Yonsei University

Korea began to adopt Western culture in the nineteenth century and developed their own hybridized music culture into the twentieth-first century. This class examines contemporary Korean musical culture alongside the history of Korea and explores Korean music culture as a global phenomenon. The course covers Korean aesthetic and sensibility in Korean musical culture with select examples from Korean traditional music, Korean’s children music, Korean arts songs of the Colonial Korea period, popular music (K-pop), Korean drama music, Korean film music, and K-classical music.

This is an advanced Korean language course. Students can communicate fluently using Korean grammar and expressions in various contexts; understand Korean way of thinking through various types of Korean materials containing various sources of Korean society and culture. This course is to achieve academic Korean language ability. Upon completion of the courses, students should be able to take university courses taught in Korean. 

The course examines popular music, not as isolated artistic texts, but situated within a wider context. The course is organized around the historical survey of popular music in modern Korea. It looks at and listens to a variety of musical genres and styles that emerged and developed in modern Korea from yuhaengga in the colonial era up until k-pop today, by situating them within a wider socio-cultural, political-economic context, as well as in relation to global musical trends.

Visions of the end of the world have become common in the for the past decades both in literature and in popular culture. This course examines the narratives dealing with the collapse of civilization and the rebirth of a new society. How have novels and films in the post-World War Two era confronted the fears of social disintegration, ecological disaster, and technological cataclysms? What might these narratives tell us about the world in which we are currently living, which appears perched on the edge of drastic and possibly calamitous changes? The course analyzes novels by George Stewart, Kurt Vonnegut, and Lionel Shriver and views classic and recent films dealing with the end of the world, of humankind, or even of culture itself. Students analyze speculative fiction and develop their own ideas about the future by extrapolating from the narratives studied in the course.

This course offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the politics, economics, and foreign policy of major nations in East Asia. It explores how their prewar historical legacies continue to affect East Asian foreign relations. The course also analyzes the ways in which China, Japan, the two Koreas and Russia have attempted to meet the challenges of a globalized world economy and politics as well as the challenges of past history and security threats. The course also attaches great importance to the study of U.S. relations with these major countries in East Asia.

This course analyzes the political economy of East Asia in the context of economic globalization and international political dynamics. It also focuses on globalization, economic crises, and other topics in political economy that revolves around the issue of power conflict between hegemonic countries like US and China and its effect on East Asian countries. The first part of this course focuses on major theories to study political economy in Asia, and the second part addresses various important issues in contemporary East Asia. 

The course examines the important role that product and service innovation plays in a firm’s long-term strategic sustainability.

A general survey of the historical development of various aspects of Korean civilization, including politics, society and economy, thought and religion, and the arts. Half of the course covers the main themes in Korean history and their historical interpretations, from prehistoric times to the modern period. It also pays special attention to social systems, religion and culture, as well as the changing geopolitics of the region. The discussions take a comparative approach by examining contemporaneous China, Japan, and northeast Asia, identifying similarities and differences between the regions. Through this course, students have a better understanding of the challenges Korea faced in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the historical processes through which Korea, China, and Japan developed.