This course provides an introduction to Contemporary Asian Studies, focusing on the rapid social, political, economic, and cultural changes taking place in the dynamic regions of East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

This course is an introduction to Contemporary Asian Studies. It covers detailed case study material from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. It introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of political, sociocultural and economic interactions among these regions, as well as the transnational forces shaping internal dynamics throughout Asia. In addition, it examines the ways that forces stemming from Asia are affecting global processes, pushing scholarship to engage questions about colonialism, nationalism, "race," religion, markets, urbanization, migration, and mass mediated culture. This course provides preparation for more advanced courses on Asia and globalization and provides an introductory gateway for the Contemporary Asian Studies major and minor. May be taken in the first year of studies.

This course analyzes the impact of colonialism in South, East, and Southeast Asia and the various ways in which pre-colonial traditions intersect with and reshape colonial and postcolonial process across the various regions of Asia. The course will examine the conjunctures of economy, politics, religion, education, ethnicity, gender, and caste, as these have played out over time in the making and re-making of Asia as both idea and place. Attention will be paid to postcolonial and indigenous theories, questions of ‘the colonial’ from the perspective of Asian Studies, and debates about the meaning of postcolonialism for the study of Asia now and in the future.

This upper-level seminar will introduce students to the interdisciplinary study of popular culture in Asia through a focus on public events. Readings about all kinds of performances, including ritual, popular protest, festivals, sports, cinema, television, digital media events, and the performing arts will help students learn methodological tools to interpret the politics and meanings of public culture as it articulates with class, ethnicity, religious community, gender and caste. The course will furthermore familiarize students with a range of theoretical lenses for conceptualizing the different meanings of the “event” and the “public” from a perspective grounded in the histories of South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and their diasporas.

This course looks at China from a regional perspective, with a focus on Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Peoples Republic of China's economic integration. The role of Chinese communities globally and in Southeast Asia also receives attention.

Examines changes in the social, political and economic geography of Southeast Asian countries. Examples drawn from Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines as these emerging newly industrialized countries enter the 21st century. Emphasis on political-economy, urbanization and environment since 1950.

This course introduces you to the connected and interdependent world people who lived between the present day cities of Dakar, in West Africa, and Jakarta, in Indonesia, from about 1000 to the present. We explore in this class the three "C"s which have linked human experience in Africa and Asia via routes which connected the Indian Ocean World: Connectedness, Contingency, and Cosmopolitanism. We study how people who lived more than a thousand years before our time transported ideas, products, and scripts by land and sea via routes that connected large parts of Africa, Central & South Asia, and East and Southeast Asia, and their histories. The land and sea routes connected these communities and the cosmopolitan outlook of the hosts provided the contingent conditions for a Buddhist monks to travel from all over China to Southern and Southeast Asia; Muslim scholars to travel from West Africa to Indonesia; and merchants and writers to move within these worlds. Human migration, economic trade, and religious conversion had linked the lands and the seas, making it possible for our imams, merchants, monks, and servants to traverse these territories, across the Africa and Asia. This vibrant and wealthy world of African and Asian thinkers, merchants, leaders, and communities became the envy of the world, and as late as the seventeenth century, these crazy rich Africans and Asians dominated the world as it was known. We'll see how history is contingent--and that human migration, economic exploitation, lack of reciprocity, and legacies of European colonial racism have disrupted the cosmopolitan worlds of the Indian Ocean. The world is different today, but more than three quarters of the human population still live in Africa and Asia--see the richness of their worlds as it was for thousands of years, and what will be left for the people of this world as climate change makes the seas rise.

A first-year seminar on the history of queerness, in all its complexity and diversity, in the no less complex and diverse settings of East, South, and Southeast Asia. Our journey will encompass empires and Indigenous peoples, rulers and rebels, and range from early recorded history down to the twentieth century. Focus will be placed on primary sources and introducing students to the evolving definitions of "queerness" itself. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course examines how the cultural, economic, religious, and social histories of "Southeast Asia" [Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Thailand, & Vietnam] shaped the world as we see it today. Lectures will demonstrate how the millennia-long cultural and material exchanges Southeast Asians engaged via water across the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the lands across Eurasia affected the lives of its inhabitants and the proximal and distant regions with which it had contact. In Tutorials, students will be trained to read primary sources. Themes to be explored include economic exchange, colonialism and its impact, gender and sexual diversity, and religion and society.

This course examines the importance of food products in the livelihoods of the inhabitants of Southeast and in the world economy. It traces the circulation of these products within the Southeast Asian region in the pre-modern period, into the spice trade of the early modern era, and the establishment of coffee and sugar plantations in the late colonial period, and the role of these exports in the contemporary global economy.

This course examines the French and American Wars (1945-75) in Vietnam and its effects on the population of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. It begins with a brief overview of pre-colonial Vietnamese history and moves into a study of the impact and legacies of colonial rule and centres on the impact of the Wars on the cultures, economies, and societies of Southeast Asia.

A survey of the musical systems of Muslim societies from North Africa to Southeast Asia, with special focus on the broader cultural contexts in which they are created, used, and appreciated. No prior background in music or ability to read music is required.

The history of asceticism and mysticism in the Islamic tradition, with particular attention to the formative period as well as the breadth and diversity of Sufism across the Islamic world, from West Africa and Spain, to the Balkans and Central Asia, to China and Southeast Asia. We begin with the origins of the piety movement in early Islam, and the ways in which it responded to late antique Christian monasticism. We then examine the emergence of classical Sufism in the 9th century, its basic concepts and practices, the rise of saints, the formation of Sufi orders, the social and cultural context for key developments, as well as the reasons for the contested legacy of Sufism in the modern world. Major figures for discussion include Rabi'a, Junayd, Hallaj, Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, and Rumi.

This course provides an overview of political regimes in Southeast Asia, as well as some of the main issues that shape its political life. It includes legacies of colonial rule, nationalist struggles, democratization, ethnic and secessionist conflict, as well as social movement.

Burma, also known as Myanmar, offers one of the richest literary landscapes in the Buddhist world. This course introduces students to the Buddha’s sermons, to the animal lives of struggling bodhisattvas, to the poetic creativity of Mandalay princesses, to the intricacies of the Buddhist philosophy of mind, to the textual regimes of monastic dress codes, and to cosmographies of Buddhist kingship in the interface of South and Southeast Asian religions. Students will be trained to take a critical look at the fascinating world of Buddhist texts, inflected by the scriptural language of Pali, through a specifically Burmese prism.