Modern Korean History Seminar introduces students to recent books and historiographical debates shaping the research of Korea's 20th century history. It provides an introduction to the state-of-the-field from the waning years of the royal dynasty, through the colonial period, to the two Koreas.

The course surveys classic and most recent scholarship on socialist studies, compares socialist and Communist thought and practices in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea, covers a wide range of topics from the question of historiography to political ideology, from leadership and youth culture, from science and technology to environment and ecology in real socialism.

Global history has expanded the boundaries of academic exploration into regional and national trajectories. This course aims to tackle the challenge of reimagining the cultural-historical changes of modern China within global and planetary contexts. Adopting a longue durée perspective on cultural-historical changes in 20th century China, the course investigates selected moments and topics, ranging from the circulation of evolutionary and anarchist theories in the 1900s, the discourse on civilization preceding and during the New Culture in the 1920s, the 'science and metaphysics' debate and regional and ecological perspectives in the 1930s and '40s, to environmental discussions in the 1950s and post-1972. To gain a comprehensive understanding of modern Chinese cultural history within the context of the 20th century world, students will engage with scholarly works and conduct weekly case-specific research using primary resources. PhD students are encouraged to develop potentially publishable essays as their final projects.

This course explores the critical ways to engage with the global environmental crisis through the lens of humanities and social sciences. It is not an introduction to a ready-made academic field, neither "environmental history" nor "ecocriticism." It focuses on the critical approaches to the planetary environmental crisis. The slowness and ineffectiveness of global responses to climate change and biodiversity loss reality prompts several questions: What lies at the core of global environmental politics? How urgent is the current planetary crisis, and what is its true nature? Is the academic discourse on environmental criticism adequately addressing the crisis? How do environmental issues intersect with human histories and everyday life? And how does environmental and interspecies justice relate to social and political justice?

This seminar examines modern Chinese literary and cultural history by way of exploring the key concept of “writing as technology.” We ask the following questions: What constitutes writing and more specifically, Chinese writing? Does the advocacy for a new Chinese literature — voiced by the vanguards of the New Culture Movement — also indicate a revolution of Chinese writing? How is the idea of "writing as technology" brought to bear on the remaking of Chinese literature, culture, and ultimately a modern China? In what way does the Chinese story of "writing as technology" speak to other parts of the world and other forms of writing? In this seminar, we explore the multiple roles of (Chinese) writing — as an inscription process, a representation system, or a symbol of power — in textual production, information dissemination, literary canonization, cultural and political mobilization, as well as nation building in modern China. We investigate these processes through different genres of writing such as novels, travelogues, artworks, as well as different technologies of writing such as the book form, newspaper, journals, telegraphy, typewriter, and computer. By bringing together literary texts, material objects, and theoretical readings, we pursue an enriched understanding of the dynamics between writing, technology, and politics in twentieth century China.

This seminar will focus on various topics of Chinese Aesthetic Studies, such as, the aesthetic categories, the Aesthetic experiences in Chinese culture, the relation between Dao and Nature in landscape painting, the question of allegory. In the age of globalization, many main ideas about beauty and art in Chinese culture even arose some deep inspirations to the creation of Art avant-garde in the contemporary. Via the training of philosophical reflection on the themes of classical Chinese Aesthetics, this course will not only provide students the knowledge about the beauty of Chinese Art, but also add to their capacity of research on the discrimination of the aesthetic values of Chinese culture, even their continuation, persistence or change in our time.

A scholarly thesis project chosen by the student, approved by the Department, and supervised by Graduate Advisor. Consult the departmental website for more information.

A study of Japanese culture, history, and/or literature. Content depends on the instructor. When offered, the course will have a subtitle that describes its content.

This is a beginners' level language course, which is designed for those who have no or very limited background in learning Japanese. This course aims at a strong development of the four skills in modern Japanese; speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and it is expected by the end of the course that you will learn to communicate at the A1 level of CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

This course is a continuation of EAS120Y1 or EAS121H1 and designed for those who have completed a year-long introductory level Japanese course at a post-secondary institution (Reference levels: N5 of JLPT or A1 of CEFR). This course aims to further develop your basic knowledge and skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Japanese, as well as to provide relevant cultural information. By the end of this course, you should expect to be able to communicate at the level of N4 of JLPT, A2 of CEFR, or Intermediate Low of ACTFL.

