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Bachelor degree in Asian Studies

The Bachelor’s degree program in Asian Studies is a 4 year programme during which students take courses across Underwood International College. During their first year, students take Introduction to Asian Studies course as well as other AS-LHP (Asian Studies Literature-History-Philosophy) and ME (Major Electives) courses.

Overall, students are required to achieve 12 AS-LHP credits and 27 ME credits. At the end of their study, students will have earned 42 credits which amount to 5 to 6 courses per semester over the course of 8 semesters. Such a curricular structure enables students to explore Asian Studies, nurturing their strengths and unique scholarly approaches to this field of study.

Introduction to Asian Studies

ASP 1011 Introduction to Asian Studies

What is Asian Studies and what does it contribute to contemporary conversations about identity and civil society? This course will problematise the idea of “Asia” and “Asian Studies” and explain the role that phenomena such as colonialism, modernity, and globalization have played in shaping communities from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The class will introduce students to the Asian Studies major and invite them to engage in a conversation about how global trade, online spaces, migration, and the redistribution of power have assigned a new position to Asia (and therefore Asian Studies) in political, economic, and cultural exchanges in the twenty-first century.

Asian Studies LHP (Literature-History-Philosophy)

Asian Studies LHP (Literature-History-Philosophy) courses are diverse and the offering changes each semester to enable students to explore Asian Studies from a multitude of perspectives. Moreover, the curriculum is designed to allow each student to explore different theoretical and methodological approaches to Asian Studies. This is why, for students who take more than 4 LHP courses, the credits earned above the requirement will count toward ME or General Elective Requirement.

General Electives

General Electives are additional courses students can take from our AS and other majors’ course offerings including courses they take during their overseas exchange. These allow student to further specialize and satisfy their personal interests within the field of Asian Studies.

Common Curriculum Courses

  • Freshmen writing intensive seminar (3)
  • Science literacy course or research design and quantitative methods (3)
  • Critical reasoning (3)
  • Language (6)
    • language courses: as students are required to fulfil two semesters of language courses (6 credits) they choose 2 courses from beginning (1/2), intermediate (1/2), or advanced (1/2) level. If students take more language classes than the language requirement, only up to 4 courses (12 credits) of the additional classes can be counted as me. Students cannot take two classes in the same language during the same semester.
  • Eastern civilization (3)
  • Western civilization (3)
  • Social engagement (0) (not required)
  • Uic seminars (6)
  • Cc lhp series (6)
  • Understanding christianity (3)
  • Chapel (2)
  • Yonsei rc 101 (1)

Asian Studies Course List

Our Asian Studies courses offer both “traditional” and “experimental” theoretical frameworks and disciplinary engagement. Some AS courses are designed both to build the basis for cultural, social, and historical understanding of “Asia,” as well as to equip students to use and evaluate existing scholarships in Asian Studies around the world. Other AS courses are intended to engage critically with the contemporary world and anticipate future developments in culture, society, science, and technology.

Level 1 courses

ASP1011

 

INTRODUCTION TO ASIAN STUDIES

 

 

Level 2 courses

ASP2001AS LHP: STATE AND ECONOMY OF KOREA AND JAPAN
ASP2007AS LHP: THE KOREAN WAR
ASP2010KOREAN SOCIETY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTAITONS
ASP2011AS LHP: SELECTED TOPICS IN CHINESE THOUGHT (2)
ASP2014AS LHP: COLD WAR IN EAST ASIA
ASP2016AS LHP: MODERN CHINA
ASP2019AS LHP: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN MODERN JAPAN, 1868-1960
ASP2020ONLINE CLASS-AS LHP: GENDER IN MODERN JAPANESE HISTORY
ASP2021AS LHP: JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE FROM THE 18TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT
ASP2022AS LHP: CHINESE CINEMAS; NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
ASP2024AS LHP: MODERNITY AND CHINESE LITERATURE
ASP2025AS LHP: POSTWAR JAPAN: POLITICS AND CULTURE
ASP2026AS LHP: ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM IN SOUTH ASIA, 1830-1980
ASP2027AS LHP: CULTURES OF GLOBALIZATION
ASP2029MEMORY POLITICS IN ASIA
ASP2033NORTH KOREA: HISTORY, CULTURE, POLITICS
ASP2034AS LHP: MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE
ASP2036AS LHP: MEMORY AND MEMORIALIZATION IN ASIA AND BEYOND
ASP2037AS LHP: THE KOREAN WAVE
ASP2038AS LHP: TOPICS IN CHINESE HISTORY
ASP2039ASP LHP: WARS IN EAST ASIA 1839-PRESENT
ASP2100AS LHP: STRANGER THINGS IN THE CHINESE LITERARY TRADITION
ASP2101AS LHP: THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE NOVEL: THEN AND NOW
ASP2102AS LHP: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND POPULAR CULTURE

