.
Popular Media in Modern China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2010, Fall 2008
What do landscapes "do"? How do landscape images and travel narratives mediate experiences of land, nature, and other peoples? How do landscapes map one's place in the world, shaping both cultural identities and real geographic spaces? Can landscapes travel? This course explores such questions by examining one of the world's longest-running traditions of landscape representation. We will consider such landscape genres as poetry, prose description, fiction, travel narrative, maps, painting, and photography, and consider their work across China's long history of imperial expansion, colonization, and globalization. We will also consider China's places in thinking about landscape and travel in the West.
Chinese Landscapes: Space, Place, and Travel: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2018, Fall 2015
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2019, Fall 2018
Readings vary from year to year and are drawn from a wide variety of philosophical and historiographical sources.
Seminar in Philological Analysis of Ancient Chinese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019
This course sets out to examine a set of “focus chapters” from the Zhuangzi along several dimensions: 1) in the context of Warring States thought, 2) as independent stories that need to be puzzled through and read critically, and 3) tracing the influence of those chapters on subsequent periods of Chinese thought.
Reading the Zhuangzi: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2017, Fall 2016
An analytical exploration of the central texts of Warring States (453-221 BCE) religion and philosophy.
Early Chinese Thought: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This seminar is an intensive introduction to various genres of Buddhist literature in classical Chinese, including translations of Sanskrit and Central Asian scriptures. Chinese commentaries, philosophical treatises, hagiographies, and sectarian works. It is intended for graduate students who already have some facility in classical Chinese. It will also serve as a tools and methods course, covering the basic reference works and secondary scholarship in the field of East Asian Buddhism. The content of the course will be adjusted from semester to semester to best accommodate the needs and interests of students.
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2011, Spring 2008
Readings in major genres and authors of Chinese literature, with attention to relevant "nonliterary" (philosophical, scholarly, historiographical, etc.) sources where useful; period and thematic focus varies from semester to semester.
Seminar in Chinese Literary History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Course content varies with interests of students.
Texts on the Civilization of Medieval China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Introduction to the history of Chinese textual production. Detailed close reading of the texts and training in the methodologies of solving problems of lexicon, theme, structure, imagery, and metaphor.
Genre and Method in Traditional Chinese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2017
This course explores relations of Chinese literature and culture to other parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the West, ranging from specific global transactions to comparative perspectives, and ranging widely across different historical periods. Specific topics vary from year to year.
Chinese Literatures and Cultures in Global Context: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
This course examines the canonical texts of the late-imperial period, placing them in the context of literary culture of the Ming-Qing. The course focuses on a different set of texts each time it is taught; the aim is to introduce students to the primary issues in scholarship of late-imperial fiction and drama over a period of several years.
Late Imperial Fiction and Drama: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2019, Spring 2015
Graduate seminar in modern Chinese literature. Topics vary from year to year.
Modern Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2016, Fall 2014
Directed study of modern Chinese literary and media cultures. Course provides both historical coverage and a grounding in various theoretical problems and methodological approaches. Topics include print culture, cinema, popular music, and material culture; emphasis varies from year to year.
Modern Chinese Cultural Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2020
Directed study of modern Chinese film. Emphasis varies from year to year.
Modern Chinese Film Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015

Thesis Preparation and Related Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the graduate adviser. Units may not be used to meet either unit or residence requirements for a master's degree.
Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare for various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session
The arts of reading a text, summarizing its argument, questioning its suppositions, generating balanced opinions, and expressing those opinions with clarity and effectiveness lie at the center of university life and educated human endeavor. EA Lang R1B is designed to help inculcate those skills, paying particular attention to East Asian humanistic topics. This four-unit course focuses on how to formulate questions and hone observations into well reasoned, coherent, and convincing essays. Attention will be paid to the basic rules of grammar, logical construction, compelling rhetorical approaches, research techniques, library and database skills, and forms of citation.
Reading and Composition on topics in East Asian Humanities: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This introduction to the study of Buddhism will consider materials drawn from various Buddhist traditions of Asia, from ancient times down to the present day. However, the course is not intended to be a comprehensive or systematic survey; rather than aiming at breadth, the course is designed around key themes such as ritual, image veneration, mysticism, meditation, and death. The overarching emphasis throughout the course will be on the hermeneutic difficulties attendant upon the study of religion in general, and Buddhism in particular.
Introduction to the Study of Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Fall 2012
Sophomore seminars are small interactive courses offered by faculty members in departments all across the campus. Sophomore seminars offer opportunity for close, regular intellectual contact between faculty members and students in the crucial second year. The topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 sophomores.
Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Summer 2015 First 6 Week Session
This course will examine comparative responses to and representations of violent conflict. We will pay attention to how catastrophic events are productive of new forms of expression--oral, written, and visual--as well as destructive of familiar ones. We will examine the ways in which experience and its representation interact during and in the aftermath of extreme violence. Our empirical cases will be drawn from our research on responses to WWII atrocities, and on the post-Cold War civil wars in Africa.
Catastrophe, Memory, and Narrative: Comparative Responses to Atrocity in the Twentieth Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2020 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2019, Summer 2019 Second 6 Week Session
This course explores representation of romantic love in East Asian cultures in premodern and post-modern contexts. Students develop a better understanding of the similarities and differences in traditional values in three East Asian cultures by comparing how canonical texts of premodern China, Japan and Korea represent romantic relationship. This is followed by the study of several contemporary East Asian films, giving the student the opportunity to explore how traditional values persist, change, or become nexus points of resistance.
Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature and Contemporary Film: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2012, Spring 2010
This course will explore how the Chinese and English-language literary traditions (broadly defined) delineate the realm of the ineffable, and how cultural notions of the inexpressible shape the writing and reading of poems, songs, and a selection of prose pieces, from the uses of figurative language and prosody to genre and canon formation. In addition, in order to deepen our understanding of how writing achieves its aims, some attention will be given to nonverbal modes of expression, including calligraphy and painting--and attempts to render them in writing. Over this course of study, students will not only refine their sensitivity to the power of artistic modes of indirection, but will also hone their skills in close reading, analytical writing, and oral expression. All readings will be in English.
Expressing the Ineffable in China and Beyond: The Making of Meaning in Poetic Writing: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2013, Fall 2008
This course will examine war, empire, and the writing and memorialization of history through an eclectic group of literary, graphic, and cinematic texts from China, Japan, Europe, and the U.S.
War, Empire, and Literature in East Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2006, Spring 2006
This course will explore poetic translation, across languages, across cultures, and across historical ages, not merely from the perspective of the "accuracy" with which a classic text is represented in the translation, but as a window into the nature of poetic tradition and poetic writing itself. Works will be primarily drawn from the Chinese tradition, but in the interest of allowing a comparative discussion of the course's central themes, a significant amount of reading from ancient and modern Greek poetry will be included as well. The goal of the class is not simply to gain familiarity with Chinese poetry and poets, but more fundamentally to gain skill and sophistication in reading, responding to, and thinking about poetry.
