Have you read short stories and autobiographical narratives of women writers? In this course, we will focus on the works of Filipina writers based in the Philippines, the United Stated and other parts of the world. Among the questions we will explore are: What are the contexts by which we can study these works? What are the dynamics between fiction and truth, and autobiographical narratives and the unreliability of memory? How did these writers participate in discourses on gender, race, and class?

This course offers a broad historical, political, ethnographical and and cultural survey of the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent from the earliest period known to archaeology to the advent of Islam as a major cultural and political force around the 13th century CE. Lectures, readings, and class discussions will center on seminal texts that have influenced South Asian civilizations from the earliest antiquity to the late medieval period. This course is open to all interested students and is required for those majoring or minoring in South Asian Studies.

This graduate seminar introduces students to the study of Buddhism in Theravada Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka through a critical survey of recent scholarship in such fields as religious history, cultural history and literary history, focusing on the modern era. Once dismissed as Buddhism of the “Lesser Vehicle”, Theravada Buddhism is a dynamic field of belief and practice whose responses to modernity include moral reform, textual purification, anticolonial protest, passive disobedience, meditation movements and militant nationalism.