Asian Studies

This course is designed to acquaint students with the concepts and values underlying the rhetorical traditions in China and the West (esp. rhetorical traditions which affect how native speakers of Chinese and English communicate). Students are expected to better understand the differences and similarities which affect the key concepts and values in rhetorical practice across cultures. Materials that will be studied and discussed include the Analects (Chinese and English bilingual version) by Confucius and Aristotle’s On Rhetoric (English translation), and important literature on comparative rhetoric with a focus on Chinese and Western (mainly Greco-Roman) rhetorical traditions.

This course aims to situate your fieldwork experiences within the context of China’s unprecedented socioeconomic transformations. It provides you with conceptual and methodological tools for approaching their field placements; to evaluate your own experiences and observations through critical reflection; and to integrate your understanding of the everyday life of Chinese through written exercises and ethnographic practices.

This course offers an introduction to the field of transcultural studies. It explores some of the processes of creative adaptation of foreign ideas and interactions between cultures on multiple levels to better understand human communication. Upon completion, students are expected to acquire knowledge of the transcultural approach and to understand the constructed nature of concepts such as boundaries, culture, nation, society, and civilization.

This course systematically introduces the core issues and cutting-edge research problems of international sinology. Through case analysis and in-depth theoretical discussion, this course teaches the academic methods and theoretical framework of international sinology and introduces historical methods on society, material, thought, literature, and multidisciplinary and cross-cultural comparison. The main content includes but is not limited to research topics such as ancient history, literature, anthropology, and ancient China from a cross-cultural perspective under international sinology.

This course examines the configuration of space, place, and identity in relation to languages, gender, and social class in Sinophone literature and culture. Engaging the issues of multiculturalism, linguistic plurality, narrative heteroglossia, and transnational im/mobility. This class probes the concept of the Sinophone and how it relates to, complicates, and challenges China and Chineseness. What is the Sinophone? How does it inform our readings of texts produced outside and on the margin of China and Chineseness? In challenging existing centers of power and hegemony, does the Sinophone form new centers? How does migration during different time periods and across different space shape the cultures of these Sinophone sites? Building on recent scholarship on Sinophone studies, this course draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories to examine a culturally and geographically diverse body of contemporary Sinophone fiction and film.

This course takes a comparative perspective to look into early Chinese and Daoist philosophy. It starts with textual reading, follows with comparative ideas, including freedom and fate, illness and death, disabilities and social exclusion, war and peace, tolerance and toleration, language and social practices, etc. It focuses on group discussions, and research methodology.

Through anthropological and historical approaches, this course delves into religious and spiritual beliefs, ritual practices, and magical material culture in Thailand, offering a nuanced view towards modern Thai society as well as cultivating the appreciation of religious plurality. 

This course examines Chinese leadership. Topics to be covered include the Chinese leadership structure, the characteristics of the party-state, the dynamics between individuals and institutions, the channels of elite recruitment, the educational and occupational characteristics of Chinese officials, the relationship between various elite groups (political, economic, and military), and factional politics. 

This course introduces Asian, European, and American material from the late nineteenth century to nearly the present day, concentrating on social and cultural themes such as industrialization, colonialism, science and race, technology and war, computers and global telecommunications and biotechnology and the human genome project. It is taught as a series of cases illustrating important events and multiple themes. The proposition that modern science and technology have been 'socially constructed', reflecting political and cultural values as well as the state of nature, is examined closely. The course includes theoretical material and an empirical focus.

This course explores an appreciation of the unique aesthetics of fiction and non-fiction film from a holistic perspective.  The course looks at works from author-directors; documentaries, and anthropological films (also known as visual ethnography), which are categorized into different themes; the course them aims to see different expressions of the same theme in different films with a comparative discussion of films from other cultures.

The selected films are all Chinese language films, which means the class will enter the context of Chinese culture through the film text. It is not only the lines told in Chinese and the scenes taken on the ground in China, but the “the Chinese emotional presentation” and "the Chinese way of viewing.” 

The course also discusses a range of possibilities arising from the collision of film as an art form with the Chinese context.