Can a song inspire a revolution? The course focuses on literary, visual, and performance texts that participated in political discourses in the Philippines. What strategies did the writers and artists employ? How did writers and artists face issues of censorship and persecution?  How did social movements influence these texts, and in turn, how did these texts contribute to these social movements?

An introduction to the mythologies of the Phillipines, providing a comparative overview of key myths. We will focus on indigenous narrative traditions encompassing myths of creation and origin, agricultural and maritime myths and practices, the founding of kingdoms, and indigenous geographies. We will further explore the role of myth in the contemporary world.

This course is a cultural history of modern 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 may this course cover canonical works and traditional performative forms (including ritual, poetry, song, and dance), it will also examine popular texts.

Readings, lectures, and discussion of the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. Insular Southeast Asia: Covers the modern-day nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Special emphasis on the arts and their social and political context, with discussions on the impact of the colonial experience and the question of modernization vs. tradition.

This Gateway course introduces the culture and history of mainland Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam) with an emphasis on Southeast Asian voices.   Our themes for 2020 are identity, power, and performance.

An introduction to the mythologies of Southeast Asia, providing a comparative overview of key myths. We will focus on indigenous narrative traditions encompassing myths of creation and origin, agricultural and maritime myths and practices, the founding of kingdoms, and indigenous geographies. We will further explore the role of myth in the contemporary world.

This course is designed to provide a dual chronological and thematic approach to the study of one of the great empires in human civilization: the Mughal Empire. Although the bulk of this course will focus on the Mughal Empire during its heyday between the 1550s and the early 1700s, careful attention will be paid to the larger historical and geographical contexts that both enabled the emergence and, ultimately, decentralization of Mughal power.

This is an introductory level course on the history of Muslim communities and institutions in South Asia.

This Upper Division, seminar-style class introduces students to the modern history and politics of Southeast Asia, from the 1940s to the 2010s, through the lens of cinema and the frame of memory. From American B-Movies to Japanese anti-war features, media monarchs to Indie film-makers, spectral spouses to exorcist monks, Cambodian Claymation to Indonesia film noir, we explore cinema as a vehicle of propaganda, remembrance, experimentation, repression, expression and resistance – but most of all, as a theater of memory.