Department website: http://krieger.jhu.edu/east-asian/
East Asian Studies Major and Minor
The East Asian Studies program is interdisciplinary and interdepartmental. It includes both a major and a minor. The primary purpose of the program is to introduce undergraduates to the knowledge, language skills, and research methods they will need to enter various academic and professional paths relating to China, Japan, and Korea. Majors in East Asian Studies engage in intensive Chinese, Japanese and/or Korean language study through the Center for Language Education and work with faculty on such topics as China in the global economy, nationalism in East Asia, Korean politics, modern Japanese history and politics, Chinese urban history, and women in modern China. Students are encouraged to pursue original research projects in East Asia with the support of intersession and summer travel grants, stipends for conference presentations, a senior thesis honors option, and seminars that bring together research scholars, faculty, graduate students and undergraduates in a manner that is distinctly Hopkins. Many students choose to combine the major in East Asian Studies with another major. Alumni of the program are making their mark around the world in business and finance, academia, law, international development, medicine and public health, engineering, media, public service, and the arts.
Direct Matriculation Program: Master’s in International Relations (MAIR) with the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
The Direct Matriculation Program: Master’s in International Relations (MAIR) with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., allows East Asian Studies majors to pursue an intensive program at the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus as well as at the SAIS campuses in Washington, DC. and Nanjing, China. The five-year program allows students to obtain both a bachelor’s degree from Hopkins and a master’s degree from SAIS. The program includes three years of study at the Homewood campus followed by one year at the SAIS campus in Nanjing and one year at the SAIS campus in Washington, DC, or two years at the Washington, DC campus. To study in Nanjing, students must be proficient in Mandarin.
Students must indicate that they are applying for the SAIS Direct Matriculation Program: Master’s in International Relations (MAIR) on their initial admissions application to the university. For more information go to the website.
Johns Hopkins in Tokyo
In fall 2012, the East Asian Studies Program inaugurated a full-year undergraduate exchange program with the University of Tokyo. This study abroad program was designed with JHU East Asian Studies majors and Japanese language students in mind. As with other departmental study abroad programs at JHU, students’ credits and grades will be transferred between the two universities.
This is a direct exchange program between the two universities, rather than a program run by JHU. For each JHU student who attends the University of Tokyo, one University of Tokyo student will attend JHU. Each JHU student has a Japanese student as their personal tutor. The tutors assist students in both academic matters and in daily life.
Limited to 1-3 students per year, admission to the University of Tokyo program is competitive. Students must have completed 4 semesters of college-level Japanese or the equivalent, have a term GPA of 3.0 or above, and submit two faculty references, one of which should be from a Japanese language instructor. For more information and application instructions, visit the website.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
This course offers a comprehensive overview of Korean history and culture from ancient times to the modern era. Through primary, secondary, and audio-visual sources, students will become familiar not only with the overall contours of the entirety of Korean history, but also with its cultural and religious legacy. The course combines lectures and class discussions.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course offers a comprehensive overview of Korean history, politics, and culture encompassing premodern, modern, and contemporary times. Through primary and secondary materials, students will learn about the formation of Korea as a complex interplay of dynastic changes, wars, colonialism, rapid modernization, migrations, and minority and diasporic politics. We will approach the study of Korea through a cultural studies perspective, paying close attention to systems of power, ideology, gender, race, and class.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This survey course introduces students to major events and themes addressed in Korean literature and film such as: Japanese colonialism, modernity, capitalism, the Korean War, rapid industrialization, postmodernity, immigration, transnational adoption, and more. Students will examine the role of literature and film in the development of the nation and the depiction of the Korean and Korean-diasporic subject as a complex set of intersecting social identities that contend with race, class, and gender.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This seminar introduces students to the phenomenon of migration in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from theoretical, empirical, and comparative perspectives. The objectives of the course are to understand the 1) historical context behind present-day migrations in East Asia; 2) different patterns of migration flows and their consequences on receiving countries; 3) various theoretical frameworks for migration. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, the course will examine theoretical approaches to migration, structured around the question of whether East Asia as a region represents a distinct model of migration. In the second, students will explore the empirical cases in greater detail by comparing and contrasting the different types of migrations. The third part addresses the responses to migration by host governments and societies and the implications of migration on citizenship and identity. Recommended Course Background: any class related to the history or politics of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and/or China.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course aims to inspire students to explore the impacts, meanings, and explanations of social transformation in contemporary China, via the lens of documentary photography. The photographic images of selective topics will include the products of photojournalism and documentary photography, and several documentary films, by both Chinese and non-Chinese photographers. While one picture is worth thousand words, one picture may also provoke countless interpretations. Students are strongly encouraged to read broadly about different aspects of social transformations in contemporary China, and to select and curate their own subjects of photo images. The spirit of comparative study of documentary photography of China and other parts of world will be strongly encouraged. Active class participation is imperative. A small exhibition on the campus will be organized by the Spring semester. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course is a broad survey of what leadership looks like in China. The main through-line of the course is the how China’s leaders navigate the often challenging terrain between constraints and incentives, on the one hand, and opportunities to apply their own individual agency. We will explore the state as the arena in which all this takes place over time (to explore continuity and change) and across space (to explore adaptation and innovation). The course does not presume prior knowledge of China or Chinese language, but students new to the study of China are encouraged to pay special attention to the cumulative nature of the course and invest in the readings, particularly in the first four weeks. Although some of the themes of this course may minimally overlap with/reinforce other Chinese politics courses offered at JHU, the approach to this class will be significantly different.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This seminar explores select human rights issues in China (e.g., human rights impacts of the management of COVID-19, the Hong Kong protests, mass detentions/forced labor in Xinjiang province) and the extraterritorial reach of China’s human rights challenges. As a practice and policy-oriented course, we will also investigate different responses and actions taken by the U.S. government and Congress, including hearings, legislation, reports, statements, etc. Class assignments include advocacy for Chinese prisoners of conscience (each student will “adopt” one currently detained PoC), and written work that mirrors real-world writing. We’ll also have several human rights advocates and experts visit the class to share their experiences and insights. This seminar explores select human rights issues in China (e.g., human rights impacts of the management of COVID-19, the Hong Kong protests, mass detentions/forced labor in Xinjiang province) and the extraterritorial reach of China’s human rights challenges. As a practice and policy-oriented course, we will also investigate different responses and actions taken by the U.S. government and Congress, including hearings, legislation, reports, statements, etc. Class assignments include advocacy for Chinese prisoners of conscience (each student will “adopt” one currently detained PoC), and written work that mirrors real-world writing. We’ll also have several human rights advocates and experts visit the class to share their experiences and insights.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
China’s turbulent 20th century was marked by social and political upheavals, wars, and economic hardship. Women writers played an important role in documenting these events. How did women experience and understand their historical context? How were their experiences and interpretations different from (or similar to) those of their male counterparts? This course will search modern China’s mind through women’s writings. Students will read works by women writers of the “long 20th century” (roughly 1890s-2020s) including, but not limited to, Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, Zhang Ailing, and Zhang Jie. We will engage in close readings of their literary works in context of their life experiences, considering key themes such as women’s identity and agency, nationalism, revolution, and social reform as well as new and changing gender norms. Basic knowledge of modern Chinese history helpful but not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
The global political and security landscape of the 21st century will be shaped by the rivalry between two superpowers -- China and the U.S. For the foreseeable future, the geographic focus of that contest will be Southeast Asia and the surrounding maritime space, particularly the South China Sea. Southeast Asia is a complex, highly differentiated region of ten-plus nations, each with its own unique history and relationship with China. This course will introduce Southeast Asia as a key region -- geographically, economically, and strategically -- often overlooked by policymakers and scholars. It will also focus on the craft of national security strategy as the best tool for understanding the multi-sided competition, already well underway involving China, the U.S., and the Southeast Asian states.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
We will read arguments, anecdotes and stories, beginning with the philosophers of the ancient period, including the imaginative paradigms of the Daoist writer Zhuangzi, and continue with the strange writings allied with shamanism and goddess-worship. We will continue with the fantastical writers of the medieval world and finish with anecdotes of the strange from the Ming and Qing. Because this is a language as well as a literature class, in addition to literary content and social history as background, we will emphasize grammar and vocabulary. Class preparation will require language exercises, translations, readings in English and there will be a final translation/research paper.
