South & SE Asian Studies

This course examines a number of areas in Singapore's domestic politics. Topics include key determinants of Singapore's politics, key structural-functional aspects of Singapore's domestic politics, the extent to which nation building has taken place in Singapore, and the key challenges facing Singapore and its future domestic politics. The course also studies issues related to nation building, state-society relations, and the likely nature of future developments and challenges. 

This course examines English as a historical, sociocultural, ideological and personal reality for Hong Kong speakers. It covers the legitimacy of Hong Kong English (HKE) as a variety in its own right and its sociolinguistic backing; the attempts at drawing up a phonology and a morphosyntax of HKE as well as the complications involved; the current standing of HKE in comparison with the ‘inner-circle’/‘standard’ varieties (British and American English) and other varieties (e.g., other Asian Englishes); and the values of HKE as an ideological concept, a fiction, and/or as protean yet homely, lay experience.

This is an introductory course to studying screen cultures in their medium specificity by looking at adaptations that make narrative borrowings explicit. Students learn how to diagnostically write about and think with films, which rework popular and literary tales.

This course provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the social and political history of Thailand from pre-Ayutthaya (1351-1767) to the Thonburi/Bangkok period (1767-1782) to the modern nation-state of the present time. Emphasis is on the modern era when the country confronted western colonization, and its reactions from within, as well as a series of nationwide reforms, and the process of change and persistence of the nation-state up to the present.