Revising the Classics: Chinese and Greek Poetry in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
In this course we compare the cultural traditions of tea in China and Japan. In addition, using tea as the case study, we analyze the mechanics of the flow of culture across both national boundaries and social practices (such as between poetry and the tea ceremony). Understanding the tea culture of these countries informs students of important and enduring aspects of both cultures, provides an opportunity to discuss the role of religion and art in social practice, provides a forum for cultural comparison, and provides as well an example of the relationship between the two countries and Japanese methods of importing and naturalizing another country's social practice. Korean tea traditions are also briefly considered.
History of the Culture of Tea in China and Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2017
This course will explore some of the most difficult bioethical issues confronting the world today from the perspective of traditional values embedded in the cultural history of India, China, and Japan as evidenced in their religions, legal codes, and political history. Possible topics include population control, abortion, sex-selection, euthanasia, suicide, genetic manipulation, brain-death, and organ transplants.
Bio-Ethical Issues in East Asian Thought: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016
This class examines the global dynamics and local distinction of literary writings from contemporary East Asia. Beginning with the colonial connections among Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul during the 1920s-1940s, and moving on to texts composed since 2000 in Manila, Hong Kong, India and elsewhere, the course considers how literary writers have grappled with an increasingly integrated global marketplace in which culture, ideas and people circulate alongside (and as) capital. Discussions will reflect on the confluence of culture and politics in literary writings that treat race tension, ecological crisis, capitalist catastrophe and other themes. Primary readings will be supplemented by iconic essays of cultural criticism and recent films.
Reading Global Politics in Contemporary East Asian Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2017, Spring 2014
The 1960s were a time of historical transformation and upheaval in East Asia. It saw the overthrow of political regimes, the consolidation of communism, unprecedented capitalist expansion, and the emergence of new technologies that affected aesthetic production and consumption. This course explores the multiple aspects of culture, aesthetics, and politics that defined this moment. It asks how and why we can define the 1960s as a period, while considering the significance of defining East Asia (a term which denotes an imagined space of relations) as a particular region at this time.
The East Asian Sixties: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2017
The course will introduce students to narratives about illness, disease and healing written by patients, physicians, caretakers, and others. These narratives report an experience. They reveal the interactions between the unfolding life of the patient and the shifting social meanings attached to illness. We will study the relationships between illness and society through readings of fiction, memoir, films, essays and graphic novels in order to understand how these varied forms of storytelling organize and give meaning to crucial questions about embodiment, disability and emergent forms of sociality enabled by our bodily vulnerabilities.
Illness Narratives, Vulnerable Bodies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2017
What does it mean to use the medium of writing to “know” a person, and precisely how does one avail oneself of that medium to make oneself—or someone else— “known”? This course will guide students in writing about one of the most challenging of subjects: people. Students will have the opportunity to (a) read deeply in a selection of writings drawn from a range of genres and cultures, to acquaint themselves with a range of rhetorical tools employed in the portrayal of human lives and character, (b) identify the aims of their own writings, and (c) develop competency in applying what they have learned as readers to their own writing.
Knowing Others, and Being Known: The Art of Writing People: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2017
Comparative analysis of modern literature from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, and Japan with an emphasis on the short story and the novel. We will think about both the specificities of the literatures of the region as well as shared and interconnected experiences of modernity that broadly connect the cultures of East Asia during the twentieth century. Thematic concerns will include: modernism and modernity; nostalgia and homesickness; empire and its aftermath; and the cultures of globalization.
Modern East Asian Fiction: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018
This course provides a forum for reading and discussing East Asia’s greatest and most iconic modern writers, Lu Xun. We will closely read Lu Xun’s major works , discuss his role in the reinvention of the Chinese language and literary tradition, explore the global literary and intellectual currents with which he was deeply engaged, as well as situating him within the tumultuous era of colonialism, modernization, and revolution. All readings will be available in English translation.
Lu Xun and his Worlds: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Fall 2019
This course explores Chinese cultures of sex and gender from antiquity to the seventeenth century. We concentrate on three interconnected issues: women’s status, homoeroticism, and the human body. Our discussion will be informed by cross-cultural comparisons with ancient Greece, Renaissance England, and Contemporary America. In contrast to our modern regime of sexuality, which collapses all the three aforementioned issues into the issues of desire and identity intrinsic to the body, we will see how the early Chinese regime of sexual act evolved into the early modern regime of emotion that concerned less inherent identities than a media culture of life-style performance.
Sex and Gender in Premodern Chinese Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Higher Learning begins with the study of heaven. As the source of orientation in space and time, heaven provides humanity the foundation for its knowledge and political order. To understand what knowledge is or how politics function, we need a basic understanding of the ways of heaven. This course examines the function heaven serves in the founding of order against the void in nature through the formation of conventional systems of time and space and the role heaven has played in the promulgation of governments. From a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspective that covers the course of Eurasian history and using primary sources in translation, we will see heaven unfold through the developments that leave us with the world we know today.
The History of Heaven: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course will discuss the social, economic, and cultural aspects of Buddhism as it moved along the ancient Eurasian trading network referred to as the “Silk Road”. Instead of relying solely on textual sources, the course will focus on material culture as it offers evidence concerning the spread of Buddhism. Through an examination of the Buddhist archaeological remains of the Silk Road, the course will address specific topics, such as the symbiotic relationship between Buddhism and commerce; doctrinal divergence; ideological shifts in the iconography of the Buddha; patronage (royal, religious and lay); Buddhism and political power; and art and conversion. All readings will be in English.
Buddhism on the Silk Road: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
How far can we go into the minds and bodies of others? How strongly can we sense their presence? When, and why, do we hit a wall separating us from the world beyond us? In this course we will experiment, through a number of genres and media, with the art of writing (and thinking and feeling) empathetically. These genres and media include diary, fiction, poetry, editorial, letter writing, reportage, description (of nature, art, emotions, psychic states, etc.), film, video, and photography.
The Art of Writing: Writing the Limits of Empathy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2011, Fall 2009, Spring 2008
A thematic course on Buddhist perspectives on nature and Buddhist responses to environmental issues. The first half of the course focuses on East Asian Buddhist cosmological and doctrinal perspectives on the place of the human in nature and the relationship between the salvific goals of Buddhism and nature. The second half of the course examines Buddhist ethics, economics, and activism in relation to environmental issues in contemporary Southeast Asia, East Asia, and America.
Buddhism and the Environment: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
A study of the Buddhist tradition as it is found today in Asia. The course will focus on specific living traditions of East, South, and/or Southeast Asia. Themes to be addressed may include contemporary Buddhist ritual practices; funerary and mortuary customs; the relationship between Buddhism and other local religious traditions; the relationship between Buddhist institutions and the state; Buddhist monasticism and its relationship to the laity; Buddhist ethics; Buddhist "modernism," and so on.
Buddhism in Contemporary Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2013, Spring 2010
This course will introduce students to the Zen Buddhist traditions of China and Japan, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives (history, anthropology, philosophy, and so on). The course will also explore a range of hermeneutic problems (problems involved in interpretation) entailed in understanding a sophisticated religious tradition that emerged in a time and culture very different from our own.