Prerequisite(s): (AS.373.115 AND AS.373.116) OR (AS.373.111 AND AS.373.112) OR (AS.378.115 OR AS.378.116) or Instructor permission.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Eurasia, stretching from the Western Europe across Russia, Central Asia, and China to the Pacific, is by far the largest continent on earth, with a massive share of global population, economic output, and key natural resources. It has been traditionally Balkanized. Yet since the late 1970s, due to China’s modernizations, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a series of global geo-economic shocks, the nations of this Super Continent have become increasingly interactive, creating fluid new trans-regional political-economic patterns that remain remarkably unexplored. This course explores the critical junctures that made Eurasia the dynamic, growing colossus that it is becoming today, as well as the global implications, from a unique problem-oriented perspective. It looks first at the developmental and political challenges confronting China, Russia, and key European states as the Cold War waned, how the key nations coped, and how they might have evolved differently. It then considers the new challenges of the post-Cold War world, and how national and local leaders are responding today. Particular attention is given, in this problem—centric approach, to the challenges that growing Eurasian continental connectivity, epitomized in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, are creating for US foreign policy and for the grand strategy of American allies in NATO, Japan, and Korea. Note: Some familiarity with Eurasian history and/or politics is recommended
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this course examines the role that gender and sexuality play within primarily the South Korean polity and in Asia. Drawing on queer studies, feminist studies, and critical Asian studies, the class will offer a foundational framework from which to analyze how social constructs around gender and sexuality play a major part in the marginalization of communities and their access to rights and representation. We will explore questions of kinship, family, love, and intimacy as they pertain to the larger thematics of the course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Urban China has gone through two major social transformations since 1949: the embrace of a central planning socialist system between early 1950s and late 70s, and the embrace of neo-liberal market economy in the so-call “socialism with Chinese characteristics” since 1980. While the political regime remains the same over time, many profound changes have occurred in economic life, social life, cultural life, spiritual life and civil life. What really happened in the social transformation of urban China? What would explain those changes? How did people in different walk of life deal with those huge and deep social transformation? To address these concerns, we will exam a list of issues. Topics includes changes in population and demographic characteristics, employment structure and job market, workplace and residential communities, income and wealth distributions, segregation impacts of urban household registration systems, urban consumption patterns, courting cultures and dressing codes, spiritual practices, and social mobility and social stratifications. In the realm of public policies, we will pay special attentions to the issues of transportation, housing, medical service, public education, social insurance, and environmental protection. We will also study the characteristics of contentious politics and how social conflicts of power, interest, justice, cultural and belief were processed in urban China.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
In this course, students will engage with select topics in Korean history from premodern and modern times and examine how the past has been represented through various forms of film and literature. This will be combined with readings of academic articles to allow students to gauge the distance between scholarship and cultural expressions of history. Through this, students will be introduced to the highly contested and often polarizing nature of Korean history and the competition surrounding historical memory. Prior coursework in East Asian Studies strongly recommended.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Drawing on critical race theory, and gender and sexuality studies, this course provides the analytical framework necessary to grapple with how belonging and difference are produced, manifested, and challenged within Korea’s citizenry. Students will gain knowledge on modern Korea and its diasporas and examine its construction as one rooted in a history of empire, nationalism, militarism, and neoliberalism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the transformation of labor relations in China over the past century. It will cover the origins of the labor movement, the changes brought about by the 1949 Revolution, the industrial battles of the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic restructuring of state-owned enterprises over the past two decades, the rise of private enterprise and export-oriented industry, the conditions faced by migrant workers today, and recent developments in industrial relations and labor conflict. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates and graduate students. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This interdisciplinary survey course considers questions related to women and gender in Chinese society. Taking a long historical view, the course examines ideologies, social institutions, and literary representations of women and gender in traditional society and their modern transformation. Specific topics to be explored include the concept of Yin and Yang, Confucian gender ideology and the family, sex and sexuality, marriage and concubinage, footbinding, and calls for women's liberation in the context of twentieth-century Chinese revolutions. The course will end with an examination of the relationship between social media and gender politics as seen through the Chinese MeToo movement. Students will have the opportunity to work with a variety of primary sources including historical, literary, and visual materials.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This seminar explores the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and government responses on a range of human rights in Asia, with a focus on the cases of China, Japan, Taiwan, India, South Korea, and Myanmar. In the first part of the course, we will investigate the fundamentals of the international human rights system, the foundational Universal Declaration of Human Rights and core human rights treaties, and the role of civil society in protecting, defending , and advancing human rights. We will then explore the United Nations’ human rights-based guidance for Covid-19 response and prevention, the right to health, and approaches to the balancing of rights and duties, including freedom of movement, freedoms of association and assembly, individuals’ right to health and duties to others, the right to education, rights to privacy, freedom of expression, right to information (and the problem of disinformation) and governments’ emergency powers (and their limits) to protect public health. Inequities and discrimination exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic will also be discussed, as will the necessity for international cooperation to effectively battle Covid-19 and vaccine inequity.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
We will try to get a quick overview of the recent history of patriarchy in China, South Korea, and Japan from the mid-twentieth century to our present and then compare the initiatives of feminists to transform the lives of women throughout these three societies. We will also debate whether or how it makes sense to adapt the Western notions of patriarchy and sexism as well as the Western political program of feminism to the non-Western context of East Asia by reading books by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This class will explore the construction of race and its applications in Asia and its diasporas. Using the notion of “mixed-race” as an analytic, we will examine how the colonial origins of race and the ensuing Cold War have influenced concepts of national identity and belonging. Employing an inter-sectional approach towards race, gender, and sexuality, the course will draw on a variety of media including memoirs, archives, and videos, to contemplate the locus of race and mixed-race and their importance within the larger nexus of identity formation in Asia and its diasporas.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
We will examine modern Korean culture through short stories and a series of films associated with New Korean Cinema. One aim of the course is to gain a sense of history from which the literary and cinematic artifacts obtain their representative artistic status. A second aim is to inquire into the relationship between written and filmic texts in order to articulate what the limits and advantages are of that specific medium. No prior familiarity with Korean language is expected.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course will survey the major issues of development and social change in rural China since 1950s. These issues will be addressed in chronological order. They include land ownership and land grabbing, organization of rural economic, political, and social life, rural elections and village governance, development strategies, urban-rural relationship in resource allocation, rural modernization strategies in regard to irrigation, clean drinking water, electricity supply, hard paved road, education and rural medical service, women’s rights and family life, rural consumption, and etc. This course will prepare students, both empirically and analytically, to understand what happened in rural China from 1949 to the present, and how we can engage in policy and theoretical discussions based on what we learn.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
The East Asian Studies Senior Honors Thesis Seminar is a workshop for EAS majors writing an honors thesis. It is a year-long course with meetings scheduled in both the fall and spring semesters. Please note that in order to qualify for honors in the major, the thesis must receive a final grade of A- or better. Students will receive credit for the seminar regardless of whether their thesis qualifies for honors.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course is the continuation of Senior Thesis Course AS.360.431 for students completing their thesis in the East Asian Studies program.