 

Level 3 courses

ASP3004TRANSNATIONAL EAST ASIAN CINEMAS
ASP3007AS LHP: CAPITALISM AND ITS CRITICS; KOREA 1920-PRESENT
ASP3008AS LHP: SPACE AND MOBILITY IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN 1603-1868
ASP3015MEDIA ART PRODUCTION
ASP3018HISTORIOGRAPHY ON KOREA
ASP3023TRANSNATIONAL ASIA
ASP3024ETHNICITY AND CULTURE IN ASIA
ASP3026RELIGIOUS PRACTICE IN KOREAN HISTORY
ASP3029GENDER AND KOREAN SOCIETY
ASP3030FOOD AND CULTURE IN ASIA
ASP3031DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH KOREA
ASP3032NORTH KOREAN HISTORY AND THOUGHT
ASP3033DIPLOMATIC PRACTICE IN THE KOREAN PENINSULA
ASP3034OUTLAWS
ASP3035THE DIARY IN KOREAN AND WORLD HISTORY
ASP3036SCIENCE OF SYMBIOSIS AND MULTISPECIES CULTURES

 

Level 4 courses 

ASP4005ASIAN STUDIES RESEARCH SEMINAR
ASP4009SENIOR THESIS: INDEPENDENT STUDY

Course Descriptions

Our Asian Studies courses offer both “traditional” and “experimental” theoretical frameworks and disciplinary engagement. Some AS courses are designed both to build the basis for cultural, social, and historical understanding of “Asia,” as well as to equip students to use and evaluate existing scholarships in Asian Studies around the world. Other AS courses are intended to engage critically with the contemporary world and anticipate future developments in culture, society, science, and technology.

ASP101: Introduction to Asian Studies

What is Asian Studies and what does it contribute to contemporary conversations about identity and civil society?

This course will problematise the idea of “Asia” and “Asian Studies” and explain the role that phenomena such as colonialism, modernity, and globalization have played in shaping communities from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.

The class will introduce students to the Asian Studies major and invite them to engage in a conversation about how global trade, online spaces, migration, and the redistribution of power have assigned a new position to Asia (and therefore Asian Studies) in political, economic, and cultural exchanges in the twenty-first century.

What is Asian Studies and what does it contribute to contemporary conversations about identity and civil society?

This course will problematise the idea of “Asia” and “Asian Studies” and explain the role that phenomena such as colonialism, modernity, and globalization have played in shaping communities from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.

The class will introduce students to the Asian Studies major and invite them to engage in a conversation about how global trade, online spaces, migration, and the redistribution of power have assigned a new position to Asia (and therefore Asian Studies) in political, economic, and cultural exchanges in the twenty-first century.

Like military lookout posts along Songdo’s waterfront, the irresolution of the Korean War is everywhere apparent in Korea.

Official narratives about the war, in North and South Korea and elsewhere, guard their publics against dissonant memories and dangerous scholarship.  As the official narrative is continually repeated, it shapes the discursive landscape and marks the horizon of loyal citizenship.

In South Korea, especially among the older generation, and certainly in American public memory, the Korean War is mostly recalled as an instance of UN/American rescue that saved South Korea from communism and enabled its eventual economic ascent. In North Korea, the Korean War was a war for liberation from U.S. imperialism.

This course investigates Korean literature and film that embody a range of experiences of colonized Koreans in the first half of the twentieth century, while also extending to contemporary cultural works shaped by the global K-wave. The ideological propensities of colonial-era literature and film that we will discuss include nativism, nationalism, socialism, modernism, and regionalism (pan-Asianism).

Although the course examines “Korean” cultural representations of the colonial era, the Korean nation alone does not define the so-called Koreanness of the time. Challenges from regionalism, pan-nationalism, and globalization did not undermine nationalism; rather, they helped constitute and nurture it as a competing ideology against non-nationalist thought.

