Faculty in the department study the languages, literatures, and cultures of the East Asian geocultural macroregion—an area that is comprised by the modern nations of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan and is profoundly shaped by more than two millennia of historic transformation and dynamic interaction. Our scholarship takes up questions of philological commentary, language pedagogy, cultural analysis, translation practice, and theoretical critique, spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods.
What we study
Literary and cultural studies
Poetry, historiography, fiction, film, and popular media from the ancient past to the contemporary moment, with close and critical attention to matters of genre, medium, rhetoric, historical context, aesthetics, and formal analysis.
Experiential language pedagogy
The acquisition of high-level language proficiency by both heritage and non-heritage learners through both standard classroom language instruction and familiarity with everyday, colloquial language usage.
Critical and theoretical approaches
Aesthetic theory, gender and sexuality, environmental humanities, narratology, comparative historiography, translation as theory and practice, myth studies, realism, poetics of the everyday, media theory, non-fictionality, transnational experiences, affect theory, theory of lyric, cybernetics.
Linguistics
Second language acquisition, translation studies, computational linguistics, calligraphy as history and practice, philology, classical language instruction, histories of writing.