Prerequisite(s): AS.310.431
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Students carry out an independent research project involving East Asia.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
This course will takes the reverberations of the Korean War to examine the ways in which catastrophic violence is absorbed into and corrodes social life. Particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of conflict, how boundaries around peace and war are established, and how recent scholarly and artistic work on the Korean War has critically engaged dominant frameworks of memory and trauma. Readings will draw from fiction, ethnography, historiography and will also include film. This course also draws from the public syllabus on Ending the Korean War.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This seminar explores how precarity in South Korea gains expression in the medium of TV and film. In particular, this seminar will focus on how the moving image brings the viewer into the texture of everyday life. We will focus on the TV show Misaeng and include films such as Parasite and Burning. TV and film will be paired with readings on the transformations of intimate life in contemporary South Korea and comparative work on precarity.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Center for Language Education
This course is designed for students who were raised in an environment in which Chinese is spoken by parents or guardians at home and for those who are familiar with the language and possess native-like abilities in comprehension and speaking. The course therefore focuses on reading and writing (including the correct use of grammar). Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
For students who have significant previously-acquired ability to understand and speak Modern Standard Chinese. Course focuses on reading and writing. Teaching materials are the same as used in AS.373.115-116; however, both traditional and simplified versions of written Chinese characters are used. Lab required. Continuation of AS.373.111. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.111 or permission required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.111 or or instructor permission
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course is designed primarily for students who have no prior exposure to Chinese. The objective of the course is to help students build a solid foundation of the four basic skills---listening, speaking, reading, and writing in an interactive and communicative learning environment. The emphasis is on correct pronunciation, accurate tones and mastery of basic grammatical structures. Note: Students with existing demonstrable skills in spoken Chinese should take AS.373.111-112. No Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Introductory course in Modern Standard Chinese. Goals: mastery of elements of pronunciation and control of basic vocabulary of 800-900 words and most basic grammatical patterns. Students work first with Pin-Yin system, then with simplified version of written Chinese characters. Continuation of AS.373.115. Note: Student with existing demonstrable skills in spoken Chinese should take AS.373.111-112. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.115 or permission required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.115 or instructor permission]
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course is designed for students who finished AS.373.112 with C+ and above (or equivalent). Students in this course possess native-like abilities in comprehension and speaking. The course focuses on reading and writing. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.112 or equivalent.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
For students who have significant previously-acquired ability to understand and speak Modern Standard Chinese. Course focuses on reading and writing. Teaching materials are the same as used in AS.373.115-116; however, both traditional and simplified versions of written Chinese characters are used. Continuation of AS.373.211. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.211 or permission required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.211 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Consolidation of the foundation that students have laid in their first year of study and continued drill and practice in the spoken language, with continued expansion of reading and writing vocabulary and sentence patterns. Students will work with both simplified and traditional characters. Note: Students who have native-like abilities in comprehension and speaking should take AS.373.211-212. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.116 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Consolidation of the foundation that students have laid in their first year of study and continued drill and practice in the spoken language, with continued expansion of reading and writing vocabulary and sentence patterns. Students will work with both simplified and traditional characters. Note: Students who have native-like abilities in comprehension and speaking should take AS.373.211-212. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.215 or Permission Required.Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.215 or instructor permission.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course is designed for those who have already taken AS.373.212 or equivalent. Students need to have native-level fluency in speaking and understanding Chinese. The course focuses on reading and writing. In addition to the textbooks, downloaded articles on current affairs may also be introduced on a regular basis.Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.212
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course is a continuation of AS.373.313. Students need to have native-level fluency in speaking and understanding Chinese. The course focuses on reading and writing. In addition to the textbooks, downloaded articles on current affairs may also be included on a regular basis. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.313 or Permission Required. Lab required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.313 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This two-semester course consolidates and further expands students' knowledge of grammar and vocabulary and further develops reading ability through work with textbook material and selected modern essays and short stories. Class discussions will be in Chinese insofar as feasible and written assignments will be given. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.216
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This two-semester course consolidates and further expands students' knowledge of grammar and vocabulary and further develops reading ability through work with textbook material and selected modern essays and short stories. Class discussions will be in Chinese insofar as feasible, and written assignments will be given. Continuation of AS.373.315. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.315 or permission required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.315 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course is designed for students who finished AS.373.316 with a C+ or above (or equivalent). Readings in modern Chinese prose, including outstanding examples of literature, newspaper articles, etc. Students are supposed to be able to understand most of the readings with the aid of a dictionary, so that class discussion is not focused primarily on detailed explanation of grammar. Discussion, to be conducted in Chinese, will concentrate on the cultural significance of the readings' content.Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.316 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Continuation of AS.373.415. Readings in modern Chinese prose, including outstanding examples of literature, newspaper articles, etc. Students should understand most of the readings with the aid of a dictionary, so that class discussion need not focus primarily on detailed explanations of grammar. Discussion, to be conducted in Chinese, will concentrate on the cultural significance of the readings' content. Recommended Course Background: AS.373.415 or Permission Required. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.415 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Fifth Year Chinese is designed for students who finished fourth year regular or third year heritage Chinese course at JHU or its equivalent and wish to achieve a higher advanced proficiency level in Chinese. The goal of the course is to help students further develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills cohesively and to enhance students’ understanding of Chinese culture and society through language learning.
