South & SE Asian Studies

This course examines the military situation of Singapore and how it is governed by its place in the Malay world and its fluctuating strategic value to great powers. Students learn the 700‐year approach to the island’s military history and examine the relative impact of its distant and recent past on its present situation. 

Using New Express Plus: Burmese by Masahiko Katō as the course textbook, this course teaches the fundamentals of spoken Burmese. 

This course deepens understanding of Singapore history through an examination of different representations of history: academic scholarship, social memory and oral history, heritage. Each section incorporates fundamental concepts and debates behind the production of history, together with the application of these ideas to specific Singapore case studies. At the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze Singapore history as a whole in terms of historiography and heritage studies, whilst gaining familiarity with the treatment of key issues in Singapore's past.

This course examines the intersection of involuntary labor, transnational migration, and sexual exchange, broadly categorized under “human trafficking.” While this issue has gained urgency with the adoption of the United Nations’ Palermo Protocol (2000), historical inquiries reveal that commercial sexual labor has existed in various forms and under different guises throughout history. This course situates contemporary human trafficking within a continuum with historically similar practices, some of which were considered “indigenous” to Asia. This course looks at traditional forms of servitude and sexual exchange in east and southeast Asia, as well as the contemporary transnational migration of women for the sex industry. It engages with historiographic and ethnographic accounts on slavery, dependency, and other forms of servitude in Asia as a necessary background to the examination of modern practices of using women for sexual services.  

The course delves into the social and economic conditions that have historically facilitated the growth of the sex industry, including colonial establishments, and military mobilization, and the so-called “white slave” trade that spurred abolitionist movements by feminist and religious groups in the early 20th century. For contemporary cases, it examines practices that have been associated with human trafficking, such as prostitution and international brokered marriages. The course investigates the possibility of agency among exploited women, potentially challenging the predominant victimhood narrative. It concludes with a discussion on the social norms surrounding payment for intimate relations. 

This survey course covers the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China. It covers the pre-1949 revolutionary struggles, socialist transformation and construction in the 1950s, political movements from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, and post-Mao economic and political reforms, up to the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s personal rule. The permeation of the party-state’s power into diverse aspects of social life is one key feature of communist rule, and this entire course closely integrates national and international political events with the daily lives of Chinese people. It examines historical transformations in the fields of economics, culture and the arts, family and gender relations, public health, and environment and ecology during the century, throughout the study of revolutionary wars, political movements, and reforms.