Courses

Asian American Studies courses encourage inquiry within traditional disciplines and across a number of interdisciplinary fields. You will explore a wide variety of theories, methods and methodologies—both scholarly and creative—and the social and cultural construction of place and identity. Courses also emphasize intersectional analyses of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, citizenship and class.

Asian American Studies courses are taught by faculty whose official faculty appointments are in other academic units, such the departments of Dance or Religion, or other programs, such as American Studies and Latina/o Studies. Students should note that, due to faculty leave patterns and a faculty member’s responsibilities to teach in their home units, not all of the courses listed below are available every semester or even every year, though some are. If you’re curious about when a course will be taught next, you can reach out to the faculty member or the Asian American Studies Program Chair for more information.

Asian American Studies Courses

AAS 125 (F, S) SEM Introduction to Asian American Studies

Who or what constitutes the term “Asian American”? Leading with this provocation, this course offers an introductory overview of the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies, including its formation in, and evolution from, the late 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on an array of foundational texts, cultural productions, and primary sources, we will ask who has been included/excluded from this term, how people approach and negotiate Asian Americanness, and what it means to treat Asian America — however it may be defined — as a source of knowledge. We will analyze the shifting constructions and enactments of “Asian American” alongside other markers of difference from as early as the eighteenth century to the present. In particular, we will be attentive to how these constructions have been shaped in relation to other racial formations, political struggles, and overlapping systems of power — including US settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. With this, we will examine how this term has been widely undone and remade via political activism, visual and performance art, plays, media, poetry, etc. The aim of this course is not to identify a singular or “correct’ definition of the term “Asian American,” but to collectively assess and explore its limits, reaches, utility, and meaning in a diverse range of contexts and experiences.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto, Jan Padios | Catalog details

AAS 166 SEM Being Muslim, Being American: American Muslim Literature in the 21st century

Last offered Spring 2026

Islam and Muslims in the United States are the subject of extensive public scrutiny and media coverage in broader public discourses. It is less common, however, to hear Muslims’ own voices speak about their lives, experiences, beliefs, and commitments. This course takes a literary approach to exploring American Muslims’ own narratives about themselves, which will serve as an introduction to religion in contemporary U.S. culture. We address questions such as: How do American Muslims attempt to fashion their identity in the wake of 9/11? What are the pressures and demands of American national belonging and cultural citizenship that Muslims must navigate? How are race, gender, ethnic heritage, and immigration definitive of Muslim experiences and self-understandings? How are Muslims approaching the tensions between communal belonging and individuality? What are the competing claims and contestations about authentic expressions of Islam? We engage such themes through popular memoirs, autobiographies, novels, short stories, poetry, films, and comedy.

Taught by: Zaid Adhami | Catalog details

AAS 170 (S) SEM Chinatowns: Race, Culture, and Politics

In the late nineteenth century, in response to hostility and legal exclusion, Chinese migrants on the West and East Coast of the U.S. began to build self-reliant communities that became known, both to Chinese and non-Chinese residents alike, as Chinatowns. By the turn of the century, Chinatowns had sprung up in cities, from Chicago to Phoenix to San Diego. To some, Chinatown was a haven for Chinese migrants to socialize, worship, shop for familiar food, find jobs, and assimilate into the host country. Others have depicted Chinatown as a homogeneously exotic and dangerous place that posed physical and moral threats to European American and other non-Chinese residents. What do the historical development and representations of Chinatowns tell us about U.S. history and the American imagination? What is the continued significance of Chinatown in the U.S.? This course will help students answer these questions through various primary and secondary sources–including novels, films, business advertisements, travel guides, and oral histories. With a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore themes including food and culture, labor migration, public health, gender and sexuality, segregation, displacement and gentrification, criminalization and immigrant detention, economic mobility, transnationalism and globalization, and political agency and alliance building. Students will leave this course with an understanding of the different theories, practices, and ethics involved in interpreting race, culture, and politics in American cities and ethnic neighborhoods. As a part of the final research project, students will have the opportunity to consult archival collections on Manhattan’s Chinatown and produce research that sheds light on some of the most critical issues that the neighborhood faces today.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

