ENROLL

Seungjoo Yoon

An introduction to the study of historical biography. Instead of what we heard or think about Confucius, we will examine what his contemporaries, both his supporters and critics, thought he was. Students will scrutinize various sources gleaned from archaeology, heroic narratives, and court debates, as well as the Analects to write their own biography of Confucius based on a particular historical context that created a persistent constitutional agenda in early China. Students will justify why they would call such a finding, in hindsight, "Confucian" in its formative days. Themes can be drawn from aspects of ritual, bureaucracy, speech and writing

Held for new first year students

Seungjoo Yoon

How do Shintoism view childbirth and death? How do Buddhism and biotechnology intersect in the making of Japan? How do Japanese perceptions about health and medicine evolve with settler colonialism? This course examines the meaning of body, health, and medicine in Japan’s recent past when biomedicine came to replace classical Chinese medicine and to gradually occupy a hegemonic position in its pharmaceutical regime. Reading materials are drawn from illustrations, travelogues, and poems, as well as medical journals and reports. Themes include body and modern self, family and reproductive justice, medical colonialism, hygienic modernity, narcotics and ethnopsychology, and national healthcare system.