Asian Studies

This course examines the material culture of modern China from the Republican period to the Reform era, with a focus on the Maoist era from 1949 to the late 1970s. By focusing on the design, production, consumption, and circulation of the material culture everyday life, this course will make sense of how the profound changes experienced during the twentieth century translated into the material, aesthetic, and cultural experiences of everyday people in China. It looks at how objects came to signify abstract concepts such as socialist modernity, feudal backwardness, or revolution, and ask how material goods can carry multiple associations, from the ideological to the aesthetic. The class will examine a variety of objects, including ceramics, consumer goods, enamelware, interior design and decor, lantern slides, photographs, posters, and textiles, paying particular attention to the relationships formed with objects and the cultural meanings ascribed to them.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the archaeological evidence for Southeast Asian history. It is generally possible to see Southeast Asian culture as a diverse historical complex of local pre-historical cultures, Indian-influenced cultures, Chinese-influenced cultures, Islamic-influenced cultures, and European-influenced cultures. Geological separation between insular and mainland Southeast Asia further complicates the situation. This course traces the development of each culture in Southeast Asian through an archaeological examination of its material culture. Course topics include: the age of European influence; the age of Islamic influenc; the age of Chinese influence; the pre-modern ceramic trade and Taiwan; sunken ships and underwater archaeology; Southeast Asian castles and towns.

This course is tailor-made for International Asian Studies Programme (IASP) students who want to engage in a short-term project. Students taking this course are required to write a research paper on a topic in international studies under the supervision of an academic staff member.

This course closely examines several Taiwanese films from the past two decades, and through them, discovers what prominent phenomena and changes have been taking place in Taiwan's social culture. Taiwanese films present themselves as various attempts to make conversations with the world that we call Taiwan and live in. This course explores and reflects on Taiwanese social culture by not just watching but also reading Taiwanese films. The course intends for the students to familiarize themselves with Taiwanese history in the recent past, crucial events, contemporary social issues as well as cultural conditions. Through this course students expect to understand the social development vis-a-vis cinema in Taiwan. Students look closely at the emergence of Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s as well as the socio-political and -cultural contexts in which it emerged. This course moves on to discuss various subject matters and social trends in Taiwan from the 1990s on; students also look at the films produced in Taiwan in relation to those matters and trends.

The course provides an overview of Korean history from the 19th century onward and its journey to modernity. The course demonstrates the effects of colonization and the division of North and South on the nation, society, and daily life.

This course will critically approach tradition as encompassing the plural “Asian traditions” and the notion of modernization or modernity, as they relate to transformational experiences of nation-making, identity-formation and self and communal actualization. Debates and critiques on Asian traditions and modernity are examined in relation to nation, gender, intellectualism, spirituality, heritage, visual arts, architecture and aesthetics in the Malay world in comparison to other Asian and global experiences.