AAS 205 (S) SEM Hollywood Asians: Race, Empire, and the American Imagination

This course explores the changing ways Asians and Asian Americans have been represented in Hollywood cinema from the 1920s to the present by examining a film from each decade alongside its historical and political context. From the birth of horror in films like The Mummy, changing Asian masculinities in kung fu movies, to military multicultural propaganda in Vietnam War films, we will trace how screen representations are shaped by and help shape the historical and political moments in which they are produced and circulated. As debates over immigration, national security, and “who counts as American” intensify, tracing how Asians and Asian Americans have been represented in Hollywood offers one lens for examining the broader racial and imperial logics that structure American life and the shifting ways communities become legible–or illegible–within it. We will consider the way ideas of “Asia” and the “the Orient” have structured U.S. policies, imaginaries, and racial hierarchies and discuss how these narratives produce Asians and Asian Americans as workers, villains, refugees, and citizens–and how filmmakers, actors, critics, and activists write back. While this course centers Asian Americans, it contextualizes Asian American experiences within the broader field of critical race and ethnic studies, placing Asian American narratives within transnational and relational frameworks. In addition to watching Hollywood films, we will read scholarship in Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, and film and media studies to develop a critical toolkit for examining the media around us, both on and off screen.

Taught by: Zaina Ujayli | Catalog details

AAS 206 TUT Beyond the Tiger Mom: Depictions of East Asian Mothers in Contemporary American Literature

Last offered Spring 2024

A tutorial designed to explore the interpretative difficulties and possibilities of East Asian mothers and motherhood in contemporary American literature (fiction and memoir). The “Tiger Mom”–highly controlling, strict, severe almost to the point of abuse–has become the go-to phrase for many Americans when referring to traditional East Asian mothering styles. This attempt to categorize and simplify cultural differences fails to capture the complex nature of East Asian mothering. While the American public imagines East Asian parenting as only unwavering and harsh, immigrant parents, for example, must often find a parenting strategy that bridges traditional East Asian and mainstream American norms. This course will explore the ways that contemporary Asian American authors depict the complexity of East Asian mothering and mothers. What kinds of mothering does the reductive category of Tiger Mom ignore? What are the central questions these authors pose about mothers and motherhood? How do they negotiate the tension between the individual versus the community, or the pursuit of the child’s own interests as opposed to success as defined by the parent when it comes to that child’s future? And what are the pitfalls of reading literature as social science? In keeping with tutorial format, students will meet in pairs with the instructor once a week; during these meetings, one student will present a short analytical paper on the texts covered that week. The other student will write a response paper and join the instructor in a discussion of both papers. The reading list may include work by Ocean Vuong, Yiyun Li, Michelle Zauner, Celeste Ng, Amy Tan, Jessamine Chan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Sola Kim, and Amy Chua, among others.

Taught by: Karen Shepard | Catalog details

AAS 214 SEM Racial and Ethnic Politics in America

Last offered Spring 2026

Arguably, the dominant discourse in American politics today is about race. Race is connected to salient issues like immigration and police conduct; to politicians across the political spectrum; and (some argue) to virtually everything in American politics, including fundamental concepts that have no manifest racial content, like partisanship and the size and scope of government. We will evaluate the role of race as it relates to public opinion, political behavior, campaigns, political institutions, and public policy debates, with special attention devoted to the nature of racial attitudes. Most of the course will focus on the historical and contemporary relations between whites and African Americans, but we will also explore topics involving other pan-ethnic communities, particularly Latinos and Asian Americans.

Taught by: Matthew Tokeshi | Catalog details

AAS 215 (F) SEM Introduction to Asian American Literature

This course introduces students to major works of Asian American literature, spanning from the early 20th century to the present. Throughout, we’ll attend to the intersection of aesthetics and politics, exploring the creative ways Asian American literature both reflects and responds to the historical forces that have shaped Asian American experiences and identities, including exclusion, internment, and U.S. wars and imperialism in Asia. We will also engage with critical debates within the field regarding authenticity, gender, and the politics of representation. Works we’ll read include John Okada’s No-No Boy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Taught by: Bernard Rhie | Catalog details

AAS 216 (F) SEM Asian/American Identities in Motion

The course aims to explore dance and movement-based performances as mediums through which identities in Asian and Asian American (including South Asian) communities are cultivated, expressed, and contested. Students will engage with how social and historical contexts influence the processes through which dance practices are invested with particular sets of meanings, and how artists use performance to reinforce or resist stereotypical representations. Core readings will be drawn from Dance, Performance, Asian, and Asian American Studies to engage with issues such as nation formation, racial and ethnic identity politics, appropriation, tradition and innovation among other topics. This is primarily a discussion-based seminar course, and might also include screenings, movement workshops, and discussion with guest artists and scholars. No previous dance experience is required.

Taught by: Munjulika Tarah | Catalog details

AAS 220 (F) SEM Universal Themes, Local Worlds: Identity, Aesthetics, and Transnational Form in Global Chinese Lit.

