Courses

This project-driven course explores how historical spaces and places can be represented, imagined, and analyzed through the creation of digital objects. What limitations and challenges come with this medium? What might it contribute? Our concept of space is broad and includes spatial imaginaries and practices, from sacred geographies to trade networks and the organization of the home. While the primary focus of our shared readings is on Japan, student projects may be situated in any part of East Asia. The course includes introductory training in GIS software, but students are welcome to design projects that make use of other technologies. 

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ruled mainland China since 1949 and has been a key part of Chinese politics since the 1920s. This seminar provides an introduction to the history of the CCP from its founding in 1921 up to the 2020s. We look at some of the concerns that have stayed with the party and its leaders since it was set up and at questions that have animated the party in particular phases of its development.  The seminar discusses issues relating both to domestic and international affairs and pays particular attention to turning points in the party’s history.

Exploration of Yale’s rich historical connections to Japan. Focus on use of the University’s museum and library collections to learn about various aspects of the Japanese past, from ancient times to the post-World War II era.

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 students an opportunity to explore recent English-language scholarship on the history of modern Japan (post 1868).

This course examines how historians can recreate, represent, and analyze the spaces of the past—and those who imagined, built, and inhabited them. We think critically about spatial history and the use of GIS and other digital historical approaches, exploring through our own hands-on work their potential to deepen our understanding of human history. The course culminates in the creation of a digital object, developed individually or in teams. These projects will progress through a series of milestones, accompanied by presentations on published objects and readings that investigate the challenges, limitations, and contributions of digital history and spatial representation.

Our concept of space is broad and crosses different scales.  It includes spatial imaginaries and practices, from sacred geographies to trade networks and the organization of the home.  The instructors are best equipped to offer detailed guidance on Japan, but projects may also focus on China or Korea, or take East Asia as a point of departure while extending beyond the region.  The course includes introductory training in GIS software, but participates are welcome to design projects that use other technologies.

Arts of China is a window to the nation’s history, culture, society, and aesthetics. This course introduces the visual arts of China from the prehistoric period to the twentieth century. We look at the archaeological findings (including pottery, jade, and bronze vessels) as well as ancestor worship and belief in posthumous souls and immortal mountains. We look at the art and architecture inspired by Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. We investigate the place of Chinese painting and calligraphy in court and elite cultures and explore how these arts intertwine with politics, printing culture, and popular culture. Lastly, we investigate the decorative arts, like ceramics, textiles, and furniture, as well as the art and architecture that reflect foreign tastes. 

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.

Arts and theory of the Japanese garden with emphasis on the role of the anthropogenic landscape from aesthetics to environmental precarity, including the concept of refugium. Case studies of influential Kyoto gardens from the 11th through 15th centuries, and their significance as cultural productions with ecological implications.

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.