Zen Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
This course will discuss the historical development of the Pure Land school of East Asian Buddhism, the largest form of Buddhism practiced today in China and Japan. The curriculum is divided into India, China, and Japan sections, with the second half of the course focusing exclusively on Japan where this form of religious culture blossomed most dramatically, covering the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. The curriculum will begin with a reading of the core scriptures that form the basis of the belief system and then move into areas of cultural expression. The course will follow two basic trajectories over the centuries: doctrine/philosophy and culture/society.
Pure Land Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2020
This course offers a cultural history of encounters between Russia and Asia in literature, film and visual art. The lenses of Orientalism, Eurasianism and Internationalism will be used to analyze Russian interactions with three spaces: the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. We will discuss works by classic Russian writers and artists (including Tolstoy, Blok and Platonov) that address the question of Russia’s engagement with Asia and consider Russia’s ambiguous spatial identity between Europe and Asia. We will also examine responses to Russian culture and the Russian/Soviet state in the literature and culture of China (Lu Xun, Xiao Hong), Japan (Kurosawa), Central Asia (Aitmatov) and the Caucasus (Sadulaev). All readings in English.
Russia and Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2013, Spring 2010
The emergence of the tantras in seventh and eighth-century India marked a watershed for religious practice throughout Asia. These esoteric scriptures introduced complex new ritual technologies that transformed the religious traditions of India, from Brahmanism to Jainism and Buddhism, as well as those of Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan. This course provides an overview of tantric religion across these regions.
Tantric Traditions of Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021
Through the prism of psychoanalytical theories, early and contemporary, this course explores a variety of pre-modern and modern East Asian texts—literary, artistic, religious, and theoretical. We will be asking both how these theories enrich our reading of the texts, and how the texts enrich our understanding of the theories. Through close readings of all the material we will begin to discern how theory and text reshape one another, where they mesh productively, and where they insistently stay apart. Topics include: the unconscious, selfhood, repression, attachment, beauty, dreams, ritual, ghosts and haunting, madness, meditative states, mystical experience, mourning, healing, therapeutic method and cure. No prerequisites.

Psychoanalytic Theory, Asian Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course studies the purview of astral science under Buddhist dominion. Here it is at once promoted for promulgating Buddhist world order and repudiated for begetting the suffering-inducing physical universe, a warped vessel of ceaselessly turning stars that the Buddhist dharma must transcend. The course begins with the part astral science plays in genesis, the creation of Buddhist world order. It then covers the science’s central aspects, celestial systems, spatial orientation, time reckoning, the making of a calendar, and publication of an almanac. Thereafter, it treats the science’s outgrowth into interrelated forms of Buddhist propaganda manifest as divination, magic, medicine, ritual, scripture, and iconography.

Buddhist Astral Science: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2022 Second 6 Week Session
This course investigates how neurotypical and neurodivergent authors (those with neurological conditions) depict and discuss "neurodiversity". We pay particular attention to how the autistic community embraces this idea. The course emphasizes two Japanese authors, Oe Kenzaburô and autistic author Higashida Naoki (both read in English). We also read other fiction and poetry dealing with themes of autism. To better contextualize the Japanese authors, we read nonfiction work on neurodiversity as well. Taking a comparative, cross-cultural approach brings into relief the ways in which neurodiversity is understood, depicted, and expressed; and the unique difficulties with representation. Satisfies Arts & Letters (AL) breadth requirements.
Neurodiversity in Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course comprises an immersive survey of science fiction - historically the only literary genre fully devoted to imagining the alterity of the future - as it takes on a unique and pressing relevance in contemporary East Asian culture and society. Providing students with both comprehensive training in literary analysis and critical thinking as well as a substantive sociohistorical introduction to contemporary East Asian societies and politics, the course will constitute a solid foundation for the East Asian humanities major. All readings will be in English; no prior knowledge of Asian languages and/or cultures expected.

Science Fiction in East Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2020
Prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology in China, Japan, and Korea.
Archaeology of East Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2011, Spring 2008
A close analysis of the oeuvre of an East Asian director in its aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts.
East Asian Film: Directors and their Contexts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
The study of East Asian films as categorized either by industry-identified genres (westerns, horror films, musicals, film noir, etc.) or broader interpretive modes (melodrama, realism, fantasy, etc).
East Asian Film: Special Topics in Genre: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is a capstone experience that centers on the philosophies and religions of East Asia examined from multiple theoretical perspectives. It comprises several thematic units within which a short set of readings about theory are followed by chronologically arranged readings about East Asia. Themes will alternate from year to year but may include: ritual and performance studies; religion and evolution; definitions of religion and theories of its origins; and the role of sacrifice.
Tools and Methods in the Study of East Asian Philosophy and Religion: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in the East Asian Religion, Thought, and Culture major (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in the East Asian Religion, Thought, and Culture major (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
This course is a pro-seminar required for all entering graduate students in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures no matter their particular areas of interest. Its purpose is to introduce graduate students in the program to the major theoretical concerns, academic issues, and interpretive methodologies relevant to humanistic studies more generally and to the study of East Asian literature, thought, religion, and culture in particular. Supervising faculty change from year to year, as does the focus of the seminar.
Proseminar: Approaches to East Asian Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2009
This course will consider alternative strategies and modes of close reading that can be relevant to the study of East Asia with a focus on China and Japan. As we concentrate on the historical role of philological research, translation studies, interdisciplinary scholarship and ask how "knowledge" about East Asia is produced in our fields, our readings on "close reading" will help us question the common sense of "civilization," culture," and "tradition," and explore new ways of asking questions about text and context, aesthetics and politics, cultural memory, historical narratives, and regimes of knowledge.
Close Reading Area Studies: China and Japan in the World: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course provides a place for graduate-level seminars in East Asian Studies that rely primarily on secondary scholarship and texts in translation. Content will vary between semesters but will typically focus on a particular theme. Themes will be chosen according to faculty and student interests, with an eye toward introducing students to the breadth of available western scholarship on that subject, from classics in the field to the latest publications.
Topics in East Asian Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2019, Fall 2016
Content varies with student interests. The course will normally focus on classical Buddhist texts that exist in multiple recensions and languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan.
Seminar in Buddhism and Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course aims to provide basic pedagogical training for teaching East Asian languages as second/foreign language. It involves critical reading and discussion of major pedagogical principles and issues in teaching Asian languages as second languages, with emphasis on the following topics:
Practical topics such as lesson planning, classroom observation, peer teaching, classroom activities, self- and peer evaluations, best practices in teaching. The focus of this course is on teaching theory, methodology, curriculum and lesson plan design, focusing on the teaching of Chinese, Japanese and Korean as foreign/second languages. Classes include lecture, discussion of readings, activities and feedback on observed language classes.

Methods of Teaching East Asian Languages: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session
Japanese 1A is designed to develop basic Japanese language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students will learn the Japanese writing system: hiragana, katakana and approximately 150 kanji. At the end of the course, students should be able to greet, invite, compare, and describe persons and things, activities, intensions, ability, experience, purposes, reasons, and wishes. Grades will be determined on the basis of attendance, quiz scores, homework and class participation.
