Asian Studies

Through case studies, this course explores the port city and the 'maritime world' in Asia. It introduces the history of China's maritime world with a focus on the challenges it faced through encroachment by Western imperial powers. This course also examines Asia's colonial port cities, including Calcutta and Singapore, as sites of Western influence and modernization and also as sites of local resistance and transformation. 

This course is aimed to allow students to learn about Korean society and culture through digital media. Particular attention is given to the sociocultural impact of new digital technologies, such as KakaoTalk, Instagram, Tiktok, Generative AI, YouTube, webtoons, RPG/MMORPG games, blogs, data visualizations, and the companies that control these technologies. Throughout the semester, we are discussing and reading the many facets of this diverse and dispersed digital ecosphere where just about anyone with access to a computer or mobile device can integrate digital images, social media, recorded audio narration, video clips, and music alongside a range of delivery channels with meta-information (e.g., hashtags, rankings, and comments by users) to tell a story to a broad audience.

This course provides a review on the literati culture of East Asian societies, focusing on China and Korea. Course topics include : socio-economic and political status of literati in the traditional era, contributions of the literati in the formative period of the East Asian civilization and meaning and impact of literary activities in maintaining societies.

This course explores the urban experience as reflected in the Taiwan fiction from 1949 to the end of the 20th century. The focus is Taipei, but also includes the Peking experience of Lin Hai-yin, the New York and Chicago experience of Pai Hsien-yung, the Kyoto experience of Chu Tien-hsin and the Kaohsiung experience of Yang Ch'ing-ch'u. This first part readings include works of writers from different periods: Lin Hai-yin of the 50s (Memories of Peking), Pai Hsien-yung (Crystal Boys) and Wang Wen-hsin (Family Catastrophe) of the Modernist 60s, Chen Ying-chen (the “Washington Building” series) and Huang Chun-ming (“Two Sign Painters” and “The Young Widow”) of the Nativist-realist 70s, and Haung Fan (“Everybody Needs Chin Te-fu,” “Tung-pu Street,” and “Rainy Night”) and Chang Ta-chun (“A Guided Tour of the Apartment Complex,” “Alley 116, Liaoning Street,” and Wild Kids) of the urban-fiction 80s. The second group of readings focuses on five different themes, which are the city and marriage, the city and labor, the city and politics, the city and compounds of military families, and the city and consumption.

This course explores how Taiwan developed into a multilingual society from ancient times to the present, delving into: (a) How Taiwan's multilingual society was formed, and how language and phenomena appeared in Taiwanese society during each period; and (b) how the various language groups interact, and what kind of relationship between language and power is presented. The course also addresses interesting phenomena involving language and society, history, culture, and politics.

This course analyzes contemporary Korean politics from the four perspectives: international politics, political economy, political culture and political processes. From the perspective of international politics, it analyzes how Korean politics has been influenced by international politics surrounding the Korean peninsula. From the political economy perspective, the course introduces how Korean politics has influenced our economic development and vice versa. From the perspective of political culture, students learn to compare contemporary Korean culture with traditional political culture to find out what continuities and discontinuities there are between them. From the political process perspective. the course examines characteristics of Korean political process in comparison with other democratic countries.