Fall 2021 Featured Classes - Asia Center - College of Humanities

Featured Class Fall 2021: Peace and Conflict

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POLS 3530-090 | Peace and Conflict in Asia

Instructor: Eunbin Chung

Location: Online (Asynchronous)

This course seeks to provide an overview of regional cooperation and competition among Asian states. As Asian economies become increasingly integrated, the linkages between these societies are deepening and broadening. However, this region faces considerable challenges as well. Security issues are dominant, examples being North Korean nuclear weapons and territorial disputes in Southern and Western Asia and the seas. Issues concerning nationalism and unresolved historical debates provide other key challenges. How can we understand these challenges and how do we evaluate the responses of Asian countries? This course will combine prominent work from comparative politics and international relations, which will then become the tools we use to analyze the important issues and challenges facing Asian countries and the U.S. We will select from a number of case studies in contemporary Asia. Students are expected to become familiar with historical and current affairs in the Asian region and to exercise their understanding of basic theories of international relations for the analysis of events occurring there.

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HIST 3540 | The Japanese Empire

Instructor: Ryan Moran

Days: Monday/Wednesday

Time: 11:50 am- 1:10 pm
Location: GC 5680

This course focuses on the Japanese empire, which formally began in 1895 and ended in 1945. The Japanese empire has had profound implications for the diplomatic relations amongst nations on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. While this course spends the most amount of time dealing with the Japanese empire, it will also consider how this empire overlapped with and intersected the expansion of the US empire. While historians and scholars have often seen these two powers as diametrically opposed - with the US supporting racial progress and freedom and the Japanese focuses on blood purity and exclusion - we will witness some remarkable similarities in how the two powers dealt with minority populations amidst the buildup to war. This course will also ask you to consider the ways in which minority discourses either shifted and/or remained the same in the postwar period. In other words, how might have the legacies of Japanese imperialism continued into the postwar period. Finally, the course will end by asking us how we as citizens and scholars should attempt to remember war and empire.

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ENGL 3780 | Literatures of Global Asias

Instructor: David Roh

Days: Tuesday/Thursday

Time: 10:45 am- 12:05 pm
Location: Canvas

If the nineteenth century was marked by a cultural and political focus on the United Kingdom, and the twentieth century by the United States, then what does the twenty-first bring? In the fall of 2011, the Obama administration introduced a new direction in foreign policy—the “pivot” toward the Pacific as the United States shifted its gaze to the Asia Pacific. The administration’s declaration was the culmination of a series of maneuvers that long preceded it, but it would mark the beginning of the twenty-first century’s focus on the rise of global Asias. However, there are nuances that can only be captured through a cultural and literary lens; the Asia Pacific is not a monolith, but many different countries with a wide array of cultures and histories. This course focuses on Asian and Asian American literatures that are global in scope, scale, and imagination; it interrogates the transnational flow of Asian and Asian American labor, capital, bodies, and culture.

Classical Chinese Philosophy PHIL 4140/5193/6140

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PHIL 4140/5193/6140 | Classical Chinese Philosophy

Instructor: Eric Hutton

Days: Monday/Wednesday

Time: 1:20-2:45 pm
Location: CRCC 215

This course will survey seven main thinkers of the “classical” period of Chinese philosophy (approx. 550-221 BCE): Kongzi (Confucius), Mozi, Mengzi (Mencius), Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi. These thinkers developed a complex and rich debate about ethics, human nature, moral psychology, and self-cultivation. The positions they established greatly influenced later Chinese history, including the development of Buddhism, and they influenced philosophical discourse in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as well. Thus, understanding these early debates is an important stepping-stone for understanding East Asian thought generally. Readings will consist mainly of primary texts in translation, with some secondary literature. No previous knowledge of Chinese language or history is necessary.