Elementary Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session
Japanese 1B is designed to develop basic skills acquired in Japanese 1A further. Students will learn approximately 150 new kanji. At the end of the course students should be able to express regret, positive and negative requirements, chronological order of events, conditions, giving and receiving of objects and favors, and to ask and give advice. Grades will be determined on the basis of attendance, quiz scores, homework and class participation.
Elementary Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is an overview of Japanese literature and culture, 7th- through 18th-centuries. 7A begins with Japan's early myth-history and its first poetry anthology, which show the transition from a preliterate, communal society to a courtly culture. Noblewomen's diaries, poetry anthologies, and selections from the Tale of Genji offer a window into that culture. We examine how oral culture and high literary art mix in Kamakura period tales and explore representations of heroism in military chronicles and medieval Noh drama. After considering the linked verse of late medieval times, we read vernacular literature from the urban culture of the Edo period. No previous course work in Japanese literature, history, or language is expected.
Introduction to Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session
An introduction to Japanese literature in translation in a two-semester sequence. 7B provides a survey of important works of 19th- and 20th-century Japanese fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism. The course will explore the manner in which writers responded to the challenges of industrialization, internationalization, and war. Topics include the shifting notions of tradition and modernity, the impact of Westernization on the constructions of the self and gender, writers and the wartime state, literature of the atomic bomb, and postmodern fantasies and aesthetics. All readings are in English translation. Techniques of critical reading and writing will be introduced as an integral part of the course.
Introduction to Modern Japanese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024
This course introduces students to the historical contexts and social forces shaping the production of Japanese texts and media.
Japanese Culture Across Texts and Media: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
The goal of this course is for the students to understand the language and culture required to communicate effectively in Japanese. Some of the cultural aspects covered are; geography, speech style, technology, sports, food, and religion. Through the final project, students will learn how to discuss social issues and their potential solutions. In order to achieve these goals, students will learn how to integrate the basic linguistics knowledge they acquired in J1, as well as study new structures and vocabulary. An increasing amount of reading and writing, including approximately 200 new kanji, will also be required.
Intermediate Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2024
The goal of this course is for the students to understand the more advanced language and culture required to communicate effectively in Japanese. Some of the cultural aspects covered are; pop-culture, traditional arts, education, convenient stores, haiku, and history. Through the final project, students will learn how to introduce their own cultures and their influences. In order to achieve these goals, students will learn how to integrate the basic structures and vocabulary they acquired in the previous semesters, as well as study new linguistic expressions. An increasing amount of more advanced reading and writing, including approximately 200 new kanji, will also be required.
Intermediate Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course will develop further context-specific skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. It concentrates on students using acquired grammar and vocabulary with more confidence in order to express functional meanings, while increasing overall linguistic competence. Students will learn approximately 200 new Kanji. There will be a group or individual project. Course materials include the textbook supplemented by newspapers, magazine articles, short stories, and video clips which will provide insight into Japanese culture and society.
Advanced Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course aims to develop further context-specific skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. It concentrates on students using acquired grammar and vocabulary with more confidence in order to express functional meanings, while increasing overall linguistic competence. Students will learn approximately 200 new Kanji. There will be a group or individual project. Course materials include the textbook supplemented by newspapers, magazine articles, short stories, essays, and video clips which will provide insight into Japanese culture and society.
Advanced Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2017, Spring 2015
Students will be trained to read, analyze, and translate modern Japanese scholarship on Chinese subjects. A major purpose of the course is to prepare students to take reading examinations in Japanese. The areas of scholarship to be covered are: politics, popular culture, religion, sociology and history as well as areas suggested by students who are actively engaged in research projects. Two readings in selected areas will be assigned, one by the instructor and the second by a student participant.
Japanese for Sinologists: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
Students develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills further to think critically, to express their points of view, and to understand Japanese culture and society in depth The readings are mainly articles on current social issues from Japanese newspapers, magazines, and professional books as sources of discussions. Students are required to write short essays on topics related to the reading materials.
Fourth-Year Japanese: Aspects of Japanese Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2018
This course provides students an opportunity to develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in order to express their opinions in argumentative discourse. Students read and discuss a variety of Japanese texts to deepen their understanding of Japanese society and people and to improve their intercultural communicative competence.
Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2018, Fall 2016
This course provides students an opportunity to develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, thereby enabling them to express their points of view and to engage in argumentative discourse. In addition to Japanese literature, readings include academic essays and other texts, which provide a variety of writing styles and serve as sources for classroom discussion. Also, Japanese films are used for various activities in order to broaden students’ cultural awareness and knowledge of Japanese society.
Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Students develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills further while examining Japanese historical figures, events, background, stories, etc. Students read a variety of texts and watch videos related to Japanese history as sources for discussions to deepen their understanding of Japanese society, culture, and people from historical perspectives. Students conduct individual research on a topic in Japanese history, and write a short research paper.
Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2021
In this course, students will practice various techniques to read articles in Japanese on current issues in Japan, and they will learn about Japanese conceptions of the world and how Japanese society functions. They may want to compare what they have learned with similar issues in their own countries to deepen their understanding of the issues and develop their critical thinking ability. They will also learn more advanced Japanese grammar and increase their vocabulary.
Fourth-Year Japanese: Current Issues in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course provides a critical survey of prominent and other noteworthy expressions of Buddhist thought and culture in Japanese history. The Japanese experience of Buddhist teachings, practices and institutions, as well as aesthetic expressions in painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, literature, and theatre will be examined against the backdrop of the transmission of all these forms of Buddhist culture from India to China to Korea to Japan. Special attention will also be given to the fusion of Buddhist and “native” Japanese sensibilities in theater (Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku) and popular art such as ukiyo-e prints and manga.
Buddhism and its Culture in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
An introductory look at the culture, values, and history of religious traditions in Japan, covering the Japanese sense of the world physically and culturally, its native religious culture called Shinto, the imported continental traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, the arrival and impact of Christianity in the 16th century and the New Religions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Focus will be on how the internal structure of Buddhist and Confucian values were negotiated with long-established views of mankind and society in Japan, how Japan has been changed by these foreign notions of the individual’s place in the world, particularly Buddhism, and why many see contemporary Japan as a post-religious society.
Introduction to the Religions of Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
An introduction to classical Japanese (bungo), the premodern vernacular, which was used as Japan's literary language until well into the 20th century and remains essential for a thorough grounding in Japanese literature and culture.
Introduction to Classical Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2021
An introduction to the critical analysis and translation of traditional Japanese poetry, a genre that reaches from early declarative work redolent of an even earlier oral tradition to medieval and Early Modern verses evoking exquisitely differentiated emotional states via complex rhetoric and literary allusion. Topics may include examples of Japan's earliest poetry in Man'yoshu, Heian courtly verse in Kokinshu, lines from Shinkokinshu with its medieval mystery and depth, linked verse (renga), and the haikai of Basho and his circle.
