Courses

Directed reading and research on a topic approved by the DGS and advised by a faculty member (by arrangement) with expertise or specialized competence in the chosen field. Readings and research are done in preparation for the required master’s thesis.

In the decades after 1979, China’s adherence to key tenets of the US-backed liberal international economic system enabled it to achieve middle income status. After the 2008-9 global financial crisis, however, weaknesses in the US model combined with China’s own sustained growth increased Beijing’s confidence in an alternative, state-oriented model that increasingly underpins China's foreign economic engagement. This course examines the basis of China’s economic strength as a precursor to investigating the Belt and Road initiatives, trade, investment, and development policies, international organization advocacy, business practices, and other aspects of China’s growing international economic footprint. These factors are analyzed from the perspective of China’s internal dynamics, competition with the United States, and overall foreign policy goals and are evaluated for their impact on the prevailing global economic order. Planned guest speakers include senior representatives from the State Department and the Embassy of China in Washington, as well as experts on Chinese investment in the United States and Taiwan’s role in global technology supply chains. In-class simulations focus on China’s WTO accession and the Belt and Road Initiative versus the Indo-Pacific Strategy. The course is taught by a practitioner who spent over a decade managing US government economic policy in and on China.

Underlying causes of current issues facing China traced back to their origins in the premodern period. Topics include economic development, corruption, environmental crises, gender, and Pacific island disputes.

Did any society attain early modernity before Europe did so in 1500–1600? China did during the Song dynasty (960–1275). Consideration of economic output, meritocratic recruitment of the bureaucracy via civil service examinations, printing, levels of education and literacy (among both men and women), urban life, and foreign trade. Seminar members may choose to do either a research paper comparing China and Europe or a historiograhic essay.

This course offers a visual history of the art objects and other material goods that people set in motion, physically and imaginatively, across the Silk Roads regions of Eurasia from antiquity through the beginnings of the medieval era. It ranges across a variety of cultural productions and sites encompassing the agrarian and nomadic zones of Eurasia from the Bronze Age through the 7th-century rise of the first Caliphates in the west and the efflorescence of the Sui-Tang cosmopolis in the east.

This class explores the theme of “time” in Chinese art from the traditional to the contemporary period. Drawing upon scholarship on Chinese philosophical understanding of time and clockworks, this course explores how art made manifest notions of the future, past, and present, the passage of time, ksana, aeons, eternity and deadlines. This class also investigates manipulations of time—how the unique format, artistic ideas and medium and materials of Chinese art helped to pause, rewind, compress and shorten time. Observing such temporalities, we analyze narrative murals and handscrolls, “this life” v. afterlife in funeral art, paintings of immortality, the significance of bronze corrosion in antiquarianism, uses of the past in traditional Chinese painting and contemporary art, the future and agelessness in movies and digital art, the materiality and nostalgia of old photography and time-based artworks, as well as the history of People’s Republic of China as presented at the Tian’anmen Square.

Exploratory and investigative in nature, this seminar is conceived as a baseline engagement with the intersections of art, religion, science, commerce, war, and diplomacy at Kyoto and Nagasaki in the age of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English political and mercantile interaction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It addresses a set of themes whose point of entry is the entangled character of visual production and reception in Japan at a tipping point in the emergence of global modernity, when what were called the Nanbans—“Southern Barbarians,” i.e. Europeans—began to arrive in Japan. The question of whether or not much-theorized nomenclatures such as baroque, rococo, mestizo, and even global modernity are pertinent to analysis from the Japanese and Asian perspective constitutes the backbone of the course and its primary objective in the study of a corpus of visual materials spanning the European and Asian cultural spheres. As such the seminar is not only about Japan, per se, or about Japanese objects, or the shogunal eye. It is equally about how Japan and Japanese objects and materials, along with objects and materials from other places, figured in a greater community of exchange, friction, confrontation, conquest, and adaptation in times when Portuguese marauders, Jesuit missionaries, Muslim traders, and Japanese pirates found themselves in the same waters, on ships laden with goods, making landfall in the domains of Japan’s great military hegemons.

This seminar explores the issue of authenticity in thirteenth through twentieth century Chinese paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery. Students become familiar with the different schools of connoisseurship and the major debates surrounding authenticity in the field of Chinese painting. Students learn about the methods for authenticating an attribution, as well as the rationale behind the dating provided by the gallery. Calligraphical inscriptions and seals on the works, as well as their physical condition, related conservation reports, and provenance are consulted as well. This class makes frequent visits to the gallery. Reading ability of Chinese is not required.

Introductory course for students with no previous background in Japanese. Development of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, including hiragana, katakana, and kanji characters. Introduction to Japanese culture and society. Individual tutorial sessions to improve oral communication skills. 

Continued development in both written and spoken Japanese. Aspects of Japanese culture, such as history, art, religion, and cuisine, explored through text, film, and animation. Online audio and visual aids facilitate listening, as well as the learning of grammar and kanji. Individual tutorial sessions improve conversational skills.

Advanced language course that further develops proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Reading and discussion materials include works by Nobel Prize winners. Japanese anime and television dramas are used to enhance listening and to develop skills in culturally appropriate speech. Writing of essays, letters, and criticism solidifies grammar and style. Individual tutorial sessions improve conversational skills.

Close reading of modern Japanese writing on current affairs, social science, history, and literature. Development of speaking and writing skills in academic settings, including formal speeches, interviews, discussions, letters, e-mail, and expository writing. Interviews of and discussions with native speakers on current issues. Individual tutorial sessions provide speaking practice.