Prerequisite(s): AS.373.416 OR AS.373.314 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course is designed for students who have no background or previous knowledge in Japanese. The course consists of lectures on Tuesday/Thursday and conversation classes on Monday/Wednesdays/Fridays. The goal of the course is the simultaneous progression of four skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading) as well as familiarity with aspects of Japanese culture. By the end of the year, students will have basic speaking and listening comprehension skills, a solid grasp of basic grammar items, reading and writing skills, and a recognition and production of approximately 150 kanji in context. Knowledge of grammar will be expanded significantly in AS.378.215. No Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course is designed for students who have no background or previous knowledge in Japanese. The course consists of lectures on Tuesday/Thursday and conversation classes on Monday/Wednesdays/Fridays. The goal of the course is the simultaneous progression of four skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading) as well as familiarity with aspects of Japanese culture. By the end of the fall term, students will have basic speaking and listening comprehension skills, a solid grasp of basic grammar items, reading and writing skills, and a recognition and production of approximately 60 kanji in context. Knowledge of grammar will be expanded significantly in 2nd year Japanese. May not be taken Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory. Recommended Course Background: AS.378.115
Prerequisite(s): Prereq: AS.378.115 or instructor permission
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Training in spoken and written language, increasing their knowledge of more complex patterns. At completion, students will have a working knowledge of about 250 Kanji. Recommended Course Background: AS.378.115 and AS.378.116 or equivalent.
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.116 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Continuation of Beginning Japanese and Intermediate Japanese I. Training in spoken and written language, increasing students' knowledge of more complex patterns. At completion, students will have a working knowledge of about 250 Kanji. Recommended Course Background: AS.378.215 or equivalent.
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.215 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Emphasis shifts toward reading, while development of oral-aural skills also continues apace. The course presents graded readings in expository prose and requires students to expand their knowledge of Kanji, grammar, and both spoken and written vocabulary. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.216 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Emphasis shifts toward reading, while development of oral-aural skills also continues apace. The course presents graded readings in expository prose and requires students to expand their knowledge of Kanji, grammar, and both spoken and written vocabulary. Lab required. Continuation of AS.378.315. Recommended Course Background: AS.378.315 or equivalent.
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.315 or equivalent.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course is designed for students who have already studied 1st Year Japanese grammar and wish to develop a thorough knowledge of Japanese grammar in order to advance all aspects of language skills to a higher level. It is also appropriate for graduate students who need to be able to read materials written in Japanese. The goal of the course is to provide students with a thorough knowledge of Japanese grammar; therefore, knowledge of vocabulary (including kanji) in depth is not requisite. In addition, since this is not a language course that places equal focus on all four skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading), there will be no conversation practice – this is a lecture course on grammar. 2 credits. Pass-fail grade option only
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.116 or permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2)
By using four skills in participatory activities (reading, writing, presentation, and discussion), students will develop reading skills in modern Japanese and deepen and enhance their knowledge on Kanji and Japanese culture. Recommended Course Background: AS.378.315 and AS.378.316 or equivalent.
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.316 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
By using four skills in participatory activities (reading, writing, presentation, and discussion), students will develop reading skills in modern Japanese and deepen and enhance their knowledge on Kanji and Japanese culture. Lab required. Recommended Course Background: AS.378.415
Prerequisite(s): AS.378.415 or equivalent.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course is designed for graduate students (in East Asian Studies, Public Health, History of Medicine, History,etc.) and undergraduate students with a strong interest in improving Japanesereading skills. The main goal of the course is to learn strategies for reading and comprehending materials written in Japanese without using a dictionary.Specific strategies and techniques are introduced, followed by practice. Class materials include a broad spectrum of native materials, including novels, newspapers, scholarly articles, essays, historical papers, and so forth. A diverse range of articles and essays are selected to introduce and enforce various ways of reading Japanese effectively. 2 credits for undergraduate students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Introduces the Korean alphabet, hangeul. Covers basic elements of the Korean language, high-frequency words and phrases, including cultural aspects. Focuses on oral fluency reaching Limited Proficiency where one can handle simple daily conversations. No Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Focuses on improving speaking fluency to Limited Proficiency so that one can handle simple daily conversations with confidence. It provides basic high-frequency structures and covers Korean holidays. Continuation of AS.380.101. Recommended Course Background: AS.380.101 or permission required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.380.101 or instructor permission
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Aims for improving oral proficiency and confident control of grammar with vocabulary building and correct spelling intended. Reading materials of Korean people, places, and societies will enhance cultural understanding and awareness. Project due on Korean cities. Existing demonstrable skills in spoken Korean preferred.
Prerequisite(s): AS.380.102
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Aims for improving writing skills with correct spelling. Reading materials of Korean people, places, and societies will enhance cultural understanding and awareness, including discussion on family tree. Continuation of AS.380.201. Recommended Course Background: AS.380.201 or equivalent.
Prerequisite(s): AS.380.201 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Emphasizes reading literacy in classic and modern Korean prose, from easy essays to difficult short stories. Vocabulary refinement and native-like grasp of grammar explored. Project due on Korean culture. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies
Prerequisite(s): AS.380.202 or equivalent
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Emphasizes reading literacy in classic and modern Korean prose. By reading Korean newspapers and professional articles in one’s major, it enables one to be well-versed and truly literate. Continuation of AS.380.301. Cross-listed with East Asian StudiesPrerequisite: AS.380.301 or equivalent.
Prerequisite(s): AS.380.301 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course is designed for those who have finished AS 380.302 or beyond advanced mid level of competency in Korean in four skills. By dealing with various topics on authentic materials including news, articles on websites, short stories, this course aims to help students enhance not only linguistics knowledge and skills, but also current issues in Korea. It is expected that, by the end of the term, students will be able to discuss a variety of topics and express opinions fluently in both spoken and written language.
Prerequisite(s): AS.380.302 or instructor permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Comparative Thought and Literature
This course surveys modern and contemporary Chinese literature with a focus on the interplay between nature and narratives. We will read fictions by Shen Congwen, Xiao Hong, Alai, and Chi Zijian, among others, to embark on a journey through different forms, ideas, and practices of storytelling with and about nature. As we traverse the landscape of Chinese literature - from West Hunan to occupied Manchuria, from Tibet to Inner Mongolia - we will pay special attention to how local geographies, aesthetics, and epistemes inform these works and help create their literary worlds. Literary texts will be brought into dialogue with ecocritical theories, as we explore storytelling as a world-making practice in which both human and non-human beings take active part. Such a perspective is helpful for reimagining a future that overcomes human exceptionalism and environmental exploitation. All readings will be provided in English translations; knowledge of Chinese is not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
An in-depth introduction to the history of Japanese animation from its origins in the 1910s to the contemporary post-Studio Ghibli era. In this course, we survey the narratives, aesthetic forms, industrial practices, and multimedia marketing strategies that have helped Japanese animation emerge as a global cultural phenomenon with a transnational fandom. What distinguishes “anime” from other practices of animation, and what forms of animation practice are excluded by animecentric narratives of Japanese animation history? What types of consumer behavior and emergent forms of sociality has anime engendered, and why have they come to occupy a central place in debates about postwar visual culture and Japanese (post)modernity? And how has Japanese animation been continually reshaped through its dynamic engagement with traditional and emerging media? In tackling these questions, our inquiry will be guided by four distinct methodological approaches that are central to studies of animation and new media: film studies, fan and cultural studies, cyborg theory and posthumanism, and media ecology.