Building on this historical framework, the course then turns to contemporary Korean and Korean diasporic writers and filmmakers who have gained global recognition, such as Han Kang and other internationally acclaimed authors, as well as new media texts that engage with the transnational circulation of Korean popular culture.

In particular, we will examine phenomena such as K-pop–inspired narratives (e.g., K-pop demon hunters) that merge popular music, fan practices, and genre storytelling, considering how they articulate Koreanness within global cultural flows. Students will learn how to analyze literary, cinematic, and popular cultural texts and to develop compelling arguments in relation to them from national, regional, and global perspectives.

In addition, the course will explore ongoing debates such as the recent comfort-women controversy alongside contemporary cultural issues raised by the K-wave, engaging with a range of scholarly, cinematic, and popular responses.

Discussion and research on the major problems related to East Asian culture and religion. Seminar topics alternate yearly with emphasis on Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism. Comparative analysis of East Asian-Western religious and cultural thoughts will also be made.

Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War became a global conflict that created mutually hostile, politically and culturally divided zones.

In contrast to the Cold War in Europe, the Cold War in East Asia included three “hot” wars in China, Korea, and Vietnam. The Cold War in East Asia had ideological and material foundations in histories of imperialism and colonialism. Wars, hot and cold, brought fear, death, and suffering to a great many.

They produced alliances “forged in blood,” along with cognitive regimes (visual, religious, aesthetic) that prompted misrecognition, fear, hatred, and (murderous) love. Keeping in mind the historical context in which empires and ideologies clashed, we will examine the creation of structures (e.g. networks of military bases and national security laws) that sustained “war politics” in East Asia.

We will end the course by looking at those who live astride state borders, to reconsider notions of citizenship and personal identity.

This course examines political, cultural, and social transformations of China during the Republican era: from the late Qing dynasty to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949).

While investigating crucial historical events of modern China, we will focus more on analyzing ideological grounds underlying existing historical narratives and think about alternative ways to recount Chinese experiences of that period.

Toward the end of the semester, students are expected to learn what have been the mainstream accounts of modern China, how new studies have challenged the previous scholarship (qua regional and global perspectives as opposed to nationalist), and ultimately how our own approaches should further intervene previous findings on modern China.

This course explores social movements in modern Japan from the outset of the Meiji Restoration (1868) to the present, focusing on large-scale collective protests against political and corporate institutions over a variety of issues pertaining to communal, national, and international problems.

Today, as we recently saw from new forms of protest elsewhere in the world, social movements can be shaped by popular media and cultural expressions, and are not dependent upon the involvement of conspicuous leading organizations.

In response, commentators of a variety of political positions have sought to assess the (in)significance and (in)effectiveness of the protests.

Inspired by these new features and recurring narrative constructions, this course pays specific attention to the cultural aspects of the social movements in modern Japanese history.

I have designed this course to:

1) examine narratives of specific social movements often differently constructed by the participants and historians, and

2) reinterpret specific strategies, messages, and cultural expressions in light of the recent experiences of the social movements. Specifically, the course examines the ways in which issues and ideologies were expressed through, interacted with, and perhaps occasionally contradicted, various forms of arts, media narratives, and means of network formations.

Rather than strictly following the chronology of events, the course underscores themes and problems manifest in specific social movements at certain historical moment.

In addition to participation in lectures and discussions, students are expected to demonstrate skills in effective historical research and cogently argumentative writing as well.

This is a reading, writing, and discussion-intensive course that examines the development of modern East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

We will examine the history and economic development of the East Asian countries in the context of imperialism, colonialism, the Cold War, and capitalist development. We will pay special attention to the dominant arguments surrounding key moments in modern East Asian history.

As this course is supported by LearnUs special lecture funding, enrolled students will have a four-week special lecture series by Keio University Professor Kiyotaka Maeda on early modern Japanese economic development, that will be conducted online during those four weeks.

Japanese popular culture has become ubiquitous, but what constitutes it, what are its origins, and what meanings, values, ideas, and practices make it into what it is? In this course, students will explore popular culture in Japan from the Tokugawa period to the present.

