Asian Studies

Open, Seminar—Fall

From its beginnings as a loose-knit group of wandering ascetics in ancient India, Buddhism developed into a monastic religion that diversified and spread across Asia, producing great buildings and monuments of wood and stone and furnishing them with a rich array of paintings and sculptures. This course will focus on the Buddhist art and architecture of South, Central, and East Asia, seeking to understand and interpret it within the specific social, institutional, mythical, and ritual contexts in which it was produced and used. Thus, for example, when examining the ground plans and architectural features of Buddhist monasteries in different parts of Asia, we will also study the internal organization and operation of those institutions, reading the rules of individual and group discipline that regulated them and learning about the various religious practices and ceremonial observances that took place in them. The aim is to explore the complex connections that exist between architectural forms and social and religious functions and meanings. By the same token, when looking at works of Buddhist art, we will not only concern ourselves with matters of iconography, style, provenance, and dating. We will also learn about the various iconic and non–iconic functions that Buddhist art has had in a wide range of cultic and social settings, and will study the religious doctrines, ideology, mythology, and folklore that has informed its production and use at different times and places.

Faculty

• Griffith Foulk

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Taking a global approach, this course will look at how artists redefined the mediums, materials, and hierarchies of modernism in the postwar period. We will look closely at how artists embraced radicality, by protesting for civil rights, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and claiming an antiwar politics in the 1960s and 1970s. This radicality shifted in the 1990s with the rise of neoliberalism and the global art market, and we will investigate changes in contemporary art and its display after 1990. Movements this course will explore include: Gutai, Neoconcretism, Happenings, Pop Art, Fluxus, minimalism, global conceptualism, site-specificity, Earthworks, the Chicano Arts Movement, the Black Arts Movement, feminism, video art, institutional critique, installation, activist art, participatory art, Relational Aesthetics, Craft, new media, biennials, and the global art museum. Throughout, we will focus on specific artworks and gain a vocabulary for close looking, while also attending to primary sources (manifestos, letters, statements, poems) and secondary, art historical, and theoretical accounts. Assignments will include papers (based on works in New York City museums and galleries), peer reviews, presentations, reading responses, a contextual research essay, and a group curatorial assignment. This course will be taught in a lecture-seminar hybrid style. One lecture a week will be presented to introduce students to the broader movements. Weekly group conferences will look at case studies of artists and representational issues.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

First-Year Studies—Year

The 2024 Presidential Election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and social wellbeing. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from difference schools of thought in economics as well as other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges we face, such as new gilded age style wealth concentration and power, economic insecurity, and the climate crisis? Why is the study of history a central methodological priority for many economists and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the relationship between political and corporate power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? What is Project 2025 and how can we understand its theoretical basis and implications? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation to the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This course on business history will situate business in its social and political contexts. At the core of the course is the argument that the economy is embedded in the political society and is thus subject to historical change. The study of business cannot be separated from politics and political struggle, which determine how society is legally constructed in any given moment in history. Thus, what is of often called “private enterprise” sits on a contextually determined set of power relations which shape and are in turn shaped by current legal institutions. Challenging the idea, common to conventional discourse, that economies can be more or less regulated, this course will focus on the politics of business regulation, which in some contexts has produced socially progressive outcomes and in others regressive ones. Regulation is ubiquitous and subject to variation given changed circumstances due say to an economic crisis, new technologies, global competition, socio-political pressures etc. In this course, the nature and politics of business regulation will be studied in different national and historical contexts, involving countries in the Global South (e.g. Mauritius, Chile, Brazil, the Indian state of Kerala, South Africa etc.) and the Global North (e.g. United States, Sweden, Germany, etc.). It will address a wide range of topics that include: (a) slavery, cotton, banking, and property rights in early American industrialization; (b) legal struggles between corporations and society over constitutional rights (e.g. what brought about the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC (2010)?); (c) corporations and colonialism (e.g. the British East India Company, the Virginia Company, etc.); (d) business regulation during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period; (e) late industrialization and social well being; (f) using the United States and Sweden as case studies, the construction of welfare states and workers’ attempts to secure social and economic rights; and (g) the history of the relationship between business associations and anti-democratic politics, including the links between Silicon Valley technolibertarians and digital capitalism (i.e. artificial intelligence and crypto currencies). At a theoretical level, the study of business history will be grounded in debates in microeconomics, theories of business investment and pricing, and the relationship between law, politics, history, and economics. This course will be of interest to students who wish to understand contemporary social and political challenges in a theoretically and historically informed way.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Seminar—Fall