This is a lower intermediate level language course, which is designed for those who have studied Japanese for two years in an academic institution and/or who have passed N4 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. This course aims to develop the four skills in modern Japanese: speaking, listening comprehension, reading, and writing. The emphasis is on context-appropriate communication in spoken and written Japanese.

This course is for students who have completed lower intermediate level Japanese (ACTFL), or approximately 360 hours of instruction at a postsecondary institution. It is open to those whose Japanese level is equivalent to that of N2 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) and /or to that of B1 level of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR), or mid to high intermediate level Japanese of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines.

This course is for students who have completed lower intermediate level Japanese (ACTFL), or approximately 360 hours of instruction at a postsecondary institution. It is open to those whose Japanese level is equivalent to that of between N2 and N3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) and/or to that of B1 level of CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

A study of Japanese culture, history, and/or literature. Content depends on the instructor. When offered, the course will have a subtitle that describes its content.

This is a beginners' level language course, which is designed for those who have some background in learning Japanese. This course aims at a strong development of the four skills in modern Japanese; speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and it is expected by the end of the course that you will learn to communicate at the A1 level of CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

This course is the second half of EAS220Y1 and designed for those who have completed three semesters of introductory-level Japanese courses at a post-secondary institution. Reference levels: N4-N5 of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) or A1.2 of CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). This course aims to further develop your basic knowledge and skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Japanese, as well as to provide relevant cultural information. By the end of this course, you should expect to be able to communicate at the level of N4 of JLPT, A2 of CEFR, or Intermediate Low of ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages).

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. Additionally, we will read works that make attempts at theorizing the possibilities of justice of different kinds, including decolonial justice. We will ask, for instance: What sets the discussions of colonial redress apart from the dominant, liberal discourse of distributive justice or the post-conflict transitional justice and reconciliation? What are the broader intellectual implications of the intensifying quests for redress, reparation, and reconciliation when considered within the ever-expanding carcerality and spaces of exception (e.g., prisons, refugee and migrant camps, the settler occupied spaces, 'low-intensity' conflict zones, etc.) and the failing juridico-political premises of modernity and how do we situate redress in that context? How has the discourse of universal human rights and other international regimes such as the human security paradigm and international feminist jurisprudence facilitated or hindered the colonial redress? What are the earlier aborted moments of decolonization and how are they theorized in recent discussion on racial capitalism, critique of liberal humanism, and the post-Enlightenment order of knowledge?

"Memory" has been deployed as one of the central concepts in the human and social sciences for the analyses of problems of power and knowledge, representation, subjectivities, and social identities. Concept of memory has also been regarded as a useful tool for questioning the teleological and developmental sense of time that underlies the colonial-modern temporality and historical consciousness. This course will offer several key texts that have been central to the discussions on philosophy of history, violence, trauma, and the politics of remembering and forgetting. We will also read several recent monographs related to Asia that, through examining various cultural production, including, the visual media, historical narrative, testimonies, law, social space, etc., critically explore the workings of power and memory in the production of nationalism, diasporic identities, loss, vengeance, revolutionary consciousness, and subalternity.

This course is designed for those interested in the methodological and theoretical dimensions of transnational cultural critique. Focusing on the entanglements of the North American and Asian geohistories, it brings together two distinct disciplinary trajectories. On one hand, the interrogation of Asian studies (or area studies, more generally) as Cold War knowledge formation has generated new politico-intellectual challenges increasingly since the 1990s. On the other, transnational American studies, Canadian studies, and Asian American studies have become attentive to the ways the U.S. and Canadian national ontologies have been shaped through their racialized, sexualized, and the formal and informal colonial relationship (e.g., "settler militarism") with different locations across Asia and the Pacific Islands/Oceans. The seminar will explore both the seminal works along with relatively new monographs that have emerged out of such interdisciplinary and transnational conversations. Our primary focus will be on the question of knowledge production. We will ask, for example, in what ways transpacific perspectives can be effective in illuminating the existing problems of knowledge production about Asia, the Pacific, the North America and beyond? What kind of critical thinking can be enabled by the diasporic and transpacific approaches and in what concrete ways have some scholars demonstrated its transformative quality in their own work? How might you deploy different transpacific perspectives in your projects and what are the questions you cannot ask otherwise?