Unlike many traditions of English-language literature, the emergence of global Chinese literatures may be less a product of direct colonialism–though not disconnected from it–than of migration, war, exile, transcultural inheritance, and shifting geopolitical landscapes. This course explores global Chinese-language literatures through a two-fold approach. First, it focuses on a critical question in the study of Chinese-language literatures worldwide: how to identify and theorize literary and cultural productions outside the geopolitical boundary of China. Some of the questions with which this course engages include: “What is Chinese identity?” “How is China/Chinese perceived in different Chinese-speaking communities?” and “How do we identify Chineseness in varying contexts?” Second, the course examines how universal human themes–such as love, friendship, coming-of-age, faith, justice, power, pain and death–are represented across these literatures and localized or “glocalized” in their distinctive historical and political contexts. Taking a comparative approach, we will read Chinese-language literary works created in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States, among other places, focusing on key historical moments in the last few decades. The readings will be paired with critical essays to help us gain a theoretical understanding of the scholarship. Throughout the semester, students should aim to 1) expand perspectives on the study of Chinese-language literatures and cultures; 2) develop critical thinking skills to understand how Chinese and Chineseness travel and translate among peoples, regions, nations, and cultures. All readings and discussion will be in English; no prior knowledge of Chinese being required. The readings are available in their original Chinese for those who are interested.

Taught by: Chen Wang | Catalog details

AAS 237 SEM Islam in the United States: Race, Religion, Politics

Last offered Fall 2025

Malcolm X–whose 100th birth year is being commemorated this year–is one of the most iconic yet controversial figures in the black freedom struggle. He is also arguably the most prominent and influential Muslim in the history of the United States. His story and legacy powerfully illustrate the complex intersections of Muslim identity, political resistance, and national belonging. From the early period of “Black Muslim” movements represented by Malcolm X, to the current “War on Terror” era, American Muslims have faced a complex intersection of exclusions. Taking Malcolm X as our point of departure, this course examines how American Muslims have navigated these multiple layers of marginalization. In so doing, we consider how broader socio-political contexts inform Muslims’ competing visions of Islam, and we unpack the complex relations between religion, race, and politics. This also allows us to reflect on urgent yet challenging questions regarding national identity and security, collective belonging, the politics of difference, and the imperatives of solidarity. Throughout the course, we will be engaging with historical and anthropological material, autobiographies, documentaries, films, historical primary-source documents, music videos, and social media. The course fosters critical thinking about diversity by challenging assumptions of who Muslims are, what being American means, and what Islam is. It also focuses on the politics of managing and navigating difference, as well as the complex interaction of different dimensions of diversity, from religion to ideology, race, nationality, ethnicity, culture, gender, and language.

Taught by: Zaid Adhami | Catalog details

AAS 252 SEM Im/mobilities

Last offered Fall 2024

We think of the freedom to move as a mark of privilege. In the United States, passing a driving test, owning a car, and getting a passport are milestones that signal modernity and freedom. Likewise, we think of restrictions on movement as the domain of the underprivileged, such as the current and formerly incarcerated. But as the Covid-19 pandemic revealed, there have always been two sides to immobility: privileged as well as involuntary immobility. There are correspondingly two sides to mobility: those who move because they want to and others because they have no choice. In this class, students will explore conceptions of mobility as adventurous, free, and modern (as with jet-setting international elites). They will compare and contrast when mobility can be threatening, exclusionary, and limited (as recognized by the Black Lives Matter movement). This class invites students to interpret their environment through the lens of mobility and inequality. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and migration studies, this interdisciplinary course offers a beginning conversation on the causes and consequences of the freedom to move–or to stay still.

Taught by: Phi Su | Catalog details

AAS 253 (F) SEM Embodied Knowledges: Latinx, Asian American, and Black American Writing on Invisible Disability