Classical Japanese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2015, Spring 2011, Spring 2009
The tradition of Japanese self-reflective literature, composed by both men and women, is long and rich. Topics for this course include highly personal memoirs by court women and poetic travel diaries.
Premodern Japanese Diary (Nikki) Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2010, Spring 2000
The course focuses on select masterpieces from the Japanese narrative tradition, including Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) and Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi).
Heian Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2018
Introductory reading class focusing on premodern texts written in Kanbun, the Japanese way of reading and writing Classical Chinese. The first half focuses on the orthography and syntax of Kanbun, primarily using examples from military texts from the medieval period. The second half focuses on writings considered artistic, religious (Buddhist), literary, historical, biographical, or ritualistic in nature, including snapshots of doctrinal statements by influential thinkers in the Buddhist tradition. In that Kanbun is Chinese in format but was nearly always read in Classical Japanese word order, this fulfills the Japanese-major requirement of a second semester of Classical Japanese.
Introductory Readings in Kanbun: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Spring 2013, Spring 2012
Critical reading and translation of important literary texts from the Edo period, including poetic diaries, merchant fiction, and (joruri) drama.
Edo Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2012, Fall 2009
Writings in the Japanese vernacular constitute only one part of the total premodern Japanese written corpus. Until the 20th century, the preferred medium for most historical texts and male diaries was Sino-Japanese (kanbun). Familiarity with the grammar of this extraordinarily rich tradition is therefore essential for all students of premodern Japanese disciplines
Japanese Historical Documents: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is an introduction to Japanese modernism through the reading and discussion of representative short stories, poetry, and criticism of the Taisho and early Showa periods. We will examine the aesthetic bases of modernist writing and confront the challenge posed by their use of poetic language. The question of literary form and the relationship between poetry and prose in the works will receive special attention.
Modern Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course examines the historical production and reception of key Japanese literary and film texts; how issues of gender, ethnicity, social roles, and national identity specific to each text address changing economic and social conditions in postwar Japan.
Contemporary Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
This course deals with issues of the structure of the Japanese language and how they have been treated in the field of linguistics. It focuses on phonetics/phonology, morphology, writing systems, dialects, lexicon, and syntax/semantics, historical changes, and genetic origins. Students are required to have intermediate knowledge of Japanese. No previous linguistics training is required.
Introduction to Japanese Linguistics: Grammar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course deals with issues of the usage of the Japanese language and how they have been treated in the field of linguistics. It concentrates on pragmatics, modality/evidentiality, deixis, speech varieties (politeness, gender, written vs. spoken), conversation management, and rhetorical structure. Students are required to have intermediate knowledge of Japanese. No previous linguistics training is required.
Introduction to Japanese Linguistics: Usage: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
An overview of the concepts of theoretical, contrastive, and practical linguistics which form the basis for work in translation between Japanese and English through hands-on experience. Topics include translatability, various kinds of meaning, analysis of the text, process of translating, translation techniques, and theoretical background.
Translation: Theory and Practice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is designed for those at high-intermediate to low-advanced level of fluency in Japanese to further develop their reading proficiency through detailed grammatical analyses of selected texts. Although adequate knowledge of both vocabulary and grammar is essential for understanding the text, often in foreign-language learning, vocabulary typically receives more emphasis than grammar.
Through assigned texts, students learn through a hands-on approach how words are combined to form a phrase, how phrases are combined to form a clause, how clauses are combined to form a sentence, how sentences are combined to form a text. Readings are selected from modern Japanese writing on current affairs, social sciences, history, and literature.
Reading Japanese Texts Using Advanced Grammatical Analysis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Fall 2010, Fall 2008
This course surveys Japanese poetry and/or prose written predominantly in or before the Heian Period (794-1185). Topics will vary.
Classical Japanese Literature in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2020
This course surveys modern Japanese fiction and poetry in the first half of the 20th century. Topics will vary.
Modern Japanese Literature in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2007
Course explores stereotypical images of traditional Japanese culture and people through archaeological analysis. Particular emphasis will be placed on changing lifeways of past residents of the Japanese islands, including commoners, samurai, and nobles. Consideration will be given to the implications of these archaeological studies for our understanding of Japanese identities.
Archaeology and Japanese Identities: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2017

Urami (rancor, resentment) has an enduring presence in Japanese literature. Figures overburdened with urami become demons, vengeful ghosts, or other transformed, dangerous, scheming characters. They appear in many different genre and eras. The course's topic enables discussion on concepts important for understanding Japanese literary works such as hyper-attentiveness to shifting social status, the role of groupness in targeting victims, the imperatives of shame, secrets, the circumscribed agency of women, and the reach of Buddhist teachings into behavioral norms. For those interested in comparative literature, the course offers an opportunity to take a measure of what Japanese narratives offer as legitimate causes of rancor and revenge.
Urami: Rancor and Revenge in Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2019
This course will examine the works of the novelist Murakami Haruki and the animator Miyazaki Hayao within the context of contemporary Japanese aesthetics and history. Both Murakami and Miyazaki debuted in 1979 and their work has very much defined Japan’s cultural experience from the tail end of the Era of High Growth Economics through the Bubble Era, the Lost Decade, and into the twenty-first century. Students will explore the works of these two figures in the context of the history of Japanese literature and film and its relation to larger political, social, and cultural trends of Japan from the 1980s to the present.
Murakami Haruki and Miyazaki Hayao: the Politics of Japanese Culture from the Bubble to the Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Fall 2008, Spring 2008
The course examines the complex meanings of the ghost in modern Japanese literature and culture. Tracing the representations of the supernatural in drama, fiction, ethnography, and the visual arts, we explore how ghosts provide the basis for remarkable flights of imaginative speculation and literary experimentation. Topics include: storytelling and the loss of cultural identity, horror and its conversion into aesthetic pleasure, fantasy, and the transformation of the commonplace. We will consider historical, visual, anthropological, and literary approaches to the supernatural and raise cultural and philosophical questions crucial to an understanding of the figure and its role in the greater transformation of modern Japan (18th century to the present).
Ghosts and the Modern Literary Imagination: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2018, Fall 2016
The course considers the different literary, social and ethical formations that arise or are destroyed in disaster. It explores how Japanese literature and media, before and after 3:11, attempt to translate the un-representable, and in so doing, to create a new type of literacy about 1) trauma and the temporality of disaster, 2) precarity, community and the public sphere and 3) sustainability and ecological scale. The course will pay particular attention to a range of works that explicitly or obliquely reframe iconic or popular representations of disasters in cinema, literature and other media, taking into account of the readiness with which certain cultural forms lend themselves to vistas of disaster.
Reframing Disasters: Fukushima, Before and After: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2015, Spring 2013
This course will offer a survey of Japanese cinema from its earliest days to contemporary anime (animated film). Providing the basic tools for analyzing film language, the course begins by analyzing the interactions between early Japanese film and early Hollywood. We then consider the development of Japanese film, discussing style and structures of connotation, figurative meaning and political critique, the uses of the historical past and ideology, and the roles of youth culture and views of the family. We consider the place of important individual directors. We also discuss current critical debates about broader trends in Japanese film and culture, as they illuminate the construction and ruptures in notions of Japanese identity.
