2025-2026 Graduate Courses

This course is designed for students who have already received instruction in Modern Standard Chinese or have knowledge of Chinese characters through other means. It aims to provide basic reading skills in Classical Chinese language necessary for any student planning to study pre-modern China. Class readings, glosses, and grammatical explanations in the textbook will help to build proficiency in vocabulary and grammar. Emphasis is on grammatical analysis and translation into English.

Conventional knowledge of the Cultural Revolution has been dominated by either themes of elite conflicts, or disembodied images of irrational crowds scouring the country with spears and sticks. This course will consider the Cultural Revolution as a field of historical research and theoretical inquiry. What was the meaning of Dzculturedz in the Cultural Revolution? To what extent was it revolutionary? If the Cultural Revolution was all about class and class struggle, what did really it mean to talk about class during the movement? How do we think about China's present in the context of the Cultural Revolution? The course will pose issues of historical, political, and theoretical perspectives, raising the question of how the Cultural Revolution can be made thinkable in the Chinese present.

The aim in this course is to teach you how to approach and contextualize primary Chinese poetic texts from the Tang dynasty, how to read commentaries on those texts, and how to translate the texts into English, using a wide variety of bibliographical materials.

What is media's role in shaping the materiality and definition of modern warfare? How has the concept of war changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries after the idea of total war appeared? From image-making machine and drone, to algorithm, satellite mapping, and artificial intelligence, war is the inventor of new sensory regimes that arise from the media environments constructed by warring empires. This course examines the entanglement between militarism and media technologies, and aesthetics and the war machine to historicize the militarization of the senses.

This course explores how reading has been defined, taught, and theorized from a comparative East Asian perspective. Focusing on key moments of transformation from antiquity through the early modern period in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Inner Asia, we will examine the core tools readers have used to make sense of texts. This course will further consider methodological strategies for the study of reading and the history of textual interpretation, drawing on research from other regional contexts.

This course will introduce students to selected topics in Hong Kong literature from the early 20th century to the present through thematic research seminars on its various aspects, such as language, diaspora, life, leftism, Sinophone, etc. Students will read Hong Kong literary texts and their scholarly literature from interdisciplinary perspectives for a basic overview of the historical developments of Hong Kong literature. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to find archival resources for the studies of Hong Kong literature, analyze Hong Kong literary texts from interdisciplinary approaches, and conduct independent research on Hong Kong literature.

This course serves as a practicum for graduate-level research in East Asian Studies, focusing on various critical approaches and methodological models relevant to contemporary issues in East Asian humanities research. In addition to introducing key topics, the course aims to enhance students' ability to formulate questions and engage in critical thinking. Students are expected to: 1) grasp the core issues and arguments presented by authors, 2) understand how scholars challenge conventional concepts and contribute to new knowledge frontiers, and 3) question, analyze, and interpretate assigned texts. To facilitate this, a set of guiding questions is provided to students weekly. In return, students are encouraged to contribute one written passage per class session, summarizing an author's main argument, posing a question about the reading, or offering a creative interpretation of a primary source assigned for the week. Analytical (critical) reading of scholarly and intellectual works, as well as close examination of primary sources, are the main focus areas of this training and exercise. Other requirements and assignments include critical review essays, close-reading writeups about primary sources, final research essay, as well as participation and presentation

The course is designed for those interested in the theories of violence and justice but with special emphases on the question of coloniality and the concept of the human. We will read several classic and recent key texts that have gained significance in recent humanities and social sciences as a result of the renewed sensibilities for the contradictions of colonial and racial capitalism.

This course explores topics in Archaeology of Ancient China.