This class is an opportunity to work closely with the Chinese sculpture, paintings, bronzes and other works of art in the collection of the Penn Museum. Some of the objects are well-known and on permanent display. Others have hardly been researched since they were acquired, and rarely leave storage. The class will meet in small groups at the museum. Students will work on research papers and collaborative in-class presentations on objects of their choice. A variety of approaches will be encouraged and students may choose to focus on iconography, historical and religious context, materials and manufacturing techniques, collectors and patronage, or inscriptions. There are no prerequisites for this course.

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Palme d'Or at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival. This event marked the apex of South Korean cinematic renaissance, having steadily become a tour de force in the international film festival scene since 1997 onwards. This course explores the major auteurs, styles, themes, and currents of the so-called "New Korean Cinema" that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s to continue to this day. Drawing from texts on critical film and Korean studies, we will pay particular attention to how the selected works re-present, resist, and interweave the sociopolitical climate they concern and are born out of. Using cinema as a lens with which to see the society, we will touch upon major events of the twentieth century including national division, military dictatorship and democratization movements, IMF economic crisis, youth culture, hallyu (the Korean wave), and damunhwa (multiculturalism initiative). In so doing, we will closely examine how each cinematic medium addresses the societal power structure and the role of the "Other" it represents in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the construction of contemporary Korean society. We will also briefly survey the history of South Korean cinema that has evolved hand-in-hand with the history of modern Korea itself, walking through its five different phases (1945-Korean War era;1955-1972 "Golden Age"; 1973-1979 censorship era; 1980-1996 democratization era; and 1997 onwards). No prior experience of Korean studies courses necessary; all films will be screened with English subtitles.

This graduate class analyzes global film practices of the 1960s alongside revolutionary movements, from the 1960 Japanese anti-US-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO) protests to the global insurrections of May 1968 and beyond.

In this course we examine buildings, remains of buildings, sites, tombs, and the contents of all of them in Mongolia. We read primary sources about the architecture (in translation) and we read excavation reports and descriptions as means of understanding the implications of permanent construction on grasslands, steppe, and desert, and on terrain traversed by nomads and semi-nomads. In this course, Mongolia is the landmass that is today Inner and Outer Mongolia.
The course has no prerequisites. However, most students will have had at least one course in the art or history of Mongolia or a region that borders it. Most students will be able to read at least one East Asian language or Russian. Students who can read languages other than English will be encouraged to do research using those languages.

Who (or what) where the samurai? What does it mean to say that Japan had an "Age of the Samurai"? In popular imagination, pre-modern Japan has long been associated with its hereditary warrior class. Countless movies have explored the character and martial prowess of these men. Yet warriors constituted but a tiny portion of the societies they inhabited and ruled, and historians researching medieval Japan have turned their attentions to a great range of subjects and to other classes (elite and commoner alike). This class is designed to acquaint students with the complex and diverse centuries that have been called the "Age of the Samurai"-roughly, the years between ca. 1110 and 1850. In the course of the semester, we will explore the central themes in the historiography of warrior society, while introducing some of the defining texts that have shaped our imagination of this age (from laws to epic poems, from codes of conduct to autobiographies).

This seminar explores evolving understandings of the Chinese economy from ancient times to the nineteenth century. We will read and discuss important work in Chinese economic history both to understand the trajectory that has led to China’s contemporary economic position and to situate China’s economic development within world history. Discussions will focus on how China emerged as the world’s leading economy by the year 1000 and how changes in agriculture, industry, markets, and money led the Chinese economy into the modern age. The course will proceed chronologically, and the sources for discussion will include scholarly articles and monographs, and primary materials—texts, images, and archeological excavations. Graduate students will engage with the principal scholarly debates in the field and finish the seminar with a nuanced understanding of the field’s historiography. Knowledge of Chinese is not necessary.

This course is intended as an introduction to the foundational thinkers of Chinese civilization, who flourished from the fifth to the second centuries B.C. No knowledge of Chinese is presumed, and there are no prerequisites, although Introduction to Chinese Civilization is recommended. Graduate students should see the instructor to discuss requirements for graduate credit.

This is an advanced course for upper level undergraduates and graduate students on various issues in the study of Buddhist texts, art, and history. Each semester the theme of the course changes. In recent years themes have included: Magic and Ritual, Art and Material Culture, Texts and Contexts, Manuscript Studies. Fall 2013 Topic: Buddhist repertoires (idiosyncratic and personal assemblages of beliefs, reflections, wonderings, possessions, and practices) for a large part, material and sensual. Buddhists are often sustained by their collection, production, and trading of stuff amulets, images, posters, protective drawings, CDs, calendars, films, comic books, and even Buddhist-themed pillow cases, umbrellas, and coffee mugs. Aspirations are interconnected with objects. Beliefs are articulated through objects. Objects are not empty signifiers onto which meaning is placed. The followers and the objects, the collectors and their stuff, are overlooked in the study of religion, even in many studies in the growing field of material culture and religion. What is striking is that these objects of everyday religiosity are often overlooked by art historians as well. Art historians often remove (through photography or physical movement to museums or shops) images and ritual implements from their ritual context and are seen as objets d'art. While art historians influenced by Alfred Gell, Arjun Appadurai, and Daniel Miller have brought the study of ritual objects into the forefront of art historical studies, in terms of methodologies of studying Buddhist art, art historians have generally relegated themselves to the study of either the old and valuable or the static and the curated. This course aims to 1) bring a discussion of art into the study of living Buddhism. Art historians have primarily concentrated on the study of images, stupas, manuscripts, and murals produced by the elite, and primarily made before the twentieth century; 2) study art as it exists and operates in dynamic ritual activities and highly complex synchronic and diachronic relationships; 3) focus on the historical and material turn in the study of images, amulets, and murals in Buddhist monasteries and shrines.

This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.

This course serves as a thematic introduction to modern Chinese literature and cinema in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other transnational Chinese communities in the twentieth century. By discussing a wide range of key literary and filmic texts, this class looks into major issues and discourses in China's century of modernization: enlightenment and revolution, politics and aesthetics, sentimental education and nationalism, historical trauma and violence, gender and sexuality, social hygiene and body politics, diaspora and displacement, youth sub-culture and urban imagination.