Many different disciplines will be combined to study its various aspects including how picture scrolls intersect with anime and manga; what fashion meant for the popularization of horticulture; where animism meets environmentalism; how mecha relates to WW2; what otome and bishōjo games mean for the ways love is redefined; how cyborgs embody Japan’s modernity.

This course examines classical Chinese films from the Republican to contemporary periods as well as field-defining critical theories in Chinese Film Studies. As an artistic innovation, an intellectual current, and a political platform, Chinese cinema has always functioned as a site where nationalist, anti-imperial, and global identities and feelings are formed, negotiated, and remade.

Key issues that we will engage throughout the semester include cinematic languages, spectatorship, modernism, left-wing criticism, ideology, national mythology, urbanism, women and the gaze, gender, class struggle, and linguistic politics and diversity.

Students will become familiarized with films that belong to the classics of Chinese cinema; at the same time, we will learn new methods of analyzing and critiquing the linkage between “cinema” and “the nation” in the continual process of China’s visual self-making in the world.

This course investigates the genesis and development of modern Chinese literature of the Republican era (1912-1949) and examines an array of canonical novels, short stories, and critical essays.

We will analyze the ways that Chinese writers grappled with the task of modernization in literary and critical writing amidst various challenges and threats from Western and Japanese empires.

Course participants will learn how crucial historical junctures—for instance, the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the 1927 split of United Front between the Chinese Communist and Nationalist Parties, and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)—shaped and reshaped literary practices of modern China.

The course focuses on distinctive themes and forms of modern Chinese literature, including revolution, love, national salvation, New Woman, individual subjecthood, first-person narrative, and appropriation of an omniscient point of view. Over the course of the semester, the instructor will guide students to critically analyze assigned texts and discern unique qualities of literary narratives in comparison to other nonfictional discourses that emerged in Republican-era China.

What kinds of political, social, and cultural shifts accompanied Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, when the past presumably ended and the present began? What were the competing American and Japanese visions for postwar Japan, and how did they play out during the American occupation?

Keeping in our field of vision the Cold War in East Asia that involved massive American intervention in two major wars (Korea and Vietnam), this course will explore key themes and issues in the political, social, and cultural reconstitution of Japan as a nation-state following its defeat in World War II, including issues relating to the emergence (and disappearance) of a progressive intellectual community, the formation of mass culture, consumerism, and (myths of) middle class life, and certain continuities in Japan’s political economy from the 1930s and the war era.

This course examines the historical development of ethnic and national identities in South Asia, and their ongoing relevance for today.

Focusing principally on the history of India and Pakistan (but also taking examples from Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius) from the 19th century to the present, it will examine the phenomena of ethnicity and nationalism from a variety of theoretical perspectives, as well as the writing of national leaders including Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah.

We will explore not only the political and diplomatic importance of ethnicity and nationalism, but also their effects on ordinary people, and their intersections with questions of race, caste, gender, and other forms of collective identity.

Students will find that not only are these historical questions still critical for public policy and international relations, but will also understand the key role played by South and Southeast Asia in theorizing the role of ethnicity globally.

This course seeks to help students learn critical languages for theorizing globalization, which questions the current world order and also stimulate curiosity about lesser-known, unfamiliar parts of the world.

To this end, firstly, we will examine key studies that have shaped the fields of global history, empire studies, transnational history, and cultural studies. Drawing on critical concepts and theoretical insights of previous scholarship, we will analyze cultural works of our own time, ranging from graphic novel (comic strip), film, and TV series, which are replete with poignant and eye-opening accounts of human experiences at the marginalized corners of the world.

Toward the end of the semester, we will be able to revise existing studies on globalization and also decenter first-world-oriented views of the global and the local. (In its process, the instructor will assist students in cultivating critical skills for effective learning.)

This discussion-oriented course examines the changing relationship between history, memory, and the formation of national identities in post-WWII Asia.

With the help of theories of memory and history, we will explore the ways in which Japanese, Chinese, South/North Koreans, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese have sought to remember and represent their war, colonialism, and other catastrophic events amidst recent changing domestic politics and international relations.

In doing so, we will specifically pay attention to the history, discourse, and space: the history of political contestations in Asia; cultural representations of the past in the forms of film, novel, and manga; and lingering conflicts surrounding the sites of commemoration and contestation.