Distribution Area: Humanities
The “founding father of modern Chinese literature,” Lu Xun (1881-1936) saw himself as a contemporary of writers like Gogol, Ibsen, and Nietzsche in creating his seminal short stories and essays, and likewise, he has been seen by numerous Chinese and Sinophone writers as their contemporary since his lifetime until today. In this course, we will survey Lu Xun's canonical works and their legacies through a comparative approach. What echoes do Lu Xun's works have with the European and Russian texts he engaged with? Why did his works manage to mark a “new origin” of Chinese literature? How were his works repeated, adapted, and appropriated by Chinese and Sinophone writers from the Republican period through the Maoist era to the post-socialist present, even during the Covid-19 pandemic? Are his times obsolete now that China is on the rise? Or, have his times come yet? We will raise these questions to guide our comparative investigation into Lu Xun’s works and their legacies in China’s long twentieth century and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
A survey of post-WWII literatures written in Japanese and/or by writers of Japanese backgrounds from the perspective of their engagement with the memories of war and imperialism. Reading novels, short stories, essays, and poems produced by representative postwar Japanese writers, zainichi Korean writers, and overseas Japanophone writers, we will discuss how their struggles with the contested, politicized, and/or un-historicized memories of suffering from war and imperialism shapes literary forms. These works will be coupled with critical writings on key concepts such as pain, trauma, victimhood, responsibility, nationalism, diaspora, and gender. Readings in Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Murakami Haruki, Lee Yangji, Yu Miri, John Okada, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others. This course also serves as an introduction to postwar Japanese literature and culture. All readings are in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
A survey of contemporary literature and film from the peripheries of the Chinese-speaking world, with a special focus on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe. We will not only examine literary and filmic works in the contexts of the layered histories and contested politics of these locations, but will also reexamine, in light of those works, critical concepts in literary and cultural studies including, but not limited to, form, ideology, hegemony, identity, history, agency, translation, and (post)colonialism. All readings are in English; all films subtitled in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Modern literature in East Asia is as much defined by creation of national boundaries as by their transgressions, negotiations, and reimaginations. This course examines literature originally written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in light of contemporary understandings of political, social, and cultural boundary demarcation and crossings. How do experiences of border-crossing create and/or alter literary forms? How, in turn, does literature inscribe, displace, and/or dismantle boundaries? Our readings will include, but not limited to, writings by intra- and trans-regional travelers, exiles, migrants, and settlers; stories from and on contested borderlands and islands (e.g. Manchuria, Okinawa, Jeju); and works and translations by bilingual authors. All readings are provided in English translation.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
A survey of Japanese and Japanese- language literatures produced in Japan and its (former)colonies during the “transwar” period, or the several years before and after the end of WWII. This periodization enables us to take into account the shifting boundaries, sovereignties, and identities amid the intensification of Japanese imperialism and in the aftermath of its eventual demise. We aim to pay particular attention to voices marginalized in this political watershed, such as those of Japanese-language writers from colonial Korea and Taiwan, intra-imperial migrants, and radical critics of Japan’s “postwar” regime. Underlying our investigation is the question of whether literature can be an agent of justice when politics fails to deliver it. We will introduce secondary readings by Adorno, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida, and Scarry, among others, to help us interrogate this question. All readings are in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This course invites students to explore culture in the late and post-Cold War world from a broader perspective by surveying literature, thought, cinema, art, and music in Chinese and Soviet societies from the 1980s to the present. How did Chinese and Soviet intellectuals reconfigure, reform, and/or reinvent their cultures as they re-embraced the ideas of freedom, democracy, and globalization? How did they grapple with the legacies of their socialist and even pre-socialist pasts as they entered new eras of reforms? How did reform movements adopt different forms and strategies in different parts of the USSR and in the Sinophone world? What kinds of negotiations took place between various centers and peripheries within and around these regions? What can we learn from their cultural endeavors about the promises, contradictions, and discontents of the post-Cold War world, as we witness the rise of a so-called “new cold war” today? In this co-taught course, specialists in Sinophone and Soviet cultures will guide students to read and discuss representative works from the 1980s onward from a comparative perspective. Readings include Cui Jian, Yu Hua, Can Xue, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Guo Songfen, and the film Hibiscus Town, as well as Viktor Tsoi, Komar and Melamid, Aka Morchiladze, Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, and the film Repentance. No prerequisites. All course materials will be provided in English translation or with English subtitles.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Economics
Increased mobility of people across national borders, whether by choice or by force, has become an integral part of the modern world. Using a comparative perspective and an applied economics approach, the course explores the economic and political determinants, and (likely) consequences of migration flows for East Asia, the US and the EU. Lectures, assignments and in class discussions, will be built around the following topics: i) migrants’ self-selection; ii) human capital investment decision-making; iii) remittance decisions and effects; iv) impacts on labor markets of both receiving and sending countries; and v) the economic benefits from immigration. Overall, the course will give students perspective on the why people choose or feel compelled to leave their countries, how receiving countries respond to migrants’ presence, and the key economic policy concerns that are influencing the shaping of immigration policy in East Asia, the US, and the EU.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
In 2001, Jim O’Neill, the Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs, coined the acronym BRIC to identify the four large emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China. These economies had an amazing run for the next decade, and emerged as the biggest and fastest growing emerging markets. However, since 2014 there has been some divergence in the BRICs’ economic performance. In this course, we look at the economic experiences of the BRIC countries for the past several decades. We discuss the reasons that contributed to their exceptional growth rates, with particular emphasis on their transformation into market economies, and the reasons for their eventual divergence. We also analyze some of the challenges that these countries continue to face in their development process.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Discussion of the economic experience of Post-War China, primarily emphasizing topics rather than historical narrative: agriculture, industry including corporate governance and public enterprises, international trade, population, migration, education, health, public finances among other topics. This course is writing intensive and the only assignment for the course is a 40 page paper on some aspect of the Chinese economy to be done under the close supervision of the instructor. The course is not primarily a lecture course, although there will be some lectures on how to do a paper and on the substance of the Chinese economic experience.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not take AS.180.390 if they took AS.180.391.;AS.180.301
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
Japan is a world leader in biomimetic robotics. Japanese society enthusiastically embraces robotic nurses, robotic guides, robotic waiters, robotic pets, and even robotic girlfriends. What are the origins of the Japanese love of robots? What role did robotics engineers play in creating the image of loveable robots? What societal fears do Japanese robots assuage and what hopes do they foster? In the course of the semester, students will learn about the evolution of Japanese robotics, and explore the implications of this evolution to humans’ relationship with robots. While learning about Japanese robots, students will acquire skills necessary for college-level education, including how to write an email to a professor, how to organize and manage digital tools, how to navigate the information resources, and how to develop, complete, and present research projects. This course will equip students with skills essential to their success in college and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what it means to think and write across multiple cultures in the contemporary world. What do we gain and/or lose when we think and write crossing cultural boundaries? How do knowledge and experience of two or more cultures help us think and act critically, creatively, and ethically? What does plurality of cultures mean to universal discourses such as science and technology? How can cultural differences help or hamper our efforts to tackle global problems like climate change? These are some of the guiding questions that we will investigate together in this course by examining novels, essays, autobiographies, travelogues, philosophical writings, and films that engage with multiplicity of cultures between East Asia -- especially China, Japan, and Korea – and the West as well as within East Asia.
