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Exploring some of the Asia-focused courses at Duke in Spring 2025
Each semester, APSI works closely with faculty from multiple departments across Duke to develop a curated list of courses focused on topics that help students critically examine important contemporary and historical questions related to Asia and the Asian diaspora.
For Spring 2025, we wanted to offer a closer look at some of the new (and returning) courses offered by our amazing faculty. These courses can be used to meet minor, major, certificate, and/or degree requirements for undergraduates as well as graduate students. They can also be used to explore an area of interest or even an entirely new subject or disciplinary approach.
This is not an exhaustive list, and we encourage students to contact individual faculty as well as your academic adviser with questions about how a particular course might fit into your overall program of study. We may update this post with new information, so please bookmark and return as needed.
note: Information below is accurate at the time of initial publication (December 11, 2024); please confirm all dates, times and locations in Duke Hub as these details are subject to change at the discretion of the university registrar.
EAS 590 Critical Animal Studies
Instructor: Jieun Cho
This introductory seminar explores the often-overlooked significance of non-human animals in today’s socioecological crises, with a regional focus on Asia. Together, we will examine the intersections of animal life, social justice, and environmental ethics in a multispecies world by investigating the evolving relationships between animals, humans, and their environments.
The course meets on Tuesdays from 3:05–5:35PM in Classroom Building 106 (East Campus). It is cross-listed as AMES 590S, ICS 590S, and CULANTH 590S and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (EI) Ethical Inquiry; (SS) Social Sciences.
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History 514: Culture and Environment in Chinese History
Instructor: Prasenjit Duara
The course is designed to grasp the changing patterns through which the physical environment and culture are mutually formed in late imperial and modern China. Culture includes cosmological and social ideas as well as long term practices of settlement and utilization of the environment. In what ways did cultures facilitate or create limits to environmental exploitation? Through case studies, we will identify specific periods and regions in which this relationship is especially volatile and investigate their causes. We will also seek out how communities and the state respond to environmental disasters and explore the feedback loops for protection and prevention. Finally, we will assess the importance of long-term understanding and implications of the current environmental condition in China and the world
The course meets on Wednesdays from 1:40–4:20PM in Classroom Building 241 (East Campus). It is cross-listed as: AMES 531 and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (EI) Ethical Inquiry; (STS) Science, Technology, and Society; (CZ) Civilizations; (SS) Social Sciences.
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AMES 340S: Anthropology of Japan: Past, Present, Future(s)
Instructor: Kimberly Hassel
This course explores Japanese society through an anthropological lens. Alongside our examination of contemporary Japanese society, we will also examine Japan Anthropology as a discipline.
In Part 1 of the course, we will examine key historical moments in the field, beginning with Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and the complicity of American anthropologists in wartime paradigms.
In Part 2, we will examine major themes and issues relevant to contemporary Japanese society, including but not limited to schooling, public health infrastructure, intimacy, globalization, diaspora, and precarity. In exploring these issues and themes through ethnographic texts, we will also think critically about ethnography as method, a genre of writing, and lens.
In Part 3, we will discuss emerging themes and issues in a changing Japan, including but not limited to Afro-Japanese solidarities, digital activism, and digital sociality in pandemic times. We will conclude with a speculation of the future of Japan Anthropology as a field.
By discussing the field of Japan Anthropology alongside contemporary Japanese society, this course seeks to motivate reflection on the role(s) that anthropologists have had in reinforcing and/or contesting particular images of Japan, along with the ways in which anthropologists attempt to capture reality through ethnography.
Graduate students interested in this course should contact Dr. Kimberly Hassel to enroll via independent study.
The course meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:25–2:40PM in Gray 319. It is cross-listed as: CULANTH 340S and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (SS) Social Sciences.
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AMES 420S/520S: Critical Digital Studies
Instructor: Kimberly Hassel
This course integrates frameworks in digital anthropology and critical digital studies to examine contemporary digital culture in/of East Asia. This course encourages and demands a thinking beyond and unlearning of imaginations of East Asia that fall into patterns of (techno)-orientalism. Furthermore, this course examines how the digital highlights historical and ongoing issues in East Asia. Within this course, students will also be introduced to digital anthropology and digital ethnographic methods, including debates on digital ethics.
Questions that will guide our thinking include:
- What are the (im)possibilities of a critical digital studies approach to East Asia?
- How do we negotiate the tension between the perceived “universality” of the digital and the perceived “specificity” of East Asia?
- What are the potentials and pitfalls of the digital?
Students are expected and encouraged to contribute readings and case studies from East Asian contexts. Students will learn how to adopt a critical digital studies approach to contemporary studies of East Asia, which addresses the intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and digital culture. Furthermore, students will gain an understanding of the digital as a lens into observing change and continuity in society.
The course meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:05–4:20PM in LSRC, room D243. It is cross-listed as: CMAC 420S, CULANTH 420S, ICS 439S, ISS 420S and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (R) Research; (SS) Social Sciences.
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 520: Eco-Media
Instructor: Ralph Litzinger
This seminar explores film, photography, online media, and artistic productions about the contemporary planetary ecological crisis, taking the concept of “eco-media” as its central organizing thematic. Visual materials will focus on climate change, apocalyptic imaginaries, depletion and zones and industrial and post-industrial photography, digital rubbish, disaster media, border ecologies, and extraction. Course readings will supplement the visual material by engaging a range of theories across the humanities and social sciences on the concept of the Anthropocene, the uneven effects of climate change on the global south, the techno-capitalist fix, apocalyptic thinking, discard studies, affect theory, vital martialisms, colonialisms, racism, and Black feminist critiques of the Anthropocene concept. Ultimately, we are interested in what eco-media productions and thinking tell us about the ethics of planetary care.
The course meets on Wednesdays from 3:05–5:35PM in Bivins 214. It is cross-listed as: LIT 522S, VMS 520S and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (EI) Ethical Inquiry; (CZ) Civilizations; (SS) Social Sciences.
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RELIGION 275: Four Funerals and a Wedding
Instructor: Anna Sun
This is an introductory course on contemporary Chinese religious life. In this course, we examine the major religious traditions in China today—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, and popular religious traditions—through both historical and ethnographic accounts. By focusing on rituals and beliefs related to everyday life experiences, such as birth, marriage, and death, we gain understanding of Chinese religions through their historical contexts and current developments, as well as consider the foundational aspects of what it means to be religious.
More specifically, this course focuses on the following:
1. Theories of religion that enable us to think about religious life analytically
2. Case studies that exemplify particular religious traditions in Chinese society
3. The methods used in each case study, including textual, historical, and ethnographic methods
Students in this course are encouraged to think comparatively, to write analytically, and to learn how to discuss accounts of religious life with a sociological as well as a historical imagination.
The course meets on Fridays from 12:00–2:30PM in Gray 228. It is cross-listed as: AMES 257 and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (R) Research; (CZ) Civilizations; (SS) Social Sciences.
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RELIGION 581 Religion in Modern Asia
Instructor: Richard Jaffe
This seminar is an examination of the interaction between religious institutions and the state in modern Asia. The role of religion in the formation of pan-Asian identity in Asia also will be investigated. The course is suited for advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students.
The course meets on Thursdays from 3:05–5:35PM in Perkins LINK 059. It is cross-listed as: AMES 581S and EAS 581S and can be applied to the following areas of knowledge and modes of inquiry: (CCI) Cross Cultural Inquiry; (EI) Ethical Inquiry; (CZ) Civilizations.