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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will introduce students to the history, literature, and artistic culture of premodern Japan, from the time of the first recorded histories in the 800s through the abolition of the samurai class in the late 1800s. We will focus on the politics and aesthetic culture of the ruling elites in each period, from the heyday of the imperial court through the rise and eventual decline of the samurai warrior and the growth of Edo (Tokyo), with its new mode of early modern government and new forms of literature, theater, and art. Team taught by faculty from History and Comparative Literature, the course will examine historical texts alongside works drawn from literature, visual culture, and performing arts, and will ask students to consider how these different kinds of texts can shed light on one another. What is the difference between reading history and reading literature, or is it even meaningful to distinguish the two? By critically engaging in various kinds of textual analysis, this EDI course not only considers the relationship between politics, culture, and society in premodern Japan but also explores how we can attempt to know and understand different times and places. Primary texts will include court diaries, war tales, and fiction; laws and edicts; essays and autobiographies; noh, kabuki, and puppet theater; and tea ceremony, visual art, and architecture. Students should register under the prefix specific to the Division in which they want to receive credit.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
This course will provide students with an understanding of economic growth in East Asia and the region?s current microeconomic policy issues. For the purpose of this course, we will focus on China, Japan, Korea, and several Southeast Asian countries. Those interested in economic development and applied microeconomics characteristic of East Asia will find this course useful. We first examine the process of economic growth. Cross country comparisons will help draw similarities but also differences in the development processes. The second part of the course will focus on country or topic specific current economic issues such as, privatization in China, education and inequality in South Korea, demographic challenges in Japan, black markets in North Korea, disaster aid in Indonesia, and real estate in Singapore. The course will involve readings from various texts, policy reports, and academic journals. Students will learn how to read and analyze empirical evidence presented in these articles.
Prerequisite:
ECON 110 and ECON 120
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3.00 Credits
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the recognition of untapped mineral wealth, and Islamic resurgence have all led to an increased focus on Central Asia and its neighbors, Russia, China, the Middle East. This course will be an introduction to the Caucasus, the Central Asian Republics, Xinjiang and Mongolia and the interests of their neighbors, including now the United States in those areas. This will be a lecture course that will introduce the salient themes and issues that are necessary for understanding these areas. The course will inevitably be deeply comparative focusing on themes of "the clash of civilizations," the construction of national identities, notions of ethnicity and the treatment of ethnic minorities, resurgent religious movements, and the relation of state and civil society. This course will also function as an introduction to doing social scientific research on these areas and special attention will be devoted to the preparation of a research paper.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the relationship between body, gender, and religion or community in South Asia, using three countries--India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh--and three major religions--Induism, Buddhism, and Islam--as its focus. It begins by unpacking the critical theories in which the human body serves as map for society and vice versa. It then examines the South Asian discourses linking body with nation, population, or purity. It explores a South Asian sociology of the body that occasions solidarity as well as social suffering and structural violence. Along the way, it looks at a diverse set of practices that count or control bodies to produce social cohesion including yoga, sex selection, family planning, monasticism, and fundamentalism. The body emerges as a lens through which to view the production of a politics of identity as much as fragmentation or social hierarchy.
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3.00 Credits
Because mystifying references to Zen are strewn throughout American popular culture-from episodes of the Simpsons to names of perfumes and snack foods-most Americans have an image of Zen Buddhism that is disconnected from anything actually practiced in East Asia. This course offers a corrective to this image by familiarizing students with both the history of Zen and the historiographical roots of these popular perceptions. This course will examine the origins of Zen (Ch'an) in China, trace its transmission to Japan, and cover its development in both cultural contexts. It will conclude with an examination of Zen's unique role in American popular culture. The course will enrich the conventional image of Zen by addressing its involvement with power and governance, gods and demons, mummies and sacred sites, sex and violence, nationalism and scholarship. Texts will include selections from primary works in translation (The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, The Gateless Barrier, The Lancet of Seated Meditation) as well as selections from secondary literature including Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, Victoria, Zen at War, and Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy.
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3.00 Credits
This course provides a close examination of the six decades of the history of the People's Republic of China, from the 1949 Revolution to the present day. Through readings and discussion, we will explore the multiple political, economic, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the idealism of the "golden age" of Communist Party leadership (1949-65), the political violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the profound transformation of the Reform Era (1978-present) as well as the motors of change in China today. Course materials will include films, novels, and ethnographies, as well as secondary analyses. Please note that this is a discussion seminar and not a survey course.
Prerequisite:
(HIST 213 recommended)
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3.00 Credits
An unabating tension between conflict and cooperation has been an undercurrent of U.S.-Japan relations in the past 150 years, at times erupting into clashes reaching the scale of world war and at times allowing for measured collaboration. We will explore the U.S.-Japan relationship from the perspectives of both countries with a focus on how culture, domestic concerns, economic and political aims, international contexts, and race have helped shape its course and nature. This course will fulfill the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative by examining not just the diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Japan, but also how various types of interactions have influenced the dynamics of power between these two countries and have shaped the ways in which each country has understood and portrayed the other. Topics will include early U.S.-Japan encounters; the rise of both countries as imperial powers; the road to, and experience of, World War II; the politics and social history of the postwar American occupation of Japan; the U.S.-Japan security alliance; trade relations; and popular culture. Contemporary topics will also be discussed.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructors permission
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3.00 Credits
The partitioning of the Indian subcontinent has typically been understood as an event that began and ended in 1947, culminating in the independence of India and the birth of Pakistan. Eschewing these perceptions, however, by examining a longer history of this historical moment, this course seeks to offer an alternate account to this popular narrative. Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, we will trace the trajectory of the Indian nationalist movement and the demand for freedom from British colonial rule. Moving into the middle half of the twentieth century, we will examine the impact of decolonization on the region. Millions of people were directly affected by this cataclysmic event. Drawing on official archives, alongside sources as varied as memoirs, poetry, short stories, films, and oral history, students will re-visit this most significant event in South Asian history and engage with the historiographical debates that surround it. Using a combined chronological and thematic approach, this course will address themes such as nationalism, decolonization, secularism, communalism, the post-colonial nation-state, and identity politics. The main aim is to interrogate the impact of Partition on the state, society, and people of the subcontinent. What did Independence mean for India? Was Partition the only solution? Was Pakistan inevitable? And finally, why does Partition continue to matter today?
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3.00 Credits
This undergraduate seminar emphasizes writing, critical reasoning, and analytical skills. It explores a variety of Zen art forms {painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, tea ceremony, and gardens} as expressions or visualizations of the ideals and doctrines of Zen Buddhism in the context of Chinese and Japanese cultures. Highlights include Zen's aesthetic principles as manifested in painting; dry gardens; the tea ceremony and its related art forms; iconographic development in Zen art; political functions of Zen in China and Japan's samurai culture; and feminine motifs of the Bodhidharma (founder of Zen Buddhism) symbology.
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3.00 Credits
Asian Studies senior thesis.
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