This interdisciplinary course assumes an expansive approach towards disability, defining it not exclusively as a legible identity that one can lay claim to, but rather as an identity grounded in one’s relationship to power (Kim and Schalk, 2020). This course centers on the critical role of lived experience as a key site of everyday theorization for the multiply marginalized, and specifically on the ways in which invisibly disabled Latinx, Asian American, and Black American individuals write the self. As scholars in disability studies argue, self-representations of disabled individuals carry the potential for us as a society to move beyond the binary narratives of “tragedy or inspiration” so often associated with disability. Rather, the self-produced narratives of US disabled writers of color offer a much more nuanced portrayal of everyday life with disability/ies for the multiply marginalized. Much like invisible disability itself, these self-representations ultimately refute traditional depictions of disability, and underscore the ways in which the bodymind serves as a rich, albeit often overlooked, site of knowledge. Embodied Knowledges draws on the insights of disability studies, crip studies, anthropology, literary studies, medicine, psychology, education, cultural studies, ethnic studies, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, and trauma studies. We will examine the works of Latinx, Asian American, and Black American writers and scholars others in relationship to one another, and as points of departure for examining issues such as the relationship between immigration and disability; intergenerational trauma; the impacts of paradigms such as the Model Minority Myth and notions of cultural deficit; passing; the politics of disability disclosure, the paradoxes of invisible disability; invisible disability in academic spaces; the role of culture and categories of difference such as race, gender, class and immigration status in societal approaches to and understandings of invisible disability; and future visions in the realm of disability justice and care work.

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

AAS 275 SEM Acting Out: Performativity, Production, and Politics in East Asian Theatres

Last offered Spring 2025

“Asian Theaters,” for those in the West, can conjure up a variety of exotic impressions: spectacle and cacophony, mysterious masks and acrobatic bodies, exquisite styles and strangely confusing conventions. Although Asian theaters have been studied systematically in the West for at least a century, the West has never truly left its “othering” look at them. Yet, what is “different” for the West is bedrock for Asian cultures. Theatre, one of the most important and dynamic forms of cultural production and communication, has actively involved all strata of Asian societies for a millennium. How to explain theatre’s continued presence and relevance for Asian nations? What do the traditions of Kun, Kabuki, and P’ansori reveal about the cultures and communities in which they were created? This course seeks to understand from the Asian perspective, rather than “exoticize” and “other,” musical and dance theatres from China, Japan, and Korea. Examining the evolving presentations of signature dramas dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, we will act out Asian theatres in the following ways: (1) by reading the original plays in translation in tandem with their contemporary and intercultural reproductions, we will explore how Asian theatres fare in the era of globalization within and beyond national borders; (2) by revealing the “technologies” of writing, reading, acting, and staging these plays in different cultural milieus, we will consider what kinds of language and rhetoric, forms of music and movement, as well as visual components are deployed to convey evolving messages; (3) by considering key performances held outside of the proscenium stage, we will gain exposure to alternative theatrical spaces in Asian and diasporic communities that reform performing conventions, reconfigure staging environments, and renegotiate cultural values. In this manner, we will together gain an appreciation for the aesthetic devices, thematic concerns, and production politics of East Asian theatres and their global reproductions. Class materials include drama, production videos, and invited zoom sessions with Asian theatre practitioners and directors who live in the U.S. and other diasporic communities. All materials are in English. No language prerequisite. Funded by the Global Initiatives Venture Fund, this course includes an all-expense-paid travel component, a cultural and academic exchange project titled “Redefining Amateurism: Experientail Learning with Student Theatre in Contemporary China,” which will bring up to eight Williams students to Nanjing, China during the Spring Break (3/23-4/3/2025). Students will participate in workshops with playwrights and theater-makers in contemporary China and engage in black-box theater productions with students from Nanjing University and Shanghai Theatre Academy. This travel component is OPTIONAL for students taking this course. However, students enrolled in this class will receive priority consideration to be included in the free travel project. Selection criteria include active participation, excellent performance in the course, etc.

Taught by: Man He | Catalog details

AAS 279 American Pop Orientalism

Last offered NA

This tutorial will investigate the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in American popular culture since the late nineteenth century. Our focus will be on music’s role in Orientalist representation in a wide variety of media and genres, including Hollywood film, television, popular song, music videos, Broadway musicals, hip hop, and novels. We will begin with major texts in cultural theory (Said, Bhabha) and will attempt throughout the semester to revise and refine their tenets. Can American Orientalism be distinguished in any fundamental way from nineteenth-century European imperialist thought? How does Orientalist representation calibrate when the “exotic others” being represented are themselves Americans? Our own critical thought will be sharpened through analysis and interpretation of specific works, such as Madame Butterfly, “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” Sayonara, Flower Drum Song, Miss Saigon, Rising Sun, M. Butterfly, Aladdin, and Weezer’s Pinkerton. We will end the semester by considering the current state of Orientalism in American popular culture.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

