Undergraduate Courses in Asian American Studies

Fall 2025

Building Asian America: Labor, Space, and Power (CD or HA)
Subject associations
ASA 344 / AMS 344 / URB 344

This course engages Asian American Studies by introducing students to the basic concepts of critical logistics studies, which involve thinking through dynamics of space/placemaking, movement/restriction and labor/production/consumption. Through an array of cultural texts including film, new media, video art, and photography, we will examine how material structures such as logistics infrastructures shape political, economic and cultural imaginations and vice versa. To that end, we will take a global view to understanding the place of Asian America in the world through histories of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and nationalism.

Instructors
Christopher Chien
Comparative Perspectives on Power, Resistance and Change (CD or EC)
Subject associations
AMS 101 / ASA 101 / LAO 101

This course introduces students to methods of American Studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in and about America's past and present. It presents students various scholarly approaches to historical and mythic manifestations of America from local, national, and global perspectives and considers the historical and cognitive processes associated with the delineation of America. The course examines a wide range of material and media from the point of view of multiple fields of study.

Instructors
Yarimar Bonilla
Allison Carruth
Shamus R. Khan
Advanced Seminar: The Disney Industrial Complex (HA)
Subject associations
AMS 406 / ASA 406 / LAO 406

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the history and evolution of the Walt Disney Company not only as a multinational media and entertainment conglomerate but also as a powerful cultural force, from the early films and theme parks to the highly successful streaming service. We'll consider the ever-expanding Disney multiverse (which includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, among others) as well as the company's global reach, while paying special attention to its impacts on, and representations of, American history, society, and culture, particularly as they touch on matters of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and place.

Instructors
William A. Gleason
Asian American Literature and Culture (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ASA 224 / ENG 224 / GSS 226

What is the relationship between race and genre? Through a survey of major works and debates in Asian American literature, this course examines how writers employ a variety of generic forms--novels, comics, memoirs, film, science fiction--to address issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, memory, immigration, and war. By placing racial formation in relation to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of literary texts to deepen our historical understanding of Asians in the U.S. and beyond, and probe into what labeling a work of literature as "Asian American" allows us to know and do.

Instructors
Paul Nadal
Remediating Monkey: Journey to the West (LA)
Subject associations
EAS 224 / ASA 223

This course focuses on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Monkey), some of its central themes, and its long history of adaptation across media, regional and historical boundaries. We read a good part of the 100-chapter novel, investigate some of the texts that preceded it, and look at the illustrations, comics, rewritings, films, and videogames that it inspired. If Monkey represents the spirit of play and the ability to change at will, how does remediation ask us to think about this in terms of media and philosophy, politics and language? When and how does adaptation turn into appropriation?

Instructors
Paize Keulemans
Asian Mothers (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ENG 291 / GSS 291 / ASA 291

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

Instructors
Anne Cheng
Memory, Life History, and Asian America (CD or HA)
Subject associations
HIS 416 / ASA 416

Memory plays an essential role in recovering the Asian American past. Since traditional US archives offer scant traces of Asian immigrants, historians have turned to personal recollections to fill in the gaps. In this course, we consider these alternative sources of history, including memoirs, oral histories, personal essays, (graphic) novels, and documentaries. How can these sources help us to reconstruct the lives of Asians in the Americas? What limitations do they hold? And how do they challenge the notion of historical knowledge?

Instructors
Beth Lew-Williams
Women and War in Asia/America (CD or HA)
Subject associations
HIS 486 / GSS 486 / EAS 486 / ASA 486

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

Instructors
Sara Kang

Spring 2025

Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Across the American Landscape (CD or SA)

This is an advanced Seminar meant to deepen understanding of central themes in American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino/a Studies.The Seminar concentrates on historical trajectories, social and economic evolution, and cultural contributions to nation making on the part of Asian Americans and Latino/as. We will investigate colonial antecedents and processes of exclusion/stigmatization but also acts of resistance and claims on citizenship that have consistently identified the trajectory of immigrants and their descendants throughout American history.

Instructors
Patricia Fernández-Kelly
Asian American History (CD or HA)

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese incarceration, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

Instructors
Beth Lew-Williams
Corinna Zeltsman
Introduction to Asian American Studies (CD or SA)

This course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racial and spatial formations as a product of multiple racial settler colonial projects forged through the US wars and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, migration, incarceration, and popular culture.

Instructors
Carolyn Choi

Fall 2024

Comparative Perspectives on Power, Resistance and Change
Subject associations
AMS 101 / ASA 101 / LAO 101

This course introduces students to methods of American Studies, Asian American Studies and Latino Studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in and about America's past and present. It presents students various scholarly approaches to historical and mythic manifestations of America from local, national, and global perspectives and considers the historical and cognitive processes associated with the delineation of America. The course examines a wide range of material and media from the point of view of multiple fields of study.

Instructors
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
Allison Carruth
Shamus R. Khan
Advanced Seminar: The 1970s in 10 Objects
Subject associations
AMS 406 / ASA 406 / LAO 406

The 1970s are one of the most fascinating periods in recent American history, marking a turn from the countercultural turmoil of the 1960s to the rising conservatism of the 1980s. Often overlooked, these years nonetheless encompass tremendous social, political, and cultural change. In this seminar, we'll examine the 1970s through 10 intriguing objects--some famous, some obscure---that shaped and reflected the decade's art, politics, economics, technology, and culture. We'll use each object as an occasion for looking deeper at the issues it encapsulates or represents, how those issues reverberate across the decade, and their legacy for today.

Instructors
William A. Gleason
Moving Images: Contemporary Asian American Cinema
Subject associations
EAS 350 / ASA 350 / AMS 251

This course convenes experiences of watching and thinking about contemporary Asian American film. The syllabus is built around narrative films made by and about ethnicized Asians that have crossed the threshold of commercial viability or popular visibility in America. The central critical theme: how can the structure, flow, and mood of film, diminished in cultural capital but still vital as a form of imaginative storytelling, inspire incisive modes of seeing, feeling, and thinking what it means to be Asian in the world today? Core methods of film analysis and surveys of Asian American history inform the meditations on that central theme.

Instructors
Steven Chung
Asian Mothers
Subject associations
ENG 291 / GSS 291 / ASA 291

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

Instructors
Anne Cheng
Women and War in Asia/America
Subject associations
HIS 486 / GSS 486 / EAS 486 / ASA 486

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

Instructors
Sara Kang
Asian American Women and Everyday Violence
Subject associations
SOC 392 / ASA 362 / GSS 350

The course examines the gendered racialization of Asian American women. It identifies and interrogates experiences of everyday violence, looking at their hypersexualization, labor market precarity, intimate partner violence, and poverty. It situates the discussion in the law, family, workplace, and campus community.

Instructors
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

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