This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the study of Asian/Pacific Islanders in the U.S. This course will examine, through a range of disciplines (including history, literary studies, film/media, performance, anthropology, sociology), issues and methods that have emerged from Asian American Studies since its inception in the late 1960s, including the types of research questions and methods that the study of Asians & Pacific Islander peoples in the U.S. as well as politics and historical relations in the Asia/Pacific region have to offer. In this course, we will pay particular attention to the role of culture and its production in documenting histories, formulating critical practices, and galvanizing political efforts. Topics and themes include: war & empire; queer & feminist lives and histories; refugee, adoptees, transnational families, and other forms of kinship & belonging; anti-Asian violence; settler colonialism and postcolonial critique.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AAS 1100 - Introduction to Asian American Studies

This seminar will explore Asian American history through the methodology of oral history. Students will read Asian American historical scholarship that has relied on oral history methods, but they will also engage with theoretical and methodological work around the use of oral sources. Students will develop, research, and present oral history projects.  Themes include power and knowledge production, the role of oral history in documenting the Asian American past, and local and family histories as avenues through which to explore oral history methods.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for AAS 2043 - Asian American Oral History

This course introduces Korean popular culture in global context. Beginning with cultural forms of the late Chosŏn period, the course will also examine popular culture during the Japanese colonial period, the post-war period, the democratization period, and contemporary Korea. Through analysis of numerous forms of media, including films, television, music, literature, and music videos, the course will explore the emergence of the "Korean Wave" in East Asia and its subsequent global impact. In our examination of North and South Korean cultural products, we will discuss theories of transnationalism, globalization, and cultural politics. The course will consider the increasing global circulation of Korean popular culture through new media and K-Pop's transculturation of forms of American music such as rap. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is required.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AAS 2269 - Korean Popular Culture

This course will introduce both a variety of writings and media by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working with a variety of genres, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AAS 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for AAS 3030 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

The term "AAPI" is often used as a U.S. demographic category for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but what brings these disparate groups together? This course explores the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and ideological imaginaries shaped by power struggles and empire. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking peoples across the Pacific, Asia and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? How does thinking about and critiquing imperialism inform what we mean when we say "AAPI"? Drawing on visual media, fiction, poetry, historical documents, speeches, and more, this course will track the relationship between the personal and political and ask what subjects emerge from competing imperial modernities.

Full details for AAS 3674 - AAPI and Empire

Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as 'wars at home.' Racial and warfare events often intersect—in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we'll consider how race and war have been linked—from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII 'Greatest Generation' and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a 'military-industrial complex' and a 'prison-industrial complex'.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AAS 3885 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists

What are the limits and possibilities for Asian American longing and belonging? Asian Americans have been variously understood as immigrants, refugees, "forever foreigners," and "model minorities." These ideas emerge from and shape US understandings of nation, empire, rights, and citizenship. Native and Indigenous studies scholars have asked how and whether immigrants—including exploited workers—are complicit with settlement and occupation. In this course we will read Asian American literary texts from the Americas through Asian American and Indigenous cultural critique to consider the overlapping dimensions of militarism, carcerality, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and dispossession in order to learn what comparative and relational approaches can teach us.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for AAS 4630 - Rethinking Asian American Literature: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Settler Colonialism

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for AAS 4950 - Independent Study

Individualized readings and research for graduate students. Topics, readings, writing requirements, and the number of course credits to be determined through consultation between the student and the faculty supervisor.

Full details for AAS 7200 - Directed Graduate Individual Study

Independent study course in which a small group of students works with one member of the graduate faculty. Topics, readings, writing requirements, and the number of course credits to be determined through consultation between the students and the faculty supervisor.

Full details for AAS 7300 - Directed Graduate Group Study