This course aims to help students better understand:

1) how historical memories are mobilized to formulate the national identities of each Asian country, and

2) how geopolitics and economic conditions evoke differing historical memories of the same historical events.

As introduction to the course, we begin with an examination of how North Korea becomes legible and visible to us. What seems like propaganda, what seems like the “real” North Korea, and why?

From there, we will examine North Korea’s revolutionary origins (1920s-1950), with impressive strides made, prior to the Korean War, at overcoming class and gender oppression. Following the Korean War, however, we will look at how class and gender were emptied of their radical potential in the 1950s and 1960s.

Moving to more contemporary times, we will take a critical look at extremely politicized questions like defector testimonies and human rights, regime type and famine in the late 1990s, and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in the context of an unending Korean War.

Modern Japanese Literature “Short Stories by Haruki Murakami” Haruki Murakami is one of the most celebrated contemporary authors in the world.

While deploying fantasy as the main mode and material of narrative, which makes his work highly readable and popular, Murakami does not exclude from his authorial concern serious matters in individual life, politics, and culture which literature is traditionally seen as duty-bound to represent and reflect on.  Thus situated between popular consumption and serious engagement, Murakami’s fiction makes an effective point of entry into literature today.

In this course, students will be introduced to a selection of Murakami’s work from his early to more recent parts of his long career.

Our aim is twofold: to familiarize ourselves with the Murakami-esque aesthetics-global cultural knowledge by now-and to analyze the text, that is, to recognize its structure, logic, and desire beyond the story, i.e., characters, plot, or immediate affective or moral reactions it induces.

This is a course on memory and memorialization, that is, a course on why and how we remember and commemorate the past.

We will question: How can we remember beyond re-authenticating what has already come down to us? How can we attempt to fill in the gaps of given knowledges without re-establishing yet another regime of totality? Why do we engage in commemoration and memorialization? What might be the significance of such ritual acts? How can we go beyond remembering our own to remembering our own and others? And, finally, how can we begin to imagine and enact a more just and ethical memory?

We will look into various forms and sites of memory and memorialization–from memoirs and testimony to short stories, novels, and films to memorials and museums–across time and space. Since knowing the past cannot be divorced from the contexts within which such recall occurs, we will also situate the study of memory alongside history. Some of the issues with which we will be concerned include the impact of trauma on memories, the relationship between individual/private and collective/public, the conflict between historical documentation and artistic representation, the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, the consumption of memory, and the struggle for a just future.

Hallyu, also known as the Korean Wave, refers to the sudden rise of Korea’s cultural industries and the growth of Korean popular culture in the global market since the late 1990s.

This course offers an intensive survey of performing Korean popular culture in the midst of Hallyu and the ways Korean national identity is imagined. Rather than offering a mere narrative of Hallyu, it focuses on particular performances, influences, and ruptures that have shaped the phenomena.

In particular, we will explore the detailed process of K-pop production of idol groups such as GOT7, Red Velvet, and S.E.S. from demo to recording sessions, and we will also look at the use of a form of performance, such as K-pop, musical theatre, performing arts, cinema, TV drama, food culture, and reality shows as analyzing sources.

Through the close reading of selected video clips, films, and performances, we will investigate the various forms of race, gender and sexuality, and Koreanness that are performed, represented, challenged and negotiated in Korean popular culture.

We will read critical essays in fields of gender studies, queer studies, theatre studies, critical theory and cultural studies, and interpret the discursive constructions paying close attention to the specific historical contexts in which the performances were produced and circulated in relation with globalization.

Topics in Chinese History navigates through twentieth-century China in six distinctive units. Our 15-week journey will take you to the multifaceted metropolis of Beijing and Shanghai, the culturally rich rural areas in Shanxi and Hebei, and the non-Han regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.

In each unit, we will analyze one important scholarly publication and learn several essential skills related to one of the six crucial genres of academic investigation and composition in the realm of Asian Studies.

Upon the course’s successful completion, you should be able to gain proficiency in the scholarly analyses of

1) an event,

2) a location,

3) a person,

4) an identity,

5) an organization, and

6) a controversy.

You will also obtain helpful teamwork, communication, and leadership experience.

We begin with the clash of empires in the mid-19th century, examining not just the opium trade that was vital to the British Empire, but also the war over words, like honor and dignity.