Distribution Area: Humanities
From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China
History
This course is an introduction to Japan’s history from 1800 to the present with emphasis on the influences of an increasing global circulation of ideas and people. Topics include the emperor system, family and gender, imperialism, World War II, the postwar economy, and global J-pop.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's last attempt to transform Chinese society spiritually and structurally. The events of this period were marked by social upheaval, personal vendettas, violence, massive youth movements, and extreme ideological pressure. This course will explore the Cultural Revolution from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the relationship between events in China from 1966-1976, and their interpretation in China and the West during the Cultural Revolution decade and since. (Previously offered as AS.100.219 and AS.100.236. )
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This class offers a broad overview of changes in China from Neolithic times through the Song dynasty (roughly from 5000 BCE through the 13th century CE!). It features discussion of art, material culture, philosophical texts, religious ideas, and literary works as well as providing a broad overview of politics and society. Close readings of primary sources in discussion sections and extensive use of visual material in lectures will allow students to consider the relationship between what (sources) we have—and what we can know about the past.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Challenging the conception that Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, this course considers Muslim populations across Asia and interrogates how Islam and these regions have shaped one another.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course explores the history of late twentieth-century America by examining the social, economic, and political legacies of 1960s civil rights protest for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Using primary sources, including literature and film, we will explore the changing ways in which ideologues, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens defined national identity in 20th century China and Japan.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The history of China from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Survey of the history of China from ca. 1895 to ca. 1976.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
What did Chinese local society look like under the Qing Empire, and how did it change over the early modern era?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines the experience of Chinese women, and also how writers, scholars, and politicians (often male, sometimes foreign) have represented women’s experiences for their own political and social agendas.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
How has the history of modern China been told by Chinese, Western, and Japanese historians and social thinkers, and how did this affect popular attitudes and government policies toward China?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This graduate-level seminar provides an overview of innovative works in the overlapping histories of modern Japan and Korea. We will read both “classic” and recent works that will help us analyze the following: 1) trends in the historiographies of Japan and Korea; 2) analytical, conceptual, and political challenges in the writing of Japanese/imperial and Korean/colonial history; and 3) recent global, microhistorical, and transnational methodologies. Discussions will focus as much on the craft of writing history as on the content of it.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A graduate-level seminar on the political, social, and intellectual concerns that have both shaped and undermined dominant ways of telling Japanese history, especially in Japan and the U.S. since 1945.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Open also to advanced undergraduates with at least one semester of Classical Chinese. This course has several objectives. First and foremost, it is a hands-on document reading class designed to familiarize students with the skills, sources, and reference materials necessary to conduct research in Qing history. To that end, we will spend much of our time reading documents. At the same time, we will engage in problem solving exercises designed to develop and enhance basic research skills. Finally, we will consider important archive-based secondary works which demonstrate the ways in which historians have made use of Qing documents in their scholarship.
This reading seminar will introduce graduate students and advanced undergraduates (by permission) to recent English-language scholarship in the field (mostly) of early modern Chinese history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
An introduction to Chinese Art, with a focus on the (often absence of) women, through the lens of gender and sexuality.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course aims to introduce students to the multiple modalities of modernism in Asia. We will acquire the critical tools to understand the complex and rich discussions surrounding “modernism” in the art traditions in Asia, and challenge a few fraught preconceptions: Firstly, instead of treating “Asia” as the monolithic “other” to the West, we acknowledge the plurality and multiculturality in Asian art that are eclipsed in the term “Asia” and learn the many different traditions and norms that the practitioners and theorists of modern art grappled with. Secondly, we examine how Asian artists dynamically engage with issues and ideas of modernisms that are circulated in global modern art. Thirdly, we discuss the interstitial spaces created by Asian modern artists in their engagements with both traditions and the modern art world. Last but most importantly, we challenge the notion that modernism is a Euro-American invention and exclusively in the Western art historical context. Instead, we locate these practices of modernism in Asia in each of their own histories, and understand how they try to reconfigure modern art in their contexts. The period we cover is what is considered modern and contemporary, ranging from the late 19th Century to present, but with a focus on the 20th Century. We study movements, artworks, artists, concepts changes in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Asian diaspora in the world (the list of countries are in alphabetic order). Students are also encouraged in this course to explore areas and topics that the course does not explicitly cover but need innovative research in.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course will explore modern and contemporary art in colonial and postcolonial contexts from Bangladesh to northern Africa. How do artists negotiate demands to support their national and local identities while participating in modernism across borders? What role do secularism and spirituality have in modern art? How do anticolonial, Marxist, and feminist politics shape art in these regions? How do global economic forces and the rise of powerful collectors, private museums, and international art fairs shape art and artists working across this geographic area? We will foreground the role of women as artists, collectors, patrons, and scholars throughout.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Art has always been intertwined with politics; one can even say art is always political. In modern China, this statement is especially poignant. The relationship between art and politics has been at the core of art production in China in the past century, and a perennial preoccupation of those in power, including now. This course will therefore examine three major threads: the documents, dictums, and decrees by the artists and by the regimes concerning the nature, function, and practice of art and artists in the 20th century, for example, Mao’s famous Yan’an talk in 1942; artists’ response to and art’s participation in the important political events and historical moments, for example, the 1989 democracy movement; we will also examine the space of resistance, intervention, and alterity that art created in modern China, concerning topics of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ecocriticism, privacy, and questions of historiography. The period we examine will begin at the end of the 19th century when artists struggled with a crumbling empire facing the onslaught of modernity, to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course will grapple with modern art as it emerges in critically important locations around the world over the course of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on Asia, Africa, and South America. Anti-colonial movements, national formations, geopolitical alliances, institution-building, exhibition, fair, and biennial histories, art group manifestos, and the intertwined relations of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, class, and sexuality. Museum visits to view works of art in person will be incorporated into the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar will examine a constellation of readings and moments in the history of Asian art since c. 1900 through the lens of the transnational. We’ll unpack this term and some of its relations including cosmopolitan, diaspora, and global, and then turn to several case studies of exchange, contact, engagement across geographies in the long 20th century. These include: pan-Asian aesthetics as discussed in India-Japan exchanges in the 1910s, Chinese artists who study and live in Paris in the 1920s and (sometimes) return to China, the concept of “international contemporaneity” as articulated in 1960s Japanese art, India’s engagement with internationalism and “indigenism” in the 1960s, Japan–US interfaces in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist art and art histories in India in the 1970s and 1980s, the “East Village” in Beijing and NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Chinese avant-garde in a post-Maoist context.