AAS 284 (F) SEM Asian American History

This discussion-based class, with brief lectures, offers an overview of Asian American history from the late seventeenth century to the present. It will cover the earliest Asian migration and settlement in the U.S., the rise of anti-Asian movements, the experiences of Asian Americans during World War II and the Cold War, the emergence of the Asian American movement in the 1960s, the post-1965 Asian immigration, and the War on Terror. We will investigate broader themes including labor, citizenship, political resistance, gender and sexuality, community formation, empire, and transnationalism. We will also consider key contemporary issues, including race and ethnic relations, anti-Asian harassment and violence, and the legacy of U.S. colonialism in Asia-Pacific. Along the way, we will engage classic and recent scholarship in the field, and form our own interpretations of the past based on a wide range of sources–including films, novels, newspapers, government documents, political cartoons, and more. Throughout, the course advances the argument that citizenship and belonging in the U.S. cannot be fully understood without accounting for the experiences of Asian Americans.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

AAS 285 LEC U.S. (Im)migration History: A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered

Last offered Fall 2025

How do we reconcile the popular notion that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants with the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past? In this course, we will investigate how immigrants have come to be viewed as symbols of the United States’ highest ideals and as existential threats to the nation’s survival. We will also consider how immigrants themselves have shaped American institutions and ideas about political rights and citizenship. This course aims to go beyond traditional narratives of U.S. immigration, which have often focused on early 20th century migrants from Europe. By centering the experiences of African, Asian, and Latin American migrants and their descendants from the 19th century through the present, we will understand elements of American history–including settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, Asiatic Exclusion and U.S. imperialism–that the nation-of-immigrants paradigm leaves out and obscures. In addition to reading key academic works in the field, students will engage with a variety of primary sources, from newspaper articles and films, to memoirs, immigration files, and oral histories. Students will also get to develop a creative immigrant/family history project. Students will leave this course with a more nuanced understanding of current immigration politics–including the historical roots of immigration and border enforcement within and beyond U.S. territorial borders, and strategies of survival and resistance against xenophobia.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

AAS 304 SEM Queer in Asian America

Last offered Spring 2026

Asian America has always been queer. This is both to say that, since the first waves of Asian immigrants to the Americas, there have always been queer individuals counted among them, and that the Asian American subject has historically figured as “queer” and “different” within the Western cultural, social, and economic landscape. How does queerness resonate, redound, or otherwise modulate the idea and experience of Asian Americanness? What are the textures and contours of this queerness? Does it have an aesthetic and literary dimension? This course surveys a range of scholarship and literature by queer and feminist Asian Americans that explore the interpenetrations of race, gender, and sexuality in the construction of Asian America and Asian American identity. Particular focus is paid to how Asian American artists and writers actualize queer subjectivity, relation, and intimacy across experiments in narrative, form, and media. The class will move between foundational scholarship at the intersections of Asian American studies, queer studies, and gender and sexuality studies alongside key works of art and literature. Students will also have the opportunity to contribute their own selection of art and literature to the class conversation.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

AAS 312 SEM The 626

Last offered Spring 2025

Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars is “a defiantly joyful adventure in California’s San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made doughnuts.” What sociological insight could a sci-fi novel about intense extracurricular pressure, food, and foreignness have to offer about the San Gabriel Valley, area code 626? In this course, we take the fantastical characters and plots of Aoki’s novel as an invitation to delve into the histories of Asian American settlement to Gabrielino/Tongva lands on the eastern fringes of present-day Los Angeles County. The multilingual boba shops, restaurants, and store fronts throughout the valley mask a history of violent backlash and English-only initiatives. Media reports of academic and musical prodigies skew a broader socioeconomic picture that includes crimmigration, deportation, and xenophobia. And the figure of an intergalactic refugee mother exposes the toll that crossing borders takes on individuals, families, and communities. In this project-based course, we survey the formation of a particular place and its surroundings. In doing so, students grapple with general questions such as: How does migration shape intergenerational dynamics? When and with what tools do people confront racism and intersecting forms of discrimination? How do ethnic enclaves form and fracture? And how do communities mobilize for political rights?

Taught by: Phi Su | Catalog details

AAS 313 (F) SEM Gender, Race, and the Power of Personal Aesthetics

This media/cultural studies course focuses on the politics of personal style amongst women of color in the US and around the globe in the digital era. We undertake a comparative, transnational exploration of the ways in which categories of difference such as gender, disability, sexuality, class, and ethno-racial identity inform normative beauty standards and ideas about the body. The class pays particular attention to the ways in which neoliberal capitalism shapes contemporary understandings of gendered bodies and the self. We examine an array of materials from across the disciplines including commercial websites, music videos, photography, histories, film, television, personal narratives, ethnographies, and sociological case studies. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we engage the following questions, among others: What are some of the everyday functions of personal style among women of color in the US and globally? How do Latina/x, Black, Arab American, and Asian American personal aesthetics reflect the specific circumstances of their creation, and the unique histories of these racialized communities? What role do transnational media and popular culture play in the development and circulation of gendered, raced, and sexualized aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as an activist strategy complicate traditional understandings of feminist political activity? And what do the combined insights of ethnic studies, feminist studies, cultural studies, media studies, queer studies and disability studies contribute to our comprehension of gendered Asian American, Arab American, Black, and Latina/x bodies?