Born in the crucible of such wars, revolutions, nationalist movements, and nation-states of East Asia proved willing and able to mobilize its populations, demanding affective investment in national sovereignty, pursuing economic development, and producing modern, gendered, national (racial/ethnic) subjectivities. By way of critical scholarship, we will examine how narratives about these wars continue to shape political and ethical horizons in contemporary East Asia.

This course examines notions about the strange, fantastic, uncanny, and grotesque through readings from Chinese antiquity to the present day.

Stories that implicate these categories have traditionally explored the tenuous line between the normal and the abnormal. They have also been used to critique social norms and to articulate ideals that are unrealized in the real world.

Our readings will span multiple literary genres to include foundational myths, accounts of the anomalous, stories of fox spirits and demons, Buddhist miracle tales, proto-science fiction, social satire, contemporary science fiction, and martial arts fantasy.

We will discuss the ways in which the Chinese literary tradition explored how “stranger things” might be comprehended or even normalized. All readings will be in translation.

This semester’s focus will be Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dream of the Red Chamber.

All is fair in love and war. So goes the saying that reflects a widely accepted understanding that love and war may have much in common: both involve conquest and loss, sacrifices and betrayals, victors and the vanquished.

This course introduces two of the greatest of the traditional Chinese novels—Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dream of the Red Chamber—and explores some of the profound questions that underlie human conflicts in love and war through engagement with selections from these two literary masterpieces. 

Class time will be devoted to discussing the content of the assigned chapters, and watching scenes from recent film and dramatic adaptations and comparing them with the novels. All readings will be in translation.

This course introduces major works, genres, and waves of East Asian cinema from the modern to contemporary periods, examining films from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea.

We will discuss various issues ranging from formal aesthetics to historical representation, from local film industries to transnational production, distribution, and consumption of films.

The course seeks to help students learn how to analyze classic works by East Asian auteurs, how to situate films vis-a-vis East Asian history and politics, and how to engage with critical theories in film studies that have shaped and reshaped the field.

Course participants are expected to cultivate aesthetic responsiveness and interpretive prowess apropos of moving images in an increasingly media-saturated world.

Capitalism need not produce massive inequalities. But today, in almost all capitalist economies, we see staggering levels of inequality in wealth and income.

How and why does this happen? How are inequalities created and reproduced? What are the consequences of rising inequality and reduced intergenerational income mobility – for sense of community, solidarity, and democracy?

This course explores Tokugawa Japan’s space and mobility, or phenomena broadly pertaining to performance, networking, and traveling, in society and culture from the 17th century to the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Over the past twenty years, studies of the Tokugawa period in the English language have sought to complicate the previous assumptions of the period as either years of authoritarian oppression, or, alternatively, culturally vibrant times yet to be transformed by Western modernity.

Inspired by these recent studies, this course pays specific attention to how dynamic circulations of people, ideas, and things shaped and reshaped spaces (both lived and imagined), while often transcending or negotiating with the existing boundaries of geography, status, and other categories.

By treating the Tokugawa period as a case study, this course is designed to:

1) identify problems with historical narratives (such as a history of development toward modernization), and

2) analyze historical texts of a specific society and community from the perspectives of space and its associated mobilities.

The class covers the following topics: the 47 Ronin Story; the world of kabuki; homoerotic expressions; travel narratives; cultural space of protests; negotiations with Western Imperialism; and mobility in gendered space. In order to most effectively illuminate these topics and associated problems, Thursday lecture supplements the assigned readings due on Tuesday of the following week, and provides necessary historical and historiographical information and relevant visual materials.

The general goal of the course is to provide students with multiple perspectives that will enable them to problematize the constructed nature of any historical narratives, and to facilitate methods of critical and imaginative reinterpretations of any society in the past and present.

This is a seminar course with a significant production/lab component that explores the medium of photography. It brings together readings in the Euro-American tradition of photographic theory and considers it alongside and against the grain of the Asian context.

Instead of superimposing theory from one side unto the other, we consider the historical development and experience of photography in various locations across Asia to explore how the two might be read together.

The practice component approaches writing and photography as interrelated practices of thought and being in the world that links also with the social, cultural, and political.

Over the past sixty years, history writing has become a varied and contentious intellectual practice. This course cannot provide a comprehensive overview of the academic discipline of history, nor a comprehensive overview of historiography on Korea. Instead, it introduces a set of topics, problematics, and theoretical concerns in history writing that can be seen as “critical” to historical knowledge today – especially for South Koreans.

