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.

This course is a broad introduction to the history, doctrine, and culture of the Buddhism of Tibet. We will begin with the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century and move on to the evolution of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist literature, ritual and monastic practice, the place of Buddhism in Tibetan political history, and the contemporary situation of Tibetan Buddhism both inside and outside of Tibet.

This course offers an advanced introduction to the literary history, cultural norms,
poetic forms and textual traditions of 17th to 19th century Southeast Asia through a
comparative study of three epic poems: Tum Teav (Cambodia), Khun Chang Khun
Phaen (Thailand), and Tale of Kieu (Vietnam). We will explore the dynamics of desire
and transgression, duty and sacrifice, kinship and kingship, and the interplay between
folk, court, Buddhist, Confucian, and Hindu values. Finally, we will consider the

This course is a cultural history of the Philippines, from the birth of the nation in the nineteenth century to the present. It outlines the major events in Philippine history through cultural texts that reflect the salient attitudes and ideas of key periods. Not only will this course cover canonical works, it will also examine popular texts. Expect to discuss everything from anti-colonial novels, Tagalog garage rock, third world brutalism, Manila disco, power ballads, protest songs, romantic comedies, to contemporary crime dramas.

This course examines the histories and the contexts of the realist novel through a comparative literary focus on South and South East Asia. Through novels published in South and South East Asia from the 1900’s to the present, this course will look at how the writers in these regions deployed realism in complex and innovative ways to represent ideas of the individual and the collective.