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

AAS 316 SEM Music in Asian American History

Last offered Fall 2025

Is “Asian American music” all music made by Asian Americans, music by Asian Americans specifically drawing on Asian heritage, or music engaging with Asian American issues? This course embraces all three definitions and the full diversity of Asian American musical experience. We will study the historical soundscapes of immigrant communities (Chinese opera in North America; Southeast Asian war refugees) and how specific traumatic political events shaped musical life (Japanese American internment camps). We will encounter works by major classical composers (Chou Wen-Chung; Chen Yi; Tan Dun; Bright Sheng) and will investigate the careers and reception of prominent classical musicians (Midori; Seiji Ozawa; Yo-Yo Ma). Afro-Asian fusions, inspired by civil rights protest movements, manifested in jazz (Jon Jang; Fred Ho; Anthony Brown; Hiroshima; Vijay Iyer) and hip hop (MC Jin; Awkwafina; Filipino and Desi rappers). Asian Americans have been active in popular music at home and abroad (Don Ho; Yoko Ono; Wang Leehom; Mitski). Finally, we will investigate communal forms of Asian American music making that have crossed racialized and gendered boundaries (taiko drumming; Indonesian gamelan; Bhangra; Suzuki method). This seminar is designed to develop research skills, as we pursue original fieldwork, archival research, and oral history interviews.

Taught by: W. Anthony Sheppard | Catalog details

AAS 351 TUT Racism in Public Health

Last offered Fall 2025

Across the nation, states, counties and communities have declared racism a public health crisis. This push to identify systemic racism as a high priority in public health action and policy is an important symbolic and political move. It names the faults of histories, systems and institutions but also brings to the spotlight the individual and community responsibility to dismantle racism in the US. In this tutorial, we will examine racism in public health policy, practice and research through an investigation of several mediums of evidence and information, ranging from peer reviewed literature to news editorials, podcasts and documentaries. We will explore specific pathways by which legacies of colonialism and racism function in various public health disciplines such as epidemiology, social & behavioral sciences, health policy and environmental health while also examining the dynamics of power and history in research and community practice. We will take deep dives into issues on how health can be impacted by redlining, racist medical algorithms, racial trauma and stress and police violence, to name a few. Students will also have two opportunities to select their own case studies, as a way for you to research and learn about particular racial health issues that are of personal interest. This course is also about self-reflection and exploration of the ways in which our identities and lived experiences impact our understanding and perspective. We will gain skills in speaking across differences and articulation of how our own perceptions and lived experiences of race and racism impact our study of public health. This tutorial requires an openness to self-reflection and the practice of listening and articulation.

Taught by: Marion Min-Barron | Catalog details

AAS 361 Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Last offered NA

This course examines how contemporary Asian American writers are reshaping American fiction. We’ll move beyond traditional stories of immigration and assimilation to consider how contemporary writers employ diverse genres–from speculative fiction to metafiction–to disrupt narrative conventions and rethink identity, history, and the American experience. We’ll discuss topics such as the political and psychological legacies of U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia; satirical takes on the model minority myth and the performance of race; how speculative fiction confronts capitalism and the climate crisis; and how American identity is shaped by global politics and transnational family networks. Longer works may include lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (2007), Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (2020), Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020), and Akil Kumarasamy’s Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (2022). We’ll also read short stories by Mia Alvar, Paul Yoon, Ted Chiang, Kristiana Kahakauwila, and Anthony Veasna So. Our primary readings will be supplemented by theoretical and critical writings that help us situate contemporary Asian American fiction within debates about racial form, affect, neoliberalism, and empire (by Min Hyoung Song, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Marianne Hirsch, Aihwa Ong, Sianne Ngai, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and David L. Eng, among others).

