HIEA Courses

For the most updated list of courses offered and more information including course times, locations, and enrollments, please see SIS or Lou's List. Faculty information can be viewed in the Faculty Directory.

HIEA 1501: Introductory Seminar in East Asian History

Seeley

Course Topic: Industrial Pollution and Society in East Asia

As East Asia’s economic power grows, environmental issues linked to its industrialization attract global alarm. In this course we will explore societal debates about industrial pollution in China, Japan, and Korea from a historical perspective. Questions this course will address include the costs and benefits of industrial development, the environmental costs of war, and the relationship between environmental movements and democraticization.

HIEA 2559: Post-WIII Japan through Film

Diehl

This course explores the history of postwar Japan, from the 1940s through the 1960s, through an examination of films produced during the country’s so-called “Golden Age” of film. A number of research questions will drive the course, including: How can a close viewing of films from the postwar decades elucidate for us how Japan experienced social, political, and cultural issues? How did the films present narratives to understand or suggest solutions to those issues? How did Japan grapple with postwar trauma—collective and personal—through the art of film? How did filmmakers depict the country’s history of the samurai in different ways, and how did that reflect developing views of historical memory in the postwar period? How were social and gender roles depicted on screen and how did that reflect reality?

HIEA 3111: China to the Tenth Century

Zhang

This class introduces Chinese history from the beginning through the end of the 10th century. Political, social, cultural, and intellectual history will all be treated, though not equally for all periods. Major themes of the course include intellectual developments, empire-building efforts, religious and popular beliefs, family and social life, and Chinese interaction with other cultures and peoples. Required reading includes a variety of primary sources as well as articles and book chapters. Final grades for the class will be based on daily quizzes, mini-exams, and two short papers. The course fulfills the College’s non-Western and historical perspective requirements.

HIEA 3162: Historical China and the World

Liu

The course traces the evolution of China’s external relations from antiquity to our own times. Situated in the geographic environment of the Asian Continent and being the birthplace of one of the world’s oldest living civilizations, China used to be at the center of a “world order” of East Asia and often acted as the hegemon of that region in the millennia prior to the 19th century. China’s centrality in its own world was lost in the mid-19th century when Western powers brought drastic changes to the Asia-Pacific region. In the next hundred years many Asian countries came under the Western colonial system; China also went through an arduous process of transformation from a “celestial empire” to a national state. During the first half of the 20th century, China struggled with its imperial legacies in finding a new national identity while continuously enduring setbacks from domestic divisions and foreign aggressions. After 1949, China, now under a communist system, reclaimed most of the territorial domain of the Qing Empire and began to challenge the Western world order as a revolutionary power. In the post-Cold War years a reformed China reentered the international society. In the meantime, the suspenseful “rise of China” has posed many questions to our times. This course identifies conceptions, practices, institutions, and relationships that characterized the inter-state relations of the so-called “East Asian world order,” and considers the interactions between “Eastern” and “Western,” and the “revolutionary” and “conventional” modes of China’s international behavior. The students attend lectures and read major scholarly works on ancient and modern Chinese external affairs. The student’s grade is based on participation, midterm and final tests, and a short essay (9-12 double-spaced pages).

HIEA 3559: Democracy and the Body in Modern Japan

Diehl

This course studies how political and social understandings of democracy affected the physical body in modern Japan. Put another way, the course explores how the body served as a map onto which government officials, intellectuals, artists, and others marked competing boundaries in politics, society, and culture, creating the rich topography of modern history. Some of the questions that drive the course include: How did government policies influence the everyday, lived experience of the people of Japan? How did those policies affect, for example, the biological makeup of the people? How did different styles of government, e.g. constitutional monarchy versus democracy, differ in their approach to asserting control over the bodies of the nation? In what ways did the body serve as a contested site of social and cultural power, especially during times of transition and change? How did non-governmental actors express their political voices through body culture and other kinds of physical expression? How have real or metaphorical bodies reflected both the trauma of and nostalgia for the historical past? In seeking answers to these questions and more, some of the topics covered in the course include: forced vaccinations, criminalization of tattooing and other cultural practices, party politics, political assassinations, generational conflict, sexual liberation, radical political activism, martial arts, disabled veterans, nuclear monsters like Godzilla and Akira, seppuku and other forms of suicide, and much more.

HIEA 4501: Japanese Memory of the Second World War

Diehl

This seminar introduces students to the history of memory formation in Japan regarding the Second World War. The course focuses especially on postwar cultural media and events that helped shape personal, group, and national narratives of the war. Students will also research a topic of their choice related to the course themes and produce a lengthy, original work of historical scholarship.

HIEA 4511: China and the World in Cold War

Liu

The first goal of the seminar is to familiarize students with major scholarly works and important historical questions pertinent to China’s experiences during the Cold War years. The second goal is to serve as a workshop for undergraduate and graduate students to initiate or refine their research projects. In applying rigorously the established methods of historical research to their research projects, the students are expected to produce high-quality scholarly works, which, in case of graduate students, can potentially meet expectations in actual scholarly fields. Use of primary sources is required for all research papers; use of sources in relevant foreign languages is required for research papers by graduate students. Evaluation of the student’s performance in the class is based on short written assignments, participation in class discussions, and a research paper. For undergraduate students, the research paper should be 17-20 double-spaced pages, and for graduate students, 25-28 pages.

 

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