Professor Yoon Jeong Oh | M: 11:00 AM - 1:45  PM

What determines the translatability of a language or culture? According to Benjamin, translation is a “mode,” and translatability is a characteristic intrinsic to certain works. That is, if the work contains the essential quality of translatability, it will call for translation. Understanding translatability can thus provide a fruitful approach to a body of literature and its relationship, or kinship, with other languages and cultures. Whereas translation is often represented as articulating different entities of languages and facilitates the construction of national language, translatability highlights how languages are rather intimately related. In this course, after examining how translation plays a role in the formation of national language and literature in Korea, we will focus on the translatability of Korean in its relationship with other languages and cultures in the East and West. In doing so, the course will critique the communication model in the representation of translation and investigate the concepts of equivalence and comparison in translation studies, in theory and practice. Readings will include Walter Benjamin, Samuel Weber, Jacques Derrida, Naoki Sakai, and bilingual/multilingual/translingual writers of Korea, East Asia, and the West, such as Yi Sang, Yi Kwang-su, Tawada Yoko, and others.

Professor Mark Fung | TBA

This course examines the key geostrategic issues in Asia. Emphasis will be placed on the dynamics of U.S.-China relations. Drawing from experiences at the National Security Council, this course will function, in part, as an NSC directorate meeting where students will play the role of senior director and be tasked to provide an assessment in briefing and memorandum form of an emergent or exigent situation to a hypothetical US president. The ultimate goal of this seminar is to provide "a sense" of the functions and instruments of policymaking in the international arena.

Professor Rebecca Karl | R: 2:00 PM - 4:45 PM

This course explores the emergence of what was called the “Agrarian Question” in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as that question was related to the emergence of industrialization and the shifting analysis of the question of value, problems of domestic and global revolution, and the issues of modernization and development. We will trace the evolution of the question from its modern Physiocratic core, through its articulation in Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Sun Yatsen, Chayanov, Banarji, and a host of others, and into the later twentieth century as part of the 'peasant problem' in China, as that relates to the crisis in socialist economics and its global resonances. The aim of the class is to familiarize students with some of the basic philosophical and historical texts surrounding problems of modernity, development and culture, as they pertain to the agrarian question; this is intended to assist students in analyzing contemporary problems through a longer and broader historical and theoretical perspective. Dense reading, class participation, and a research paper at the end are required. Reading memos to be submitted to NYU Classes forum each week; final paper to be submitted before Christmas, and proposed topic discussed with me by late-October

Professors Thomas Looser and Xudong Zhang | W: 3:30 PM - 6:10 PM

This course is an introductory seminar offered to first-year graduate students in East Asian studies. The seminar provides a critical overview of the social, political, intellectual, and institutional history of the field of East Asian studies. 

For more information, please visit our Independent Study page.

An Independent Study course provides students with the opportunity to work one-on-one with an instructor on a particular topic or creative project. Registration for this course requires approval of the Director of Graduate Studies. You will be asked to submit a proposal, that must include a project abstract (200-250 words) and a bibliography, approved by the professor supervising the course.