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

AAS 364 SEM Asia and Asian Americans During the Cold War

Last offered Spring 2025

This course traces how American geopolitical interests and involvement in Asia during the Cold War affected Asian Americans. It examines the history of the Cold War as a period of U.S. imperial expansion as well as a time when various actors and organizations, especially those of Asian descent, harnessed the East-West rivalry to advance their own agendas. We will consider how diverse diplomatic strategies including militarization, educational exchange, and immigration reform shaped East, South, and Southeast Asian migrations to and settlement in the United States and the social and material lives of these diverse communities. Case studies include transnational adoptees from Korea, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and across Guam and Israel-Palestine, Black, Latinx, and Asian American activists who traveled to Vietnam, educated Indian and Pakistani immigrants, and American-born individuals of Japanese ancestry in Japan. We will also explore how individuals of Asian descent leveraged Cold War geopolitics and forged cross-ethnic, cross-class alliances to advocate for social change both at home and abroad.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

AAS 373 (F) SEM US Empire in the Philippines: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Revolution

When the United States of America took official colonial control of the Philippines in 1898, the country had already been fighting an anti-colonial struggle against Spain for several years. With the start of the Philippine-American War in 1899, that fight continued. Beginning with a survey of the racial and class complexities of the Philippine revolution, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of U.S. empire-building in the archipelago from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, while also connecting the history of US empire to Filipinx art, culture, and politics today. We will pay particular attention to plantation systems that connected the Philippines, Hawaii, and other sugar-growing regions; the history of Muslim communities’ resistance to imperial power (of the Spanish, US, and the Philippine state) in the southern Philippines; constructions of Indigeneity during US colonialism; and various ways American notions of freedom, independence, and global power were articulated in, and transformed by, US occupation. Our readings may be drawn from critical ethnic studies, gender & sexuality studies, American studies, postcolonial theory, Black geography, disability studies, and more. Students are expected to take an active role in discussion, but no prior knowledge of the Philippines is expected.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details

AAS 375 SEM Asian American Sexualities

Last offered Spring 2025

Perceived as objects of sexual use and perversity, how might Asian/Asian American subjects contend with these projections and enact their own genders and sexualities? Anchored in this question, this theory-intensive seminar will provide a study of seminal and recent scholarship at the intersections of Asian American Studies, feminist criticism, and queer theory that focus on or are read in tandem with a collection of cultural expressions, including film, sculpture, poetry, drag performance, music, manifestos, and visual and performance art. To first root us, the seminar will introduce key uses and theorizations of sex/gender, sexuality, and queerness. Then, across the semester, we will focus on deployments of them through a range of topics, including sexual subjugation and activism of “comfort women,” orientalism/ornamentalism, the queering of Sikh, South Asian, and Muslim Americans post-9/11, western demands to “come out,” representations in pornography, lesbian invisibility, devaluation of trans* lives, etc., exploring questions of racialized, gendered, and sexual subordination alongside power, pleasure, play, and critique. To this end, we will approach gender and sexuality not as identity categories that one is or has but socially and biologically construed categories, loci for intervention and play, anti-normative positions, lived experiences, and ever-evolving processes of doing, becoming, and unbecoming.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

AAS 384 (F) SEM Comparative History of Science and Medicine in Asian/Pacific America, 1800-Present

How have scientific knowledge and medicine been tools of exclusion, violence, and imperial control against Asian Americans, as well as indigenous peoples, Black, Latinx, and white migrants, and their descendants? How have these groups negotiated and resisted encounters with such knowledge from the 19th century to the present? This seminar explores these questions by examining a series of case studies–including American colonial medicine and science in the Philippines and Hawai’i, Cold War migration of Chinese scientists and South Asian doctors to the U.S., and the politics of HIV/AIDS, psychiatry, and culturally competent care in Black, Asian, and Cuban migrant communities. Together, we will survey the literature in history, English, Global Health, Sociology, and other fields and consider how the Asian/Pacific American experience in science and medicine has been integral to, as well as informed by, the experiences of other groups in the transpacific world. Students will leave this course with interdisciplinary tools for understanding present-day health inequities in underserved Asian/Pacific American communities and other marginalized groups.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

AAS 396 (S) SEM Race and Performance

How does one “do” race? This seminar surveys foundational and emergent scholarship at the nexus of performance studies, critical ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies alongside contemporary visual and performance art works. It will explore how the framework of performance destabilizes notions of race, gender, and sexuality, approaching them not as ones we are or possess but as ones we enact and remake. We will begin the course by tracing key concepts in performance studies (i.e., performance, performative, performativity) before examining a range of performances that respond to and negotiate life under ongoing conditions of racial capitalism, empire, anti-blackness, and settler colonialism. To this end, we will focus on how qualities attributed to racialized and gendered bodies, such as silence, disease, patience, depression, waiting, and aloofness, are retooled as actions or positions.