Introduction to Japanese Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2019, Spring 2017
This course is an introduction to Japanese animation, or anime, from its earliest forms (in relationship to manga) to recent digital culture, art, and games. We will analyze and study mainly animated feature films and read the critical work they inspired. We will address such issues as cultural memory and apocalyptic imagination, robots and the post-human, cities, nature, and the transnational; gender, shojo, and the aesthetics of "cute," as well as consider specific issues in the theoretical understanding of anime within technology and media theory.
Japanese Visual Culture: Introduction to Anime: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Summer 2018 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2013
Selected topics in the study of Japanese film.
Topics in Japanese Film: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2015
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021
This seminar serves as an introduction to a broad range of Japanese Buddhist literature belonging to different historical periods and genres, including liturgical texts; monastic records, rules, and ritual manuals; doctrinal treatises; biographies of monks; and histories of Buddhism in Japan. Students are required to do all the readings in the original languages, which are classical Chinese (Kanbun) and classical Japanese. It will also serve as a tools and methods course, covering basic reference works and secondary scholarship in the field of Japanese Buddhism. The content of the course will be adjusted from semester to semester to accommodate the needs and interests of the students.
Readings in Japanese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Topics run from Japan's earliest extant poetic anthologies in Chinese (Kaifuso) or Japanese (Man'yoshu) to medieval linked verse (renga) and Edo haikai.
Seminar in Classical Japanese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2016
An introduction to research tools for Japanese studies. The course gives primary consideration to literary sources but also presents an overview of basic texts and web sites dealing with bibliographical citation, lexicography, history, religion, fine arts, geography, personal names, biographies, genealogies, and calendrical calculation. Internet access is required.
Japanese Bibliography: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2013, Fall 2004
Topics may include examples from the Noh, Kyogen, Joruri, or Kabuki theaters.
Seminar in Classical Japanese Drama: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
Topics may include works of Heian fiction such as The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) and memoirs such as The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi).
Seminar in Classical Japanese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2006, Fall 2001
Topics may include medieval war tales (gunki monogatari), essays (zuihitsu), and diaries in Japanese or Sino-Japanese (kanbun).
Seminar in Medieval Japanese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
Reading and critical evaluation of selected texts in prewar (roughly the 1860s though the 1940s) Japanese literature and literary and cultural criticism. Texts change with each offering of the course.
Seminar in Prewar Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2021
Reading and critical evaluation of selected texts in postwar (roughly the 1940s through the present) Japanese literature and literary and cultural criticism. Texts change with each offering of the course.
Seminar in Postwar Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015

Thesis Preparation and Related Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the graduate adviser. Units may not be used to meet either unit or residence requirements for a master's degree.
Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare for various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session
This course is designed for students who have little or no prior knowledge of the Korean language. Students will learn the Korean alphabet and basic grammar.
Elementary Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course is designed for students who already have elementary comprehension and speaking skills in Korean and have minimum exposure to reading and/or writing in Korean.
Elementary Korean for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session
With an emphasis on speaking, listening, reading and writing, students will learn daily life expressions, common colloquialisms, and speech acts. The course is also intended to introduce certain cultural aspects through media sources and various activities.
Elementary Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is specially designed for heritage students who have completed K1AX or those whose proficiency level meets the requirements. Through class presentations and projects with individual attention, students will be able to learn their heritage language more efficiently and will be able to communicate in Korean with confidence. Considering the fact that students are heritage learners, this course aims to teach the students to become lifelong learners of their mother tongue beyond the classroom through practices of active learning. In addition, this course will adopt an inquiry-based learning model and a Flipped learning model to provide an intriguing learning opportunity.
Elementary Korean for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
A survey of pre-modern Korean literature and culture from the seventh century to the 19th century, focusing on the relation between literary texts and various aspects of performance tradition. Topics include literati culture, gender relations, humor, and material culture. Texts to be examined include ritual songs, sijo, kasa, p'ansori, prose narratives, art, and contemporary media representation of performance traditions. All readings are in English.
Introduction to Premodern Korean Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
A survey of modern Korean literature and culture in the 20th century, focusing on the development of nationalist aesthetics in both North and South Korea. Topics include "new woman" narratives, urban culture, colonial modernity, war and trauma, and diaspora. Texts to be examined include works of fiction, poetry, art, and film. All readings are in English.
Introduction to Modern Korean Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
With equal attention given to speaking, listening, reading, writing, and cultural aspects of the language, students will further develop their language skills for handling various everyday situations.
Intermediate Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This is an intermediate course for students whose Korean proficiency level is higher in speaking than in reading or writing due to Korean-heritage background. Students will elaborate their language skills for handling various everyday situations.
Intermediate Korean for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Korean 10B is an intermediate Korean course for non-heritage students who have an equivalent level of Korean who took one semester of intermediate Korean course. Equal attention will be given to all four areas of language skills - speaking, listening, reading and writing – with diverse and authentic media materials to further their knowledge on Korean culture and society. This course will consist of three in-class lectures/discussions per week and two asynchronous lab days per week with diverse online activities and assignments that will foster students’ autonomous learning, build a sense of community within the class, and raise their awareness of multimodal digital literacy.
Intermediate Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This is an intermediate course for heritage speakers who have completed K10AX or demonstrated an equivalent proficiency level. While reinforcing the knowledge students have acquired thus far, this course will meet the linguistic needs of heritage language students to increase accuracy in grammar and develop reading and writing skills.
Intermediate Korean for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This is a third-year course in modern Korean with emphasis on acquisition of advanced vocabulary and grammatical structure. Equal attention will be given to all four language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
Advanced Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This is a third-year course in modern Korean with emphasis on acquisition of advanced vocabulary and grammatical structure.
Advanced Korean for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
As the second semester course of advanced-level Korean for non-heritage learners, this course aims to solidify students’ knowledge from the previous course, K100A, and help further acquire advanced-level language proficiency in spoken and written Korean through various assignments.
Advanced Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Students will be introduced to advanced-level Korean by reading authentic texts and writing short compositions, summaries, essays, and critical reviews. Students will be encouraged to speak using advanced vocabulary and expressions.
Advanced Korean for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This is an advanced course of reading and textual literary analysis in Korean. Advanced reading and writing skills and practice in the use of standard reference tools will also be introduced.
Fourth-Year Readings: Korean Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course aims to help students achieve a high-advanced level of proficiency in all aspects of Korean by deepening their knowledge of fast-changing modern Korean society through the lens of current issues. It covers various authentic media materials to facilitate class discussions and promote critical thinking skills. Special attention will be paid to the formal use of the Korean language through practices on advanced expressions and grammar.
Prerequisites: Korean 100B/BX; or consent of instructor.

