This course will explore how two intertwined ways of life - pastoral nomadism and settling down for religious, educational, and economic reasons - have shaped the cultural, artistic, and intellectual traditions of Mongolia. In this course students will learn about Mongolian pastoral nomadism, and how the Mongolian economy, literature, and steppe empires were built on grass and livestock. We will also explore how Mongolians have also just as consistently used the foundations of empire to build sedentary monuments and buildings, whether funerary complexes, Buddhist monasteries, socialist boarding schools, and modern capitals. Over time, these cities have changed shape, location, and ideology, all the while remaining linked to the mobile pastoralists in the countryside. We will also explore how these traditions of mobile pastoralism and urbanism were transformed in the 20th century, by urbanization, communist ideology, and the new reality of free-market democracy, ideological pluralism, and a new mining dependent economy. We will meet modern painters and musicians who interweave Mongolian nomadic traditions with contemporary world trends, and consider the future of rural traditions in a modern world. As a Penn Global Seminar, students will be selected in coordination with the Global Seminar Program, prioritizing students who can demonstrate interest in and some preliminary thought about he course topics and issues.

This gateway course surveys the history of Korea from early times to the present. We will study the establishment of various sociopolitical orders and their characteristics alongside major cultural developments. Covered topics include: state formation and dissolution; the role of ideology and how it changes; religious beliefs and values; agriculture, commerce, and industry; changing family relations; responses to Western imperialism; and Korea's increasing presence in the modern world as well as its future prospects. Students will also be introduced to various interpretive approaches in the historiography.

Survey of the civilization of Japan from prehistoric times to the present.

Survey of the civilization of Japan from prehistoric times to the present.

Survey of the civilization of Japan from prehistoric times to the present.

Survey of the civilization of Japan from prehistoric times to the present.

Survey of the civilization of Japan from prehistoric times to the present.

Registration for PhD students who have finished coursework and are writing their dissertation.

In 1800, Beijing ruled the world's biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire. The Emperor, ruler of China's Qing dynasty, was a sage monarch, a Confucian scholar, even a Bodhisattva on the throne. But his not too distant ancestors had been hunters, ginseng smugglers, and soldiers of fortune in the forests of Manchuria speaking Manchu-a language closer to Mongolian and Turkish than to Chinese. This course will explore how the military organization of these dissident chiefs in the forest came to command all the resources of Chinese statecraft, scholarship, and economy and how by yoking these Chinese management skills to the Manchu "frontier style" built arguably the most successful empire in Asian history.

In 1800, Beijing ruled the world's biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire. The Emperor, ruler of China's Qing dynasty, was a sage monarch, a Confucian scholar, even a Bodhisattva on the throne, but his not too distant ancestors had been hunters, ginseng smugglers, and soldiers of fortune in the forests of Manchuria speaking Manchu-a language closer to Mongolian and Turkish than to Chinese. This course will explore how the military organization of these dissident chiefs in the forest came to command all the resources of Chinese statecraft, scholarship, and economy and how by yoking these Chinese management skills to the Manchu "frontier style" built arguably the most successful empire in Asian history.