Asian Studies

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.

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.

This course provides understanding of the post-war political and economic development model in East Asia, the historical background and basic processes of the rise of East Asia, China's Reform and Opening Up policy and socialist modernization, and lays a solid foundation for studying East Asian problems. The course aims to comparatively analyze the political development of East Asian countries and regions, covering roughly the 10 ASEAN countries and China, Japan and Korea. The political development of East Asia is deeply influenced by domestic factors such as the socio-economic changes of various countries and the international factors such as the United State's East Asian policy and globalization. The course content includes the rise of East Asia and its historical and international background, the analysis of the economic and political culture of the East Asian development model, and the analysis of the political development of major countries and regions such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

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.

Images are as important as ideas in defining and transmitting cultural patterns, and neither can be understood without exploring the other. This course looks into the core of Japanese culture to understand the ideas that have been used to define Japanese culture and the connections these ideas have with images. Topics include Japanese aesthetic ideals, ethical paradigms, festivals, and visual arts. 

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. 

This course explores archaeological cultural heritage in East and Southeast Asia and how material remains of past human behavior in this broad region play an active role in shaping human perceptions of self and others in the present day. Archaeological cultural heritage as an academic field and as a profession is rapidly evolving in East and Southeast Asia, with governmental policy making, political motivations such as nation-building and nationalistic agendas, globalization, economic expansion and development, and many other factors shaping choices for how and why archaeological sites, objects, architecture, and landscapes are preserved, protected, and presented. This course focuses on these political roles of archaeological cultural heritage and examines them in conceptual and theoretical terms using a necessarily anthropological, interdisciplinary approach with models and methods from archaeology, critical museology, material cultural theory, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, among others. Case studies from around East and Southeast Asia, including Taiwan, mainland China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, and Malaysia serve to provide insight into the relationship between archaeological heritage and nationalism to explore such related issues as the domination of Eurocentrism in heritage practice and theory (and see new alternatives arising); heritage's role in identity and ideology; contested ownership; commodification and value; memorialization and "dark heritage" (e.g., post-conflict or post-trauma sites); indigenous and minority rights and stakeholding; the impact of looting and the illicit antiquities trade; and heritage tourism.