Content varies with student interests. The course will normally focus on classical Buddhist texts that exist in multiple recensions and languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan.

The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 freshmen.

Reading of Urdu prose and poetry in a variety of literary and scholarly styles; composition. Topics in advanced grammar; designed to improve proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Students will be expected to converse in a clearly participatory fashion, initiate, sustain, and bring to closure a wide variety of communicative tasks using diverse language strategies.

Advanced readings in Sanskrit texts of various genres, including Sanskrit ornate poetry with emphasis on the canons of poetic analysis of the Indian aesthetic tradition. The course is designed for advanced Sanskrit students at the graduate level and focuses on readings in various critical genres of Sanskrit texts and their commentaries with readings and discussion of linguistic, stylistic and culture-historical issues.

This is a beginner's course for learning Bengali language. The students learn the fundamentals of the language, including the alphabet and basic grammar. They acquire familiarity with common sentence structures, the ability to read and understand simple texts, and the ability to express their feelings.

Cross-listed with History 100F Section 3.

Intermediate Thai 100B continues to integrate cultural awareness into language education. In Spring 2022, we will emphasize the shift from the concrete to the abstract in Thai language and culture. Students will learn to read longer and more abstract writing, advertisements from newspapers, articles from webpages. The class will cover expressions, figures of speech, higher level grammar, and hierarchical pronouns. Writing will move from descriptive to expository. To increase verbal skills and cultural education, students will watch karaoke, advertisements, and films.

Through the prism of psychoanalytical theories, early and contemporary, this course explores a variety of pre-modern and modern East Asian texts—literary, artistic, religious, and theoretical. We will be asking both how these theories enrich our reading of the texts, and how the texts enrich our understanding of the theories. Through close readings of all the material we will begin to discern how theory and text reshape one another, where they mesh productively, and where they insistently stay apart.