Global Asia (GLA)

This course explores Asia's global connectivity from the past to the present, surveying the core cultures in the East Asia, South Asia and Inner Asia, and focusing particularity on the transformation of the different Asian civilizations into modern nation states.

This 200-level course seeks to give students an historical introduction to the growth of South Korean cinema since the 1950s. It shows that national cinema has played a significant role in shaping the collective identity of South Korean state since the end of the Korean conflict, facilitating the country’s transformation from a military dictatorship into a democratic state, and in advancing the soft power expansion of South Korea today.

This course introduces students to the historical development of Japanese Manga and Anime in the post-WWII era. It examines the transformation of traditional Japanese artistic styles and their influence on contemporary manga, anime, and video game design.

This course seeks to give students an introduction to the history, composition and consecutive artistic influence of the two great Indian epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata. The continuous retelling of the two tales through art, fiction and various contemporary media i.e. TV dramas, graphic novels and Bollywood films will be looked at in detail. Due to the length of the Mahabharata, the class will rely on a prose version of the work as well selected cantos and other scholarly texts in order to grasp the key message of the themes examined in the epic. This class will also watch TV series adaptations of the epics.

This course provides the students with an overview on Indian Civilization from 2500 BCE until the present. In addition to tracing the major political events, this course explores the economic, social, ecological, and cultural developments that accompanied and contributed to the development of Indian civilization, as well as shape and improve their skills in analyzing and interpreting historical data.

This course identifies the roles and experiences of major historical actors in Asia. It seeks to capture the individuality and dramas that marked critical periods in Asian history, while also examining the ways that individuals helped shape and remake society around them. Case studies include China’s only emperor Wu Zhao, Mongol ruler Chinggis Khan, Manchu Emperor Qianlong, Gandhi, Japanese modernizer Fukazawa Yukichi, Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, etc.

This course looks at the issue of identity formation in modern Asia (1800-2010s). The question of identity lies at the heart of much contemporary debate in and beyond our region of study. We will interrogate what we mean by “identify” – if it is a thing to be possessed, an essence in the character of a community or people, or something more complex, fluid and changing, or whether its exists at all. Through the course, these questions will be posed with reference to specific historical examples from South Asian continent. The focus of the course is on the cultural, social, and political history of South Asia since the 19th century, but we also study how aspects of the enormous social and economic change that took place during this period affected cultural and political processes today.

The United States and China are undoubtedly the two most powerful countries in the world today. Their bilateral relationships is clearly among the most important between any two states. Yet, little attention is paid by the media, and even policy actors, to the historical trends and underlying dynamics in this relationship.

This interdisciplinary Global Asia seminar studies how debates about culture and governance interact in the studies of Asia.

This course discusses the complicated relations between Confucian ethics and economic development in a variety of settings, and the rise of "multiple capitalisms" in East Asia.