Courses

Critical inquiry into the myth of a homogeneous Japan through analysis of how Japanese film and media historically represents “others” of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities, including women, black residents, ethnic Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ minorities, the disabled, youth, and monstrous others like ghosts.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the complex cultural and political paradigms of late socialism from a transnational perspective by focusing on the literature, cinema, and popular culture of the Soviet Union and China in 1980s. How were intellectual and everyday life in the Soviet Union and China distinct from and similar to that of the West of the same era? How do we parse “the cultural logic of late socialism?” What can today’s America learn from it? Examining two major socialist cultures together in a global context, this course queries the ethnographic, ideological, and socio-economic constituents of late socialism. Students analyze cultural materials in the context of Soviet and Chinese history. Along the way, we explore themes of identity, nationalism, globalization, capitalism, and the Cold War.

A research course designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students working on early, imperial or modern China in preparation for their theses. Students use their own research topic as a focus to explore and utilize the wealth of primary sources and tools available in China, Japan, and the West. As a group, we learn about the history of Chinese book collecting, classification of knowledge, the compilation of the encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng and the canon Siku quanshu, as well as the darker aspects of censorship from ancient times to the present. For native speakers of Chinese, the course includes secondary literature in English and instruction in professional writing in English about China. Other topics include Chinese bibliographies, bibliophiles’ notes, specialized dictionaries, maps and geographical gazetteers, textual editions, genealogies and biographical sources, archaeological and visual materials, major Chinese encyclopedias, compendia, and databases, and evaluating variations and reliability. The course is supplemented by materials from the Beinecke rare books collection. 

Readings in ancient and middle-period Chinese poetry, from the beginnings of the tradition through the Song dynasty. 

In this course, students read key works of Korean literature in English translation from the early twentieth century to the present day. The specific course topic varies by term. Primary sources include long-form novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction writing by representative authors, as well as literary scholarship on themes and historical context relevant to the materials. The readings in this course are arranged in roughly chronological order, requiring us to examine Korea’s colonial modernization process in the first half of the twentieth century, the authoritarian regimes of South Korea from 1948 to 1987, and South Korea’s integration into the neoliberal world order after democratization. 

This course explores how sex and sexuality have been discussed, regulated, and represented across East Asia and its diaspora, with particular focus on non-normative sexualities and gender variance. Course materials are organized in roughly chronological order, moving from scholarship on homoerotic practices in premodern East Asia; the introduction of modern sexological discourse in the early twentieth century; literary expressions of sexual deviance from the Cold War era (1945–1987); and LGBTQ subjectivities, cultures, and social movements since the 1990s.

Critical inquiry into the myth of a homogeneous Japan through analysis of how Japanese film and media historically represent “others” of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities, including women, black residents, ethnic Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ minorities, the disabled, youth, and monstrous others such as ghosts.

A research course in Chinese studies, designed for students with background in modern and literary Chinese. Students explore and evaluate the wealth of primary sources and research tools available in China and in the West. For native speakers of Chinese, introduction to the secondary literature in English and instruction in writing professionally in English on topics about China. Topics include Chinese bibliographies; bibliophiles’ notes; specialized dictionaries; maps and geographical gazetteers; textual editions, variations, and reliability of texts; genealogies and biographical sources; archaeological and visual materials; and major Chinese encyclopedias, compendia, and databases.

Readings in ancient and middle-period Chinese poetry, from the beginnings of the tradition through the Song dynasty.

An examination of key texts and problems in the study of early Chinese literature. Primary sources vary from year to year but could include the Shijing, Chuci, Shiji, early sources of anecdotal literature, and the fu.

This seminar covers the methods and problems of researching and writing Japanese film history. We review the theoretical issues involved in historiography in general and film historiography in particular, and then consider how these are pertinent to the study of Japanese cinema history. Our approach is critical, as we examine several recent examples of Japanese film historiography, as well as practical, as we explore various methods and strategies for researching Japanese film history. We particularly focus on the Japanese cinema’s historical relation to the nation, especially in terms of how cinema may help us historicize the nation, and vice versa. Students develop their own research project using the unique collections at Yale. 

This course examines the political, social, and material worlds of mobile pastoralist societies that shaped East Asian history from the 3rd century BCE through the 14th century CE. Groups including the Xiongnu, Turks, Khitan Liao, Jurchen-Chin, and Mongols built complex polities that rivaled and often conquered their sedentary agricultural neighbors, yet they have frequently been dismissed as "barbarian" raiders or excluded from definitions of "states" altogether. We trace the historical trajectories of steppe societies as distinct from yet deeply entwined with the histories of other East Asian regions, asking: How did mobile pastoralists organize political power? How did their interactions with agrarian states shape both pastoralist and sedentary societies? And fundamentally, what does it mean to call something a ‘state’? Through archaeological evidence, historical texts, and comparative analysis, students explore how pastoralist groups have been studied, represented, and misunderstood. We examine political organization, military structures, material culture, foodways, and daily lifeways, while interrogating the categories and assumptions scholars use to make sense of the past. The structuring question of this course—Do pastoralist states exist, and is that a meaningful category of analysis?—speaks to broader debates about power, identity, and state formation that extend beyond East Asia.