Distribution Area: Humanities
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
This class explores histories of diseases, epidemics, and therapeutics in Asia. We will examine the rise of public health and the nation-state and the social and political factors that guided the outcomes of public health campaigns. Who was helped? Who was harmed? Why? How? To answer these questions, we will compare both top-down and bottom-up movements to understand questions of access and ethics in different communities—ethnic, racial, and religious—and the handling of different diseases that were acute, infectious, and chronic.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
What major knowledge traditions about life’s generation and function have taken shape in Asia that continue to shape our contemporary world? How have they fared in encounters with Western knowledge traditions? How have modern biology, biotechnology and biomedicine developed in Asia in recent years within distinct geopolitical contexts? This course addresses these questions with selected historical cases from China, India, Japan, Koreas and selected Southeast Asian countries. It first introduces concepts and frameworks of major non-Western knowledge systems about life such as yin-yang and five phases and examine how religions, politics, and cross-cultural encounters impacted these systems, their evolutions or replacements. Then the class will examine the political, material, cultural and institutional contexts of more recent development in the life sciences in Asia. Class activities include lectures, discussions, research seminars, a final research project, and possible conversations with visiting professors and field trips.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
America’s scientific connections with China, its East Asian allies, and the rest of the world are heavily shaped by geopolitics nowadays. This course traces the historical root of these connections and invites you to explore the movement of knowledge and people, the omnipresence of the state and concerns about national security, and the career of Asian American students and scientists. It aims to equip you with a set of analytical tools to understand the complicated dynamics of the transnational scientific community between America and East Asian countries. As nationalism regains momentum globally, it is time to look back on history and think about how we should approach the increasingly tumultuous world!
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Will we end up oppressed by robot overlords? Will robots become our lovers and caretakers? Can we solve societal problems by building yet more sophisticated robotic machines? Will we find ourselves out of work as technologies take over tasks once considered the exclusive domain of humans?In this course we will question our hopes and fears by examining the global development of robotics, the entanglement of technology with politics and economics, and the impact—real or imagined—that robots are having on society. We will marvel at the ingenuity of French and Japanese automata of centuries past, scrutinize assumptions about labor, race and gender in automation and “labor saving” technologies, examine how the “intelligence” of AI is understood differently in Japan vs the US, ponder the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, and meet a quirky cast of robotic prototypes including Shakey, Eliza, Wabot I and II, Aibo, Kismet, Paro, Asimo, Actroids, Repelees, Sophia, Pepper, and Hyodol. By contrasting technological and social histories of actual robots with fictional representations in literature, animation, and film, we will seek answers to persistent questions about our inevitable robotic futures.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Technical cooperation has been one of the most favored formats of international development because it aims to provide internal capacity for future development. Nevertheless, technical cooperation has been a site of political conflicts where different countries, social groups, capital funds, forms of knowledge, expertise, and opportunities collide. This course critically analyzes the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural surroundings of technical cooperation projects between the United States and East Asia during the second half of the 20th century. The course has three parts, each focusing on 1) theoretical and conceptual approaches to technical cooperation projects in East Asia, 2) different stakeholders, and 3) specific examples that display how the projects unfolded in real-life situations. Throughout the course, students will analyze various formats of historical sources such as photography, diary, correspondence, pamphlet, interview transcripts, and more!
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Japan is often described as “nature-loving,” and is considered to be one of world leaders in environmental protection policies. Yet current environmental successes come on the heels of numerous environmental disasters that plagued Japan in the past centuries. Juxtaposing Japanese environmental history and its reflection in popular media, the course will explore the intersection between technology, environment, and culture.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
What can we learn from science fiction about the history of science and technology? What ideas about science do Sci-Fi novels manifest? Is the relationship between science and science fiction always the same, across different time periods and geographical areas? This course will explore these questions by taking a comparative perspective. Each meeting we will read a Sci-Fi novel from Europe, America, South and East Asia, and discuss it in conjunction with historical writing about relevant scientific developments. Reading Sci-Fi novels from 17th-century Germany, 19th-century England and India, and 20th-century Japan, China, Korea and the US, the students will explore how actual scientific developments were reflected in fiction, and what fictional depictions say about the aspirations and anxieties provoked by new technologies.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
International Studies
Over the past three decades, East Asia has been the most dynamic region in the world. East Asia has a remarkable record of high and sustained economic growth. From 1965 to 1990, the twenty-three economies of East Asia grew faster than all other regions of the world mostly thanks to the ‘miraculous growth’ of Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand; these eight countries, in fact, have grown roughly three times as fast as Latin America and South Asia, five times faster than Sub-Saharan Africa, and significantly outperformed the industrial economies and the oil-rich Middle East and North Africa regions. Poverty levels have plummeted and human-development indicators have improved across the region. The course is divided into three parts to allow students to develop expertise in one or more countries and/or policy arenas, while also cultivating a broad grasp of the region and the distinct challenges of “fast-paced, sustained economic growth.” Part I will introduce the subject, consider the origins of Asian economic development, and analyse the common economic variables behind the region’s success. It will look at the East Asian Crisis and will consider its lessons and assess whether or not East Asian countries have learned them. While the course will show that there are many common ingredients to the success of the region’s economies, it will also show that each country is different, and that differences could be, at times, quite stark. Hence, Part II will focus on the development experiences of individual countries, with a special emphasis on the ASEAN economies, NIEs, Japan and China. Finally, Part III will consider various topics of special interest to Asia, including trends toward greater regional economic cooperation, both in the real and financial/monetary sectors, and issues related to poverty, migration, and inclusiveness in the region. NOTE: Contact Dr. Dore if prerequisites are not met.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
East Asia’s “miracle growth” has not gone hand in hand with a decisive move toward democracy. Over the last 30 years, only eight East Asian countries have become democratic out of more than 60 countries worldwide, and they continue to struggle with the challenges of democratic consolidation, weak political governance, and limited citizens’ political engagement. This course explores the reasons why democratization proceeds slowly in East Asia, and seems to be essentially decoupled from the region’s fast-paced economic growth. The choice of Korea, Indonesia, and Myanmar as the case studies for this course results from their authoritarian past as well as their more recent institutional and political trajectories towards democracy.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Political Science
This course examines some of the central ideas and institutions that have transformed politics in the contemporary world through the lens of East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. We analyze two enduring themes of classic and contemporary scholarship in comparative politics: development and democracy. The purpose is to introduce students to the various schools of thought within comparative politics as well as to the central debates concerning East Asian politics.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
What you need to know about Chinese politics covers the major scandals, political events, and policy debates that every China watcher needs to know. This first module of a two-semester experience brings together two professors, Prof. Andrew Mertha (SAIS) and Prof. John Yasuda (KSAS), with very different perspectives on China's past achievements, its political and economic futures, and the global implications of China's rise. The course seeks to give ample coverage to every major political question about China that is often missed in a semester long class. In addition to lively debates between the instructors, students can also expect guest speakers from the policy world, business, and the academy for a fresh take on what's going on in China today.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This serves as a two-semester survey of Chinese politics from 1911-Present. This second module explores the politics of the reform and post-reform eras.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course examines issues of political identity, political incorporation, and political participation of Asian Americans. Themes include Asian American panethnicity, the struggle for immigration and citizenship, Asian American electoral politics, political activism and resistance since the 1960s, and the impact of Asian Americans on the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
This course introduces students to the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese politics. Topics include nationalism, electoral politics, civil society, and immigration.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
This course introduces students to the historical and institutional foundations of modern South Korean politics. Topics include nationalism, political economic development, civil society, globalization, and ROK-DPRK relations.Recommended students should take Intro to Comparative Politics or a course related to East Asia first.(CP)
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
“Can the United States and China avoid a new Cold War? One might think not given disputes over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, human rights, trade, ideology and so much more. Moreover, competition for influence in the developing world and American concerns as to whether China will replace it as the preeminent world power suggest a new Cold War is in the offing. Nevertheless, their extensive economic ties and need to work together to solve common problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics argues against a continuing confrontation. This course will examine whether cooperation or conflict will define Sino-American relations, and whether a new Cold War—or even a shooting war—lies in the future.”