This seminar probes “feminism” as an epistemological construct, where “woman” and other minoritized subjects are imagined differently in an array of “feminisms” from mid-twentieth to early twenty-first-century Asia and Asian America. Rather than a survey on women's histories, the readings center on exploring a range of methodological and philosophical approaches, from theories of yellow femininity to feminist science studies and queer theory. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and new technologies of social control, the readings think through new regimes of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and the politics of articulating difference differently. Working toward an intellectual history of difference as a concept and practice, we move from questions of visibility and representation to the temporalities and geopolitics of transnational feminist histories, and end with texts that extend the life of feminist and queer studies beyond liberal humanism.

This seminar will focus on theories of the Chinese arts by critically introducing various theoretical texts on music, painting, calligraphy, and literature, in the form of special treatises and as recorded in the Classics. It will cover topics such as the relation between li (ritual) and yue (music), the ideal of renpin (human personality) in portrait paintings, the aesthetic value of xian (leisure) in Chinese art, the humanistic spirit of Chinese literati painting. Other topics such as evaluation, taste, boundaries, playing, etc., will also be discussed in this course. Students will be expected to attend regularly, to have read the assigned readings carefully enough to engage actively in discussion, and to periodically lead discussion in class.

Readings from ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy. Beginning with linguistic (especially semantic) analysis of key words, structure and meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and texts as a whole, which forms the basis for philosophical examination.

A general survey of modern Taiwanese literature from 1949 to the present. It examines issues central to understanding the Taiwanese literary culture, such as historical/cultural context, oral/written language, self-identification, gender, and human rights.

This course explores ancient societies from prehistory to the Bronze Age of China from archaeological perspectives with a focus on Chinese collections at the Royal Ontario Museum. The course offers students an understanding of the origins and formation of Chinese civilizations.

This course explores topics in Archaeology of Ancient China.

A workshop format is used to explore problems encountered when translating Korean literary texts (fiction and poetry) into English. Practice with a variety of texts is accompanied by readings in translation theory to refine our understanding of translation and enrich our experience working with historical forms of Korean and English.

Few events in the twentieth century have exerted more lasting impact on the formation, transformation, and self-consciousness of modern Chinese culture than the May Fourth Movement. What is May Fourth and why does it matter? On the one hand, May Fourth ushered in an age of everything new — new culture, new science, and new revolution — jettisoning all things old and Chinese; on the other, it sought to reinvent a form of Chinese nationalism that would not only salvage the nation in peril but also maintain a certain continuity with what was understood to be Chinese. Imagining ourselves as the "new youth" of that new era, we take this seminar as a discursive center where intense cultural, intellectual, and political debates took place and we seek to understand the literary, aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications of this seismic events that came to be defined as the May Fourth Movement, rethinking its legacy, challenges, and unfulfilled promises.

For centuries past, pilgrims, merchants, pleasure-seekers, diplomats, and refugees have set out (on foot, on boats, on camels/horses) across Asia. What they wrote about traveling can tell us a great deal about how they dealt with the unknown or alien, about how they understood their places in the world, and also about how history and geography share a fuzzy boundary with imagined narratives. In this class we will read first-hand and second-hand accounts describing these travels across centuries, in order to understand not only the cultural contingencies but also the historical conditions for their travels. We will combine these texts with visual material to understand not only the physical mobility of people throughout history, but also the cultural mobility of knowledge, ideas, and narratives.

This course examines the history of the Chinese book from the earliest forms of the Chinese 'page' to modern print editions. We will begin with the formation of the Chinese writing system and the bones, shells, silk, and bamboo slips on which it was first inscribed in the centuries BCE. We will then trace the rise of specific commodities and technologies associated with medieval manuscript and early print cultures, including paper, the scroll and codex formats, and the woodblock — many of which were associated with Buddhist textual production. We will conclude by surveying scholarship on the social history of the Chinese book and book culture in the early modern and modern periods. Along the way we will draw on the methods and theories developed in diverse fields of study, including book history, philology, literacy studies, and archive studies to examine unique chapters in the history of the Chinese book.

This course reviews and develops the basic Marxist discourse of the revolutionary transition from capitalist society to communist society according to Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. In doing so, we learn key problems and concepts in the Marxist discourse of transition and revolution, e.g., the dictatorship of the proletariat, the 'withering away of the state,' and 'planning,' all problems that have animated the modern history of East Asia from the late 19th century into the 20th and early 21st centuries. In the second half of the course, we study contemporary discourses on revolution and transition from three perspectives: Uno Kozo's theory of capitalist crisis (or economic crisis); theories of feminist Marxism and anti-racism; and Foucault's theory of the subject. The goal of the course is to reconstruct the Marxist theory of revolution and transition in light of today's multiple crises of capitalism.