Taught by: Kelly Chung | Catalog details

AAS 402 (S) SEM Marxist Feminisms: Race, Performance, Labor

This seminar traces queer, black and women of color feminist, and critical ethnic studies critiques of orthodox Marxism. Beginning with core texts from the tradition, including Capital Volume I, we will examine a range of social positions and modes of extraction that complicate Marx’s emphasis on the factory worker. Every week, we will draw our focus to conditions of reproduction, racial slavery, care and domestic work, indentured servitude, immigrant labor, land expropriation, and sex work among conditions. Throughout and towards the last half of the semester, we will turn to aesthetic practices that respond to these conditions and incite new ways of being in the world. To this end, this seminar will equip students with critical understandings of how racial capitalism has fundamentally relied on the mass elimination, capture, recruitment, and displacement of different racialized, gendered, and abled bodies in and beyond the U.S. and how value and life under these conditions can and must be undone.

Taught by: Kelly Chung | Catalog details

AAS 404 SEM New Works in Asian American Studies

Last offered Spring 2026

In this seminar, we will consider recent and/or recently intensifying debates, conversations, and intellectual directions in Asian American Studies. Topics may include settler colonialism; indigeneity, the Pacific, and the transpacific; war and refugee experiences; media, including video games; political participation, conservativism, and religion; affirmative action; sexual violence; mental health; and comparative and relational racialization e.g. scholarship at the intersection of Asian American, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous, and African American/Africana studies. We may also consider some new works of Asian American film and literature, and the criticism it generates. Course material will focus on scholarship that critically engage race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and/or disability as key terms. Students may be asked to develop a final project or paper based on one of the topics or books covered in the course; review a new work independently; or conduct an interview with an author. Students will gain an understanding of the field’s recent concerns but also become familiar with the broader political, social, and cultural contexts from which they emerge.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

AAS 415 (F) SEM Racial Melancholia, Queer Melancholia

Psychoanalysis teaches that the inauguration of our subjectivities (the entry into sociality, into language, etc.) names at once our arrival into, and our break from, the world. Loss–or the condition of deprivation which instigates all manners of reaching out towards, holding on to, and finding objects anew–thus serves as a foundational framework in psychoanalysis and its uptake in contemporary theories of identity, race, gender, sexuality, relationality, trauma, and memory. This class explores loss–and more specifically the Freudian concept of “melancholia”–across psychoanalytic theory, queer and feminist theory, Black studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian American studies. In the wake of losses due variously to histories of forced migration and slavery, the AIDS epidemic, war, and social exclusion, theories of racial and queer melancholia have emerged as supple frameworks through which to consider how queer and racialized subjects hold onto non-normative ways of being, relation, and sociality against the normalizing tides of erasure. To that end, we will also look at a range of work by artists and writers such as Dionne Brand, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Gil Cuadros, Richard Fung, and Isaac Julien. The course moves back and forth between loss as a historical/collective and personal/subjective phenomenon as it cuts across the construction of queer, racialized, and diasporic subjectivities.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

AAS 424 SEM New Work in American Studies

Last offered Spring 2026

In this seminar, we will consider recent and/or recently intensifying debates, conversations, and directions in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Topics may include settler colonialism, the carceral state, trans politics, US empire, refugees, indigeneity, and more, and draw on scholarship at the intersection of Asian American, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous, and African American/Africana studies. Class discussion and writing will revolve around the construction of arguments in American Studies scholarship, methodological approaches to research and analysis, how American Studies researchers combine various types of sources (e.g., art, archives, interviews, media), and understanding the current intellectual priorities in the field. Students may be asked to develop a final project or paper based on one of the topics or books covered in the course, such as reviewing a new work independently. Students will gain an understanding of the field’s recent concerns but also become familiar with the broader political, social, and cultural contexts from which they emerge.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details

AAS 497 (F) IND Independent Study: Asian American Studies

For students pursuing a semester-length independent study for Asian American Studies credit in the fall. Independent study proposals are due to the Chair of Asian American Studies by the end of the pre-registration period the semester prior. Proposals must be approved before students can enroll. Note that students enroll for this course code regardless of the instructor advising the independent study. See Chair for more details.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details

AAS 498 (S) IND Independent Study: Asian American Studies

For students pursuing a semester-length independent study for Asian American Studies credit in the spring. Independent study proposals are due to the Chair of Asian American Studies by the end of the pre-registration period the semester prior. Proposals must be approved before students can enroll. Note that students enroll for this course code regardless of the instructor advising the independent study. See Chair for more details.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details