Fourth-Year Korean: Korean Society through current issues: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course is for students wanting to acquire high-advanced and superior level Korean proficiency in Korean business settings through the nuances of job-related communication and cultural expectations. Students master appropriate workplace terminology, expressions, and professional style spoken and written form. They complete job a search, plan a new product, present and negotiate the product status, and finally present the product externally. In addition, this course will cover Korean job culture topics such as work ethics and relationships. Upon completion, students can expect to be able to more confidently navigate a job search, application process, interview, job acceptance, and common situations in a professional Korean setting.
Business Korean: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is uniquely designed for students who are interested in enhancing their proficiency level up to high-advanced or superior level through the lens of Korean popular media. By analyzing various media such as movies, documentary, TV shows, K-Pop songs, and news articles, students will broaden their knowledge and understanding about Korean society and culture in a deeper level, which is vital in advancing proficiency. Class discussions, presentations, article readings, and essay writings will help students learn and practice how to express their own opinion on various topics from aspects of Korean history to current social issues. Additionally, four-letter idioms, advanced grammars, and vocabularies will be introduced.
Korean Language in Popular Media: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course is designed to help advanced Korean students understand the influence of history and politics on contemporary Korean culture. Students will analyze contrastive views on historical events reflected in writings and media. Structured as a seminar format, students will take active roles in a class by sharing their inquiries and findings on course materials. A superior level of speaking and writing competence will be promoted based on advanced reading and listening competence. Prerequisites: Korean 101 or Korean 102; or consent of instructor.
Fifth-Year Korean: Korean Culture and History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course aims to prepare students for research or employment in a Korea-related field. Authentic materials will be used to discuss various issues in Korea and some may be selected by students to explore their specific interests/needs. Students will conduct research projects in their own fields of study.
Fifth-Year Readings: Korean for Research and Professional Use: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2006
This course will examine traditional and poetry, and consider the performative and cultural contexts of compositional practice before the 20th century. The course is intended to introduce key verse forms as well as basic reading knowledge of premodern Korean texts. Topics will vary.
Genre and Occasion in Traditional Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Fall 2011, Fall 2010
This course is a critical exploration of the broad range of prose literature before the 20th century, including vernacular fiction, memoirs, travel accounts, and essays. Particular attention will be given to narrative styles, issues of personal identity, and a link between literary text and material culture in the development of prose literature before the 20th century. The course is intended as a close reading of key prose narrative works, while functioning simultaneously as an introduction to basic reading knowledge of premodern Korean texts. Topics will vary.
Narrating Persons and Objects in Traditional Korean Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
This course will examine the works of major poets in the first half of the 20th century and will consider the formation of modern Korean poetry. Particular attention will be given to the ideas of lyricism, modernism, and the identity of a poet in the context of the colonial occupation of Korea.
Modern Korean Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
This course aims to facilitate critical understanding of persistent themes and diverse styles of modern Korean literature through close readings of canonical works from the colonial period (1910-1945). It encourages students to develop broad comprehension of “post-colonial” characteristics of Korean literature. Concurrently, it explores how Korean literature aspired to the expression of the universal aesthetic values and judgment against the particularistic historical condition of colonialism.
Readings in Modern Korean Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2017
This course surveys modern Korean fiction in the first half of the 20th century. Readings include major works of the novel, short fiction, and literary criticism. The course examines the development of modern fiction in the context of nationalist movements, colonialism, and the Korean War.
Modern Korean Fiction: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2017
This course surveys contemporary Korean literature, focusing on the separate development of language, literary aesthetics, and nationalism in North and South Korea from the end of the Korean War to the present. The course examines an assortment of works of fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and visual media. Emphasis is on close readings of the texts, while considering various issues involving post colonial cultural production: war and trauma, gender and labor, political violence, modernization and dislocation, and diaspora. Topics will vary.
Contemporary Korean Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2000, Spring 1996
This is a basic introductory course in Korean linguistics. The course will explore the Korean language from several perspectives: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, orthography, and the history of the Korean language.
Korean Linguistics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course aims to provide a high-fidelity musical history of Korea’s long 20th century. Starting at the tail end of the Chosŏn Dynasty in the late 19th century with Korean folksongs, we will proceed to catalogue the changing dynamics of Korean popular music as it encountered and remixed Western forms, and examine these different musical genres in their socio-historical context. No musical background or Korean language proficiency is required. All readings will be in English, although students will acquire some familiarity with Korean language through abundant listening selections and lyric analysis.
K-POP: A History of Korean Popular Music: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2008, Fall 2007
This course will provide an overview of the considerations that a translator must take into account when approaching a Korean text. Special attention will be paid to the structural and linguistic differences between Korean and English as well as cross-cultural differences in stylistics. Texts to be considered are drawn from both expository and literary writings in Korean. By means of translating selected texts in English, students will acquire abilities to recognize common translating problems, explore methods for finding solutions, and evaluate accuracy and communicative effectiveness of translation.
Translation: Theory and Practice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2015
This course will explore the moments of intercultural encounters captured in Korean literature. Encounters with foreign cultures and literary reflections on them have emerged as prominent at critical moments of Korean history, such as periods of great social transition or international conflict. In this course, we will be addressing questions concerning how experiences of the encounters of foreign cultures have been represented in Korean literature from the sixteenth through the twentieth century; what their domestic ramifications were, especially in terms of literary genres; and how the transformation of Korean national identity have been imagined and articulated in literary works.
Intercultural Encounters in Korean Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2015
This course examines Korean literature from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries through the perspectives of gender. Although the modern discourse of enlightenment in Korea, beginning in the early twentieth century, has been sharply critical of gender inequality in premodern Korea, the gender relations represented in premodern Korean literature are much more complex and dynamic than we might expect. To revise our understanding of gender in premodern Korea, this course seeks to examine how gender is imagined particularly in terms of the body, bodily practice, and theatrical performance.
Gender and Korean Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course surveys modern Korean fiction of the 20th century in literary and visual media. Topics will vary.
Modern Korean Fiction in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Fall 2013
This course introduces various critical approaches to modern Korean literature through a set of texts in English translation. Readings will include an assortment of works of fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and visual media. Emphasis is on close reading of texts and literary approaches to them.
Critical Approaches to Modern Korean Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024
This undergraduate course offers a broad understanding of the non-mainstream independent cinema of South Korea, from its early formative years in the 1980s under the authoritarian regime through to the present renaissance. It traces the indie cinema’s historical origins and transformation, socio-political context and institutional practices, and modes of production, distribution, and exhibition. The course also stresses exploring the changing subject matters, aesthetics, and sensibilities. The questions of identities and affiliations (class, gender, sexuality, national division), affect and ethics, style, genre, and taste form the thematic pillars of the course.
Korean Independent Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Fall 2012, Spring 2008
This course explores the role of modern visual media in shaping geopolitical, cultural, and historical imaginations of Korea during the last hundred years. Drawing examples from photographs, films, and literature, produced in and outside Korea, the course aims to consider the idea of "Korea" primarily via images constructed through transnational cultural networks. Consideration will be given to the relationship between visual media and cultural memory. We will think in particular about the ways in which globally accessible visual media such as photography and film narrate the key local sites of contested memories of colonization, war, and political violence.