The topics/problematics we will address include: colonialism and de-colonization in comparative perspective; and “new” approaches/problematics in scholarship on North and South Korea.

We will end the course with examination of history education in China, Japan, and Korea, and the politics of “history wars.” Deep knowledge of Korean history is not a prerequisite.

In this course we will explore this sense of dislocation as it unfolds across “Asia,” noticing the way we encounter it in everyday things like time, but also other taken for granted things like self, nature, art, life, death, here, there, and the otherworldly.

This is a seminar class, which means we meet once a week for 3 hours, spending much of the time closely engaging with the readings and materials in collaborative workshop-like discussions and writing sessions. I scheduled the class towards the end of the day on Friday, to leave open the possibility of running over, or literally running into the weekend, which is to say that field excursions will be a big component of the course. Together we will do “fieldwork” and write “fieldnotes”, the mainstay of an anthropologist, as we visit the Museum of Shamanism in Seoul and Space Lee Ufan in Busan among other sites of interest.

This is an anthropology course on East Asian cultures. We will explore various socio-cultural aspects of contemporary East Asian society such as social relations, pop culture, gender issues, identity politics, globalization, and transnationalism through anthropological perspectives.

A comparative perspective will be employed to explore the commonalities as well as distinctiveness between different cultures and societies.

This semester, our readings and discussion focus on Protestant Christianity. In contrast to the usual portrayals of Protestant Christianity as the bearer of enlightened modernity, the readings are comprised of critical scholarship on the varieties of Protestant Christianity that helped shape (South) Korean society, culture, and politics. The readings span from the 1890s to the present.

Thematically, our focus will be on two related histories: Protestant Christianity, gender politics, and the “spirit of capitalism”; and Protestant Christianity, social movements, and political contestation. For theoretical consideration, we will begin with a brief discussion of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. We then examine the historical nexus between Protestantism, liberalism, and capitalism at the turn of the last century.

Moving closer to the present, we look at choral singing (sŏngak), and discuss how the value placed on a “clean” voice is emblematic of a culture of Euro-centric, class-based aspirations. In the realm of politics, we will look at Protestant Christianity’s conflict with Marxist/ progressive politics, and North Korea. For origins, we begin in the colonial period and then explore how the conflict hardened during the Korean War.

We conclude by examining how this conflict is waged today in and around the Korean peninsula.

From lightsticks to flags to Kisses and from t’alddŏ k to YouTube to youth groups, nowhere was the gender divide plaguing South Korea made so visible (and material and affective) than on the streets of Seoul in the winter of 2024-2025.

While “gender wars” have always existed, the anger and hate accompanying them today feel unprecedented–and thus terrifying. What has made “feminism” so fearful and derogatory a term (so that I have met students who can only whisper the word)? What is the sentiment fueling anti-feminists into (often violent) action? Are these discords really about gender? How did South Korea get here?

This course explores how Korean society has been (re)imagined and (re)organized in gendered ways–by looking at popular (mainstream) culture. We focus on popular culture not only to examine the ways in which gender is represented, circulated, and contested in the public realm, but also to problematize the politics and practices of narrativity and visibility that actively produce and manage how we perceive and understand gender.

Our methods will be interdisciplinary, multi-theoretical, and genealogical as we interrogate gender at the intersections of sexuality, class, race as well as desire, affect, and personhood–to reflect on the possibilities for equality, justice, and solidarity.

This course is an anthropological exploration of food and culture in Asia. We will explore various socio-cultural aspects, as well as the historical contexts, of contemporary cuisine and food consumption in Asia. Food in different cultures represents more than subsistence patterns.

A variety of foods and cuisine are often used as markers for identity, religion, class, gender and regionalism. A distinctive comparative approach will be employed to explore the commonalities, as well as distinctiveness, between food cultures and Asian societies.

This course offers an interdisciplinary and critical framework for examining the nature, practices, and limits of democracy in South Korea.

Moving beyond a linear narrative of democratization, we explore how democracy is shaped and challenged by the unresolved Korean War, national division, Cold War legacies, and neoliberal restructuring. Through field trips to non-governmental organizations focused on civic activism and participatory democracy, students will be encouraged to “see like citizens” and witness democracy in action.