This seminar will look to mainland and Taiwanese fiction as a window on recent Chinese history. In the 1980s, China emerged from the paroxysms of the Maoist period (1949-76) and began its transition toward a market-based economy. Accompanying this economic liberalization, many of the tight political controls on writers were loosened. All types of literature, but particularly fiction, boomed. China returned to its rich heritage of a book culture, with a mass book market sustained by avid consumers. And Chinese fiction has won an international audience and acclaim, culminating in 2011 with MO Yan’s Nobel Prize in literature. Literature, thus, stands at the heart of China’s postrevolutionary history. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand a rapidly changing society and economy. What are the legacies of decades of revolution for Chinese literature? By examining narratives that deal with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), we will look at how writers have assessed and appropriated the Maoist period, especially the experience of intellectuals  “sent down” to the countryside. How did the “nativist” fiction of the 1980s and 1990s reevaluate Chinese tradition and traditional society? Urban fiction, often decadent and gritty, will raise issues of how authors and narratives portray China’s breakneck economic development? What is the relationship between art and politics in these works? Do they tacitly support or subtly resist political authoritarianism? We will also look at Taiwanese literature, from the 1960s through the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Along the way, we will encounter MO Yan’s blood-drenched bandit heroes; YU Hua’s long-suffering peasant; SU Tong’s vicious sadists; disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; HAN Shaogong’s novel written in the form of a dictionary; and BAI Xianyong’s homosexual young men searching for love. The majority of the course will consist of fiction from mainland China and Taiwan, but we will also read some short memoir pieces by novelists and the debates in Western media about MO Yan’s 2011 Nobel prize. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Year

This seminar is a sustained look at the recent history of China and Japan, the major countries within East Asia. Placed alongside each other, the often wrenching history of Japan and China over the past three centuries raises important historical themes of Asian modernity—questioning both its sources and how we define it. Often portrayed as a direct import from the West in the 19th-century, we will ask whether modernity might instead be traced to legacies of Japan’s isolationist feudalism under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) and China’s multiethnic Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) even as we acknowledge the far-reaching impact of Euro-American imperialism. For example, did the evolving samurai culture of the Tokugawa era lay socio-economic foundation for Japan’s political and economic modernity in the late 19th century? And did deep changes in Qing China society destabilize the dynastic balance of power as early as the 18th century? Both China and Japan have entrenched master narratives that portray themselves as victims of the West, but we will also investigate the contours of Asian imperialism. How and why were their empires built, and how did they end? How were the nation-states we now call China and Japan formed, and how was nationalism constructed (and re-constructed) in them? What role did socio-economic, cultural, and international crises play in fueling nationalist sentiments? How and where was radicalism (of various forms, including Maoism) incubated? The impact of war, preparing for it, waging it, and rebuilding in its wake will be a repeated theme, too. And finally, we will look at Asia’s economic dynamism, covering both Japan’s post-World War II capitalism (and its roots in the wartime imperialist project) and China’s transition to a market economy. Course readings will consist of historical scholarship regularly punctuated by primary sources, documents, fiction, and some film.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Spring

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched what could well be the most radical, most adventurous mass political campaign in world history, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), which set out to attack the very communist Party-State that Mao himself had established. Going through several phases, this utopian experiment lasted for a decade (1966-1976). Students in urban universities and middle schools were the first to respond to Mao's call—and in spectacular fashion: with attacks on authorities of all kinds, rallies of millions of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, and vast numbers of young people making treks across the country. In Shanghai, radical workers took over the city from the government, establishing the (short-lived) Shanghai Commune. The Party-State fought back, however, and in many parts of the country, cycles of violence and revenge exploded. With the military brought in to restore order, the Cultural Revolution slowly slid into more managed forms of mass mobilization: tens of millions of urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside to learn from the peasants. The experiment ended only with Mao's death in 1976. This course will examine MAO's reasons for launching the GPCR, the famous Red Guards, the Shanghai Commune (its rise and demise), the causes behind the paroxysms of mass violence, the reassertion of control that began after 1969, the nature of the GPCR in rural areas, the Sent-Down Youth experience, the legacies of the GPCR for China, and its influence abroad (particularly among leftist intellectuals in Europe and the United States). Our sources will include a rich mixture of scholarship on mainland China's politics (both before and during the Cultural Revolution); contemporary primary sources (e.g., party documents, propaganda materials, a Model Opera, one of the few films made during these years); memoirs of Red Guards and intellectuals; and later art and literature written assessing the period and its legacies for China. In many ways, today's China is not understandable without an appreciation of this decade-long radical experiment, as the Party-State (still the dominant force in China) continues to bear scars of the Cultural Revolution, despite its attempt to enforce a peculiar form of amnesia on the whole country. No prior knowledge of China is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Fall