Picturing Korea: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
This course offers a historical overview of Korean cinema from its colonial development to its present renaissance. It covers Korean film aesthetics, major directors, film movements, genre, censorship issues, and industrial transformation as well as global circulation and transnational reception. In an effort to read film as sociocultural texts, various topics will be discussed. All readings are in English.
Introduction to Korean Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2018, Spring 2017
This course examines representations of history and memory in contemporary Korean cinema. Korean films have displayed a thematic preoccupation with the nation's tumultuous past by presenting diverse stories of past events and experiences. The course pays close attention to the ways in which popular narrative films render history and memory meaningful and pertinent to contemporary film viewers. All readings are in English.
History and Memory in Korean Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
This course examines the formation and transformation of global Cold War culture in South Korean literature and film of the 20th century. It pays close attention to representations of the Korean War and its aftermath in literature and cinema, but opens up the field of inquiry to encompass larger sociocultural issues related to the Cold War system manifest in literature and cinema. All readings are in English.
Cold War Culture in Korea: Literature and Film: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2016
This undergraduate course examines aesthetic features and thematic preoccupation of major Korean film authors. It begins with the brief survey of historical development and theoretical underpinnings of the concept of “auteur” and advances an inquiry into the application of such theoretical tool in the area of film criticism and culture in Korea. In addition to analyzing signature style, generic orientation, and thematic consistency, the course also situates and explores the unique film authorship in relation to larger contexts that constitute the dynamics of Korean cinema: industrial structure, government censorship, social changes and cultural phenomena, intellectual development, technological shifts and discourse of national cinema.
Korean Film Authors: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2011, Spring 2007, Fall 2004
This seminar provides in-depth discussions on a topic germane to Korean and other East Asian literary and cultural studies. Students in the Group in Asian Studies with research interests in Korean literature, intellectual history, and popular culture are particularly recommended to take this course. Students in Chinese and Japanese may take this course for the purpose of comparative examination with the student's main area of research. The course is open to graduate students in all fields, but students should consult with the instructor to determine the viability of this course for the student's overall program of studies. Topics will vary.
Special Topics in Korean Literature for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015

Thesis Preparation and Related Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the graduate adviser. Units may not be used to meet either unit or residence requirements for a master's degree.
Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare for various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
A beginning Mongolian course dedicated to developing basics in listening, speaking, and reading Standard Khalkha Mongolian, writing in Cyrillic script, but with exposure to traditional script.
Elementary Mongolian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016
A continuation of Mongolian 1A, this course continues training students in basic listening, speaking, and reading Standard Khalkha Mongolian, using Cyrillic script and introducing traditional script.

Elementary Mongolian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course studies literary Mongolian, literature written in traditional Mongolian vertical script.
It covers historical texts of the Mongol empire, Mongolian Buddhism, early twentieth century
Mongolian governments, and diverse Mongolian peoples. The fall semester offers a regular
introduction to the language. Students learn basic skills covering phonology, grammar, the vertical writing system, and its relationship to spoken language. Over the second half of the course, students immerse themselves reading texts. For spring, students continue reading texts ranging in difficulty from intermediate to advanced. This course is intended for students with facility in literary Mongolian. Prerequisite: introductory course or instructor permission.
Literary Mongolian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
This course examines the Mongol Empire founded by Chinggis Khan. We will study the empire from the time its founding in 1206 until its decline in the mid-14th century. The greater extent of the course covers the matter of the Mongol conquest: military technologies, methods and strategies, logistics, and the events of specific battles and actions. These events are framed in the context of the Mongolian culture: its scientific, political, and economic systems and over-arching worldview. The course also covers what comes from the conquest in terms not only of destruction but what the Mongols make of the world they've won. Readings for the course are of primary sources in translation.
The Mongol Empire: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course covers the history of Mongolian Buddhism from its inception in the Yuan dynasty to the present. The importance of Mongolian Buddhism to the greater dharma lies not only with the ways of its priests but also with the means of its patrons, the Mongol aristocracy, in forging a distinctive tradition in Inner Asia and disseminating it throughout the world. While maintaining a historical thread throughout, this course will examine in detail some of the tradition’s many facets, including Mongolian-Buddhist politics, the politics of incarnation, the establishment of monasteries, economics, work in the sciences, astral science and medicine, ritual practice, literature, sculpture and painting, music and dance, and more.
Mongolian Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2018
This course examines the modern history of Mongolia. Beginning from the Mongols' heritage as imperial nomads who uphold a dual custom, the Buddhist religion and the Manchu Qing dynastic state, it discusses how this order came to be threatened by, and ultimately dissolve under, the political pressures imposed by modern thought and the certain governments that espoused it. With this, it focuses on how, navigating through the chaos that ensued with the falls of the Russian Empire and Qing Dynasty, the Mongols were able to come to found a sovereign government of their own. Readings for the course are of primary sources in translation.
Modern Mongolia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
Supervised individual study and research.
Thesis Preparation and Related Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the graduate adviser. Units may not be used to meet either unit or residence requirements for a master's degree.
Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare for various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
A beginning Tibetan class developing basic listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in modern Tibetan (Lhasa dialect). The course also helps students begin to acquire competence in relevant Tibetan cultural issues.
Elementary Tibetan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
A continuation of Tibetan 1A, Tibetan 1B develops further listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in modern Tibetan (Lhasa dialect), with a gradually increasing emphasis on basic cultural readings and developing intercultural competence.
Elementary Tibetan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2020
This course is a broad introduction to the history, doctrine, and culture of the Buddhism of Tibet. We will begin with the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century and move on to the evolution of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist literature, ritual and monastic practice, the place of Buddhism in Tibetan political history, and the contemporary situation of Tibetan Buddhism both inside and outside of Tibet.
Tibetan Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2014
Tibetan Buddhists view the moment of death as a rare opportunity for transformation. This course examines how Tibetans have used death and dying in the path to enlightenment. Readings will address how Tibetan funerary rituals work to assist the dying toward this end, and how Buddhist practitioners prepare for this crucial moment through tantric meditation, imaginative rehearsals, and explorations of the dream state.
Death, Dreams, and Visions in Tibetan Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2012
This course provides a place for graduate-level seminars in Tibetan Buddhism that rely primarily on secondary sources and Tibetan texts in translation. Content will vary between semesters but will typically focus on a particular theme. Themes will be chosen according to student interests, with an eye toward introducing students to the breadth of available western scholarship on Tibet, from classics in the field to the latest publications.
Seminar in Tibetan Buddhism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
This seminar provides an introduction to a broad range of Tibetan Buddhist texts, including chronicles and histories, biographical literature, doctrinal treatises, canonical texts, ritual manuals, pilgrimage guides, and liturgical texts. It is intended for graduate students interested in premodern Tibet from any perspective. Students are required to do all of the readings in the original classical Tibetan. It will also serve as a tools and methods for the study of Tibetan Buddhist literature, including standard lexical and bibliographic references, digital resources, and secondary literature in modern languages. The content of the course will vary from semester to semester to account for the needs and interests of particular students.
Readings in Tibetan Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]