Equipped with theoretical and methodological tools, students will conduct their own fieldwork, culminating in a final research project that explores democratic thought as a form of creative engagement with South Korean society.

This course introduces the Korean Peninsula and its region through the lens of diplomacy. It looks at the historical, institutional, and contemporary structures that frame modern diplomatic practice in the region.

Students will be introduced to the processes of all-source foreign policy analysis so that by the end of semester they can undertake assessments and make policy recommendations to inform decision-making on current issues in the Korean Peninsula region.

How do we draw the line between lawful and unlawful, just and unjust? Is a “righteous outlaw” a contradiction in terms? This course explores traditional narratives of law and justice that have influenced Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures by focusing on figures that challenge law and order.

These figures raise questions such as: how do we achieve justice within and beyond legal institutions, how do we deal with injustices imposed by the law or by legal actors, and what happens when the bad guys become good?

By analyzing literary texts about those who transgress the law, we explore how notions of justice have been variously conceived and problematized in East Asian cultures. All readings will be in translation.

The purpose of the course is to introduce the diary as a subject in Korean and world history.

The course will teach theories of diary analysis, global examples of the diaries development and translations of the diary from Korean history. The course will contextualize Korean developments alongside those from other nations.

Students will also be expected to take a diary and emulate forms from around the world. Each week a new subject and period of history will be introduced including, government diaries, Refugee Diaries, Travel Diaries, Political Diaries, Women’s Diaries and many others.

In this course, we combine Biology, Humanities, and Social Sciences in rethinking the meaning of “life,” both human and beyond human. On the one hand, we explore the symbioses between animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms to develop an understanding of how epistemology of life is formed through the observation of the natural world.

On the other hand, by looking at life beyond human, we engage with the epistemology of human life; of culture, civilization, and progress. Through transnational scholarship with a focus on Japan, we ultimately explore the basis of our understanding(s) of the world.

Games and Animation will introduce students to transnational East Asian cultures of games and animation, theories of G&A , as well as how to explore and critically engage various issues and topics through G&A, from geopolitics and cultural identity to gender and intimacy with virtual characters. Students will develop an in-depth understanding of G&A history, present, and potential futures in a transcultural and transdisciplinary framework including psychology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, and more.

This is a semester-long advanced research project carried out independently under the guidance of an adviser. It is recommended to students with a GPA above 3.0 who intend to advance to graduate study.

Working under supervision, students will formulate a question and then research and write a research thesis demonstrating their ability to make an original contribution to their chosen discipline. The Senior Thesis gives students advanced research, analytical and communication skills, plus greater experience working on independent projects. Students intending to enrol in the Senior Thesis are responsible for finding a faculty member to supervise their thesis.

The faculty member must be a full-time Yonsei professor at UIC.

Courses Outside Asian Studies & Asian Studies Major Electives

In addition to the LHP and ME courses, students can also take courses outside Asian Studies at Underwood International College as well as across Yonsei University, and even Asian Studies courses at other universities. These include:

  • LHP courses beyond the requirement of 12 credits
  • ME courses and Language Courses beyond the requirement
    (up to 12 credits after fulfilling the language requirement)
  • UIC courses that are cross-listed with AS

(AS students can see which courses are cross-listed when they register for classes)

Cross-listed courses

 

POL3153

UNDERSTANDING CHINESE POLITICS

CLC3708

MANGA: THE ILLUMINATED TEXT

SOC3402

COMPARATIVE EAST ASIAN STUDIES

POL4135

GLOBAL CHINA AND WORLD POLITICS

SOC4305

OTHER MODERNITIES IN EAST ASIA

CLC4719

TRADITION AND POPULAR CULTURE IN ASIAN THEATER

Yonsei University courses

Courses at other universities that are Asian studies courses (student exchange)

(Need pre-approval by AS permanent faculty to count as ME)

Asian Studies Requirements for Double Majors

For students who wish to double-major in Asian Studies, they may select a second major from any majors offered at Yonsei, except for a few majors such as medicine, dentistry, nursing, etc. The application period is around the final examination period of each semester, and the application can be accessed through the Yonsei portal. Applications for Double Major within UIC can be submitted from the fourth semester. For Double Major outside UIC, students can apply from the third semester.

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