What is “the long postwar”? For decades, Japanese intellectuals and cultural historians have been engaged in debate over when (or whether) the “postwar period” will ever really be over, and how to understand Japan’s current national, geopolitical, and culture identity in relation to the empire that came before. This discourse has been reignited with the political rise of Takaichi Sanae, elected Japan’s first female prime minister in 2025, who seems intent on radically revising Japan’s postwar constitution. This course will examine Japanese culture since 1945 through key works of fiction and film, tracing the arc from the devastation of war and the United States Occupation, through the reconstruction of social order and national community, to the development of a hyper-modern consumer culture. Some of the issues we will explore include the depiction of the war and its aftermath, the influence of the United States Occupation, the disintegration of the family system, questions of cultural and personal memory, historical revisionism and ideas about the remilitarization of Japan, radical New Left movements in the 1960s, the representation of marginalized groups in postwar society, and the culture of postmodernism. Students will connect the historically informed close reading skills we develop in the course with individual conference work on a topic related to media from postwar and/or contemporary Japan or East Asia.

Faculty

• Julia Clark

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will explore how conceptions of Japan as a modern nation state have always been entangled with ideas about sex, gender, and reproductive bodies, from the eugenicist policies of reproductive control that were foundational to the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), to the current Japanese government’s attempts to combat the depopulation crisis. In many cases, such as the “fertile womb battalions” (kodakara butai), which commended and rewarded women who gave birth to multiple children during the empire’s mobilization for total war (1937-1945), there is also an eerie resemblance to the recent surge in pronatalist sentiments within the United States government. Together, we will learn about how eugenics and reproductive rights were intertwined in early Meiji-era debates on womanhood and motherhood, reading key early feminist texts from Hiratsuka Raichō and the Japanese Bluestockings, and then trace how those ideas echo and transform through the radical uman ribu (women’s liberation) movement in the 1970s through to the present day. Other topics covered will include resistance and collaboration with the Empire among female proletarian writers in Japan and colonial Korea; Hayashi Fumiko's literary representation of licensed prostitution under the United States Occupation; postwar depictions of the discriminatory fixation on the reproductive lives of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Pan-Asian feminism and the “comfort women” redress movements in the 1990s; and the contemporary rise of a new generation of popular writers in Japan (and East Asia more broadly) who seek to complicate prior understandings of gender, parenthood, and the human body. We will end the term by looking at techno-natalist dystopias (or utopias?) in recent Japanese science fiction. Students will complete an individual conference project related to modern Japanese media and/or the themes of the course.

Faculty

• Julia Clark

Open, Lecture—Fall

How do we listen to unfamiliar music? What ideas, principles, and ideologies influence how we hear? What do the sounds of music tell us about society? This course will explore the practice of music theory and the search for musical meaning, with examples from around the world. We will describe unfamiliar music and then understand it using various approaches to translate its meaning. Course themes will include musical and cultural differences, the relativism of musical perception, structuralist approaches to music theory, the politics of representation, decolonizing music history, and others. Course units will draw from varied ethnographic case studies from ethnomusicology and anthropology and may include examples from India, Indonesia, China, East Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Participation in the Balinese Gamelan Angklung Chandra Buana, an Indonesian tonal percussion ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course will study David Bowie’s music styles and cultural influences over a career that spanned almost fifty years. The focus will be on how he conveyed through music and lyrics ideas about alienation, isolation, madness, dystopia, gender ambiguity and identity, glamour, role-playing and self-realization, among other things. We will trace how he conveyed those ideas by using elements of German Expressionism, Weimar cabaret, Asian culture, dadaism, surrealism, European art films (by Buñuel, Dalí, Fellini, Dreyer, Bergman, and others), the cut-up technique made popular by William S. Burroughs, commedia dell'arte, English music hall, the Broadway musical, mime, French chanson, blues, soul, Krautrock, minimalism, science fiction, and other things. We will attempt to understand what was more interesting to him than conventional pop stardom, and why he sought an exit from that whenever he achieved it. Singer and songwriter Siouxsie Sioux said that Bowie was an unusual pop star in that he comes with a reading list; we will try to find out what might be on that list and how it might illuminate his career.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