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Business, Finance, and Government in East Asia explores the dynamics of East Asia's economic growth (and crises) over the last fifty years. We will examine Japan's post-war development strategy, the Asian tiger economies, and China's dramatic rise. Centered on case studies of major corporations, this course examines the interplay between politics and economics in East Asia, and considers the following questions: How have businesses navigated East Asia’s complex market environment? In what ways can the state foster economic development? How has the financial system been organized to facilitate investment? What are the long-term prospects for growth in the region?
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course is designed to help students better understand the politics of China. Lectures will focus on the tools of governance that China has employed to navigate its transition from plan to market, provide public goods and services to its citizens, and to maintain social control over a rapidly changing society. The course will draw heavily from texts covering a range of subjects including China's political economy, social and cultural developments, regime dynamics, and historical legacies. Students interested in authoritarian resilience, governance, post-communist transition, and domestic will find this course particularly instructive.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course examines the most important debates about China’s political economic development. After exploring Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic policies, we will consider the politics of reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping, and finally conclude with China’s state capitalist policies across a variety of issue areas. The course will cover literatures on financial reform, public goods provision, foreign trade and investment, agriculture, corruption, business groups, and regulatory development. Where possible we will draw comparisons with the economic experiences of other East Asian nations as well as other post-communist states.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Despite growing awareness in other subfields of political science of the importance of Asian Americans as a political constituency, Asian American political theory and thought has yet to be recognized. This course provides an opportunity to investigate and interrogate the possibility of a textual “tradition” of Asian American political thought, including writings by thinkers before the invention of “Asian American” as an analytic, political, and identity category. How do Asian American writers, thinkers, and activists conceive of core political concepts such as freedom, citizenship, inclusion, and justice in the face of longstanding historical injustices–ranging from legal and social exclusion to internment? How do Asian Americans understand, portray, and attempt to alter their social position and relation to state power? What tools of resistance were available to them, and how did they use those tools to negotiate and reconfigure central conceptual categories of political thought and politics? We will engage a wide-ranging group of Asian and Asian American writers as well as contemporary theorists, as well as a variety of genres.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This upper-level seminar examines some of the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese and South Korean political economy. Topics include nationalism, gender politics, civil society, immigration, and US-Japan-South Korea trilateral relations.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Sociology
This survey course examines the foreign influence on China’s political changes between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The topics include Chinese Christians and anti-dynastic revolutions, Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism, Chinese overseas and federalist movements, as well as global connections of Chinese communist movements between 1921 and 1949.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the impacts of colonialism in East and Southeast Asia. Special attention will be paid to the social and economic development in British Singapore and Hong Kong as well as Japanese Korea and Taiwan. Topics include free-trade imperialism, colonial modernity, anticolonial movements, pan-Asianism, and post-war U.S. hegemony.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course examines the trajectory of economic development in China since the beginning of market reforms in the late 1970s, with a special focus on social inequality and forms of resistance that have emerged in response to the expansion of the market economy. The first part of the course focuses on understanding the academic debates around China’s economic miracle and introduces students to theories about the relationship between market expansion and social resistance. The second part focuses on key thematic topics including the rural/urban divide, rural protest, urban inequality and labor unrest, gender and sexuality in social movements, environmental protests, and the politics of ethnic relations.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The course examines the modern transformation of social life from the prism of coffee and tea. It traces the mass consumption of these two caffeinated beverages from the expansion of Eurocentric capitalism from the long sixteenth century onwards. It shows the changes in the coffee and tea culture from their respective Asian contexts to the age of mass consumption at the turn of the twentieth century. The topics include cash-crop production, plantation and peasant economy, the public sphere, and food heritage and nationalism.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine various aspects of social inequality in China during the Mao and post-Mao eras, including inequality within villages, the rural/urban divide, labor relations, education and health policies, gender and ethnic relations, and the social foundations of elite groups. Each of these topics will be tackled analytically, but the goal is also to understand what it was and is like to live in China as the country has undergone radical social transformations over the past seven decades. The course is writing-intensive and will be conducted as a discussion seminar.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the relationship between China and its migrants and their descendants from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It highlights the transnational foundation of modern Chinese nationalism. It also compares the divergent formations of the “Chinese question” in North America and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Key concepts include transnationalism, diaspora, ethnic politics, racism, Orientalism, and “united front” work.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not have completed AS.230.217 previously.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
In this course we will examine contemporary Chinese society, looking at economic development, rural transformation, urbanization and migration, labor relations, changes in class structure and family organization, health care, environmental problems, governance, and popular protest. The course is designed for both graduate and undergraduate students. Undergraduates must have already completed a course about China at Hopkins. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Women in Western Thought is an introduction to (the history of) Western thought from the margins of the canon. The class introduces you to some key philosophical question, focusing on some highlights of women’s thought in Western thought, most of which are commonly and unjustly neglected. The seminar will be organized around a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the mind/body question in Early Modern Europe, the declaration of the rights of (wo)men during the French revolution, the impact of slavery on philosophical thought, the MeToo debate and others. By doing so, the course will cover a range of issues, such as the nature of God, contract theory, slavery, standpoint epistemology, and queer feminist politics. Students will engage with questions about what a canon is, and who has a say in that. In this sense, Women in Western Thought introduces you to some crucial philosophical and political problems and makes you acquainted with some women in the field. The long term objective of a class on women in Western thought must be to empower, to inspire independence, and to resist the sanctioned ignorance often times masked as universal knowledge and universal history. People of all genders tend to suffer from misinformation regarding the role of women and the gender of thought more generally. By introducing you to women who took it upon themselves to resist the obstacles of their time, I am hoping to provide role models for your individual intellectual and political development. By introducing you to the historical conditions of the exclusion and oppression of women (including trans and queer women as well as black women and women of color), I hope to enable you to generate the sensitivities that are required to navigate the particular social relations of the diverse world you currently inhabit. By introducing philosophical topics in this way, I hope to enable you to have a positive, diversifying influence on you future endeavours.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Writing Seminars
An introduction for students unfamiliar with the Korean language but interested in Korean culture / literature. Students will read a variety of translated texts, especially of works written in the 20th and early 21st centuries by authors including Kim Tong-in, Hwang Sun-won, Pak Wanso, Hwang Sok-yong and Han Kang; there will also be classes on traditional sijo poetry. Students will become familiar with Korean literary genres and formal features, and develop a broad understanding of the historical and sociocultural context of Korean literature.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive