How do people, identities, cultures, and languages cross borders?

Eileen Chow, Associate Professor of the Practice, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Course examines the foodways and food cultures of East Asia and global Asian diasporic communities. Why does food define us, beyond basic survival? What can food tell us about individuals, communities, and cultural flows across space and time? Topics include: food as environmental and bodily processes; food as language, history, cultural memory, religious practice, identity and national markers; food as history of plenitude and hunger; the discourse of food as danger (from foreignness to cannibalism to zoonotic contagion). Course aims to introduce different disciplinary approaches and methodologies through the focus on foodways. No prior study of Asian languages or cultures is required. Part of 'How do Asian cultural heritages circulate?' first-year Constellation.

Cross-lists: AADS 120CN/ ICS 127CN

Calvin Cheung-Miaw, Assistant Professor, History

An introduction to the historical experiences of the diverse communities of Asian America, from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. Topics will include migration, immigration law, experiences of war, community formation, and political activism. Students will also gain experience working with primary sources.

Cross-lists: AMES 198CN, AADS 198CN

Carlos Rojas, Professor, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

This course will introduce students to Chinese-language science fiction (SF), including works from the early-twentieth to the early-twenty-first centuries, but with a focus on works from the contemporary period. We will consider literature and film from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Particular attention will be given to the use of SF to offer critical commentaries on sociopolitical concerns.

Purnima Shah, Professor of the Practice, Dance

The course is a broad survey of the socio-political, religious and aesthetic aspects embedded in the performing arts of Asia, covering China, Korea, Japan, and India, Indonesia, Thailand, including intercultural collaborative exchanges within Asia as well as with Euro-America. It will cover artistic forms of performance, including performative notions of hybridity emerging within the Asian American diaspora as well. There are no prerequisites required for the course.

Cross-lists: AMES 135CN/ICS 137CN/ RELIGION 137CN/ THEATRST 137CN

Yan Liu, Associate Professor of the Practice, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Designed for first-year students to understand Chinese diasporas through the lens of sociolinguistics. Investigate how language shapes and is shaped by cultural identity, intergenerational communication, language ideology, and societal attitudes within Chinese diasporic communities. Key themes include the diverse linguistic profiles of Chinese diasporas, language maintenance and shift, identity and language, linguistic landscapes in Chinatowns, and Chinese heritage language education. Readings and class discussions conducted in English.

Cross-list: AMES 173CNS

Mona Hassan, Associate Professor, Religious Studies

The dynamics of cross-cultural interaction have actively shaped the world for many centuries now. This class explores some of the religious, social, and economic forces that fostered increasingly global contacts in history. In particular, it examines how centrally located and cosmopolitan Muslims played a critical role in connecting people of far-flung regions, cultures, and religions with one another. It surveys the myriad encounters of Muslims, Buddhists, Confucianists, Hindus, Jews, Christians and more across Afro-Eurasia and into the Americas. How did religious networks, processes and events foster historic exchanges of ideas, practices, and commodities across the world?

Yan Li, Assistant Professor of the Practice, Thompson Writing Program

What can we learn when Aristotelian and Confucian wisdom traditions meet in conversation? How do different cultural frameworks shape what it means to speak, write, and live wisely? This course invites students to explore rhetorical traditions across time, language, and geography, with a particular focus on how Eastern and Western conceptions of rhetoric reflect and inform broader worldviews.

We will engage foundational thinkers — such as Plato, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Aristotle, and their intellectual descendants — alongside contemporary scholarship in comparative, cultural, and decolonial rhetoric. Together, we’ll examine how rhetorical practices are shaped by values, ethics, relationships, and social roles, asking: How does one speak with authority in a Confucian context? What does ethos look like in classical Greece? And what happens when these traditions encounter each other in today’s global contact zones?

Susan Thananopavarn, Lecturing Fellow, Thompson Writing Program

Description forthcoming.

Description forthcoming.