First-Year Studies—Year

The concept of a “thing”—an entity that exists in and of itself, separate from all other things—is nothing but a useful fiction; in the real world, there actually are no “things” that meet that description. This, in a nutshell, is the startling proposition advanced by the Buddhist doctrine of śunyatā—or “emptiness,” as the Sanskrit term is usually translated. Often misconstrued by critics as a form of nihilism (“nothing exists”), idealism (“all that exists are mental phenomena”), or skepticism (“we can never know what really exists”), the emptiness doctrine is better interpreted as a radical critique of the fundamental conceptual categories that we habitually use to talk about and make sense of the world. This course will have several aims. In general, it is designed to help students develop the kind of research, writing, and critical thinking skills that are needed for academic success in college and in whatever career paths they may pursue thereafter. More specifically, the course will aim to impart a clear, accurate understanding of the “emptiness” doctrine as it developed in the context of Buddhist intellectual history and found expression in various genres of classical Buddhist literature. Another aim of the course will be to explore ways in which the emptiness doctrine, if taken seriously as a critique of the mechanisms and inherent limitations of human knowledge, may be fruitfully brought to bear in a number of different disciplines—academic and otherwise. In the fall semester, the class will read and discuss a number of Buddhist texts—primary sources in English translation from the original Sanskrit or Chinese—that advocate the philosophy of emptiness, as well as some secondary scholarship on the subject. Students will also be given a series of homework assignments that target basic academic skills in the humanities and social sciences (e.g., how to do bibliographic research and evaluate the reliability of sources; how to annotate scholarly writing). Individual conference meetings with the instructor in the fall will be devoted to learning and improving those skills. In the spring semester, the class will read and discuss a number of scholarly works written in English that deal with Western (non-Buddhist) traditions of historiography, literary theory, and scientific inquiry. The readings are designed to introduce students to some of the main intellectual trends in the humanities, social sciences, and “hard” sciences that they are likely to encounter in other college courses. At the same time, the class will learn how to use the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness as an analytical tool to critique the conceptual models employed in the various academic disciplines treated in the readings. For individual conference work in the spring, each student will be required to use that tool to analyze the fundamental nomenclature—the way of dividing up the world into “things”—employed by some particular field of human endeavor, which may be an academic, artistic, or athletic discipline or any other endeavor (e.g., political or economic) in which they are especially interested. At the end of the semester, each student will have half of a class meeting to introduce their particular field of inquiry to everyone else. They will select some representative readings that the class will do in advance, lead a discussion of those readings, and present their own critical analysis of the nomenclature used in the field in question. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• Griffith Foulk

Open, Seminar—Fall

From its beginnings as a loose-knit group of wandering ascetics in ancient India, Buddhism developed into a monastic religion that diversified and spread across Asia, producing great buildings and monuments of wood and stone and furnishing them with a rich array of paintings and sculptures. This course will focus on the Buddhist art and architecture of South, Central, and East Asia, seeking to understand and interpret it within the specific social, institutional, mythical, and ritual contexts in which it was produced and used. Thus, for example, when examining the ground plans and architectural features of Buddhist monasteries in different parts of Asia, we will also study the internal organization and operation of those institutions, reading the rules of individual and group discipline that regulated them and learning about the various religious practices and ceremonial observances that took place in them. The aim is to explore the complex connections that exist between architectural forms and social and religious functions and meanings. By the same token, when looking at works of Buddhist art, we will not only concern ourselves with matters of iconography, style, provenance, and dating. We will also learn about the various iconic and non–iconic functions that Buddhist art has had in a wide range of cultic and social settings, and will study the religious doctrines, ideology, mythology, and folklore that has informed its production and use at different times and places.

