2025–2026 Courses

Block 2 & 5, 2025

What can a monkey, a tree, a snaky demoness, or an opium plant teach us about identity, society, history, and ultimately what it means to be human? This course seeks answers by exploring stories about nonhumans from the traditional and popular cultures of China, often retold across multiple media. Students engage with key terms from animal studies and environmental humanities, including anthropocentrism, nonhuman agency, and the Anthropocene.

An exploration of gender and feminist thought across Asian literary and cultural traditions. The course reads women authors and feminist critics from China, Japan, Korea, and beyond, tracing how gender shapes literary form, cultural production, and political imagination.

An interdisciplinary introduction to the histories, cultures, and societies of Asia. The course approaches Asia as a dynamic, internally diverse, and globally connected region, drawing on literature, film, art, and cultural theory. Topics range from ancient traditions to contemporary popular culture, with particular attention to how Asia has been imagined from within and without.

From K-pop and idol survival shows to animation, manga, manhwa, genre fiction, and streaming TV dramas, this course explores major forms of contemporary pop culture across Asia and their global circulation. Rather than treating pop culture as mere entertainment, students theorize it through critical lenses including consumerism, neoliberalism, affect theory, and thing theory.

This course explores the cultural and literary entanglements of China, Russia, and Central Asia across the vast Eurasian landmass. Reading with a comparative lens into stories, films, and histories, students reconsider Asia as a space for intersecting narratives of modernity, empire, and the nonhuman world. Fulfills AIM Gen Ed.