Faculty

• Griffith Foulk

Advanced, Seminar—Year

In recent years, gender and nationalism have been at the center of local, national, and global politics and concerns in the United States, but also globally. Starting with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, attempts to overturn availability of contraception in numerous states in the United States, as well as at the national level, struggles over gender and/or heteronormativity continue to be ongoing. Overall, nationalism can be understood as a project simultaneously involving construction(s) of bodies, memory, history, and identity. In this seminar, we will identify the multiple and shifting dimensions of nationalism as a world historical phenomenon. Central to our focus will be the centrality and particular constructions of gender in different national projects. Attention will be paid to nationalism in its colonial and contemporary trajectories. Questions to be addressed will include the following: What is the relationship between nationalism and identity? Which symbols/languages are called upon to produce/evoke collective identity? What are the various inclusions, exclusions, and silences that particular historically-constituted nationalisms involve? Is nationalism necessarily a positive force? If not, under what circumstances, in what ways, and for whom does it pose problems? What is the relationship of nationalism(s) to socially and politically marginalized groups? How is pluralism and difference constructed and treated? How do the same issues, such as those regarding cultural authenticity and identity, take on a different meaning at diverse historical moments? How is the insider/outsider relationship conceptualized, and what shifts occur in different periods? Women have been interpellated and have participated within nationalist movements in a variety of ways. The dynamics and contradictions of such involvement will be analyzed closely. We will strive to explore the implications of these processes for women's and non-binary individuals' sense of self, citizenship, and belonging at specific periods and over time. In the spring semester, we will turn our attention more specifically to performances of nationalism through institutional and popular cultural arrangements. Under the former category, we will look at issues of migration, immigration, and exile; public policy and international relations; war and conflict. In the arena of popular culture, we will examine the production of nationalism(s) through the mass media, sports, film, museums and exhibitions, and tourism. Conference work can include an examination of a specific nationalist movement, theoretical issues pertaining to nationalism(s), memory, identity, performances of nationalism(s) in popular culture and the mass media, and the interplay between institutional and everyday constructions of nationalism in specific settings.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Seminar—Fall

This fiction workshop seeks to draw inspiration in both our reading and writing from the work of Asian American writers. In addition to coming together to support one another in a writing workshop environment—discussing matters of “craft,” “technique,” and the like—we will also spend our time discussing questions about race, immigration, nationality, and storytelling (in addition to any other questions) as they arise through the fiction of Asian American writers. We will begin with Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) and work our way “forward” to a reading list that may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Amy Tan, Don Lee, Anthony Veasna So, Ocean Vuong, Julie Otsuka, David Wong Louie, K-Ming Chang, Nam Le, Chang-Rae Lee, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Akhil Sharma, Paul Yoon, Jenny Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Ayad Akhtar, among others. To be clear, this is a writing course and not a critical survey of Asian American literature and literary history—at least not in the manner that my colleagues in the literature program might be able to provide. Nevertheless, Asian American fiction will constitute the common source material from which, I hope, students might derive their pleasures (and lessons) as aspiring fiction writers regardless of their chosen subjects. In addition to actively participating in class discussions and providing their peers with constructive feedback for their work, students will be expected by the end of the semester to develop and produce—through the conference system—a portfolio of short fiction. 

Faculty

• Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

In addition to being the title of Michael Clune’s memoir or a theory in the hands of McKenzie Wark, video games have now invaded social space—and, therefore, our literary imaginations—in a way that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. And yet, how do we write about games? About the experience both of playing these aesthetic objects and living in an arguably gamified world with the same intensity, curiosity, and rigor that we might otherwise bring to any centuries-old ekphrastic attempt? In this course, we will query the limits, techniques, and new forms of nonfiction writing made possible through video games, taking the anthology Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games as a springboard for our own experiments through short exercises and workshop. We will focus on the interplay between social position and form where, rather than an escape, video games pose new questions of difficulty in prose and in life. No experience playing video games will be required, though this will certainly not hurt; smaller indie games may be used as examples. 

Faculty

• Joseph Earl Thomas

Open, Seminar—Spring

There is nothing like a zuihitsu, and its definition slips through our fingers. It is a classical Japanese genre that allows a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way. —Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Following Millennium

The name zuihitsu is derived from two Kanji: “at will” and “pen.” In this course, we will explore the poetic form of the zuihitsu: as readers, via three required texts—The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, and two versions of Narrow Road to the Interior, one by Bashō and one by Kimiko Hahn—and, as writers, using the materials of haiku, lists, interviews, dialogues, travelogues, monologues, letters, maps, orts, scraps, fragments, and poems of all varieties. Participants will be required to make a zuihitsu. The only expectations are a desire to be challenged, a thirst for reading that equals your thirst for writing, the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation, and a willingness to undertake whatever labors might be necessary to read and write better on our last day of class than on our first.

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier