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THE GRADUATE CURRICULUM Each student will be encouraged to develop a program best suited to their intellectual and scholarly needs. While it is the purpose of the program to be as flexible as possible, given faculty and course offerings, students will normally pursue work in one of the language areas or comparatively around a common theme. Basic Seminars All first year graduate students will be required to enroll in a one year seminar, Introduction to Critical Asian Studies. This seminar will be team taught yearly by different faculty and its aim is to introduce the student to the institutional and political history of Oriental Studies and Area Studies as they have been practiced in the United States and, where relevant, elsewhere. Its purpose is to familiarize students with current and historically significant debates in the field and to the intellectual, theoretical and social implications of the study of modern East Asia in today's world. This first year seminar will also concentrate on principal paradigms that have informed the development of research agendas. Archives, Materials and Research Procedures is a one semester seminar required of all students in the program to be taken in their third year. The seminar is designed to help students formulate an individual research project. Although its primary purpose is to familiarize students with a diversity of research methods and techniques related to the identification of materials, the accessibility of collections and major research sites devoted to archiving sources in East Asia, the form of the seminar will also be critical and interdisciplinary in nature. Core Theory and Method The 200 series seminars are designed to engage particular theories or clusters of inter-related theories with wide-ranging relevance in critical, interdisciplinary research in modern East Asia. How these theories are implicated in East Asian situations will be explored to explain how theoretical formulations are grasped as crystallizations of East Asian historical, social and cultural circumstances, rather than mere imported abstractions. Such explorations will involve seeing how appropriations operate in specific circumstances to produce different and productive inflections that signify a lived and historical experience. In other words, theory (say, from Marxism to postcolonialism, from psychoanalysis to Maoism) will mark the moments of how East Asian societies negotiated their own modernity. These core seminars will deal with questions of nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, diasporic movements, globalization and commodification, comparison and comparability, Marxism, feminism, capitalist modernization and modernism, gender and sexuality, class formations, production of cultural identities etc. Moreover, the 200 series seminars in core theories and methods are intended to be taken by students across the language groups. With permission from the Director of Graduate Studies or a student's academic advisor, these seminars can be substituted to fulfill requirements in the categories of Themes, Special Topics, Texts. Themes, Special Topics, Texts The 300 series seminars will deal with major themes, periods, movements, authors, genres, texts and other cultural and historical forms. (See list of departmental offerings.) The 400 series courses offer more specialize focus and the opportunity for greater in-depth investigations of historical, social and cultural phenomena reflecting the particular expertise and competence of the department's faculty. Students will normally take 400 series courses only after they have completed the required coursework at 100, 200 and 300 levels General Examinations The general examination consists of three parts: The first part of the examination, on theory and history of the field, is to be taken at the end of the first year of graduate study. In this part, the students are expected to show critical understanding of the institutional, social, and intellectual development of East Asian studies, as well as to demonstrate familiarity with major theoretical and discursive paradigms in or relevant to the field. The Basic Seminars series are designed to help the students prepare for the first exam. The format will be a 4 hour long take-home exam, during which students write a few short essays on the given topics. The first part of the examination is administered by an ad hoc faculty committee, which decides on the topics and reads the results of the examinations. The second examination, to be taken toward the end of the students' coursework, usually during the third year of the graduate study, is on the students' chosen fields of teaching. This is designed to ensure the students' general competence and viability as college teachers, although, under normal circumstances, the reading list should be relevant and leading to the students' work on their dissertations. The teaching field can be defined in more traditional terms of national literature, national history, etc. (such as modern Chinese literature or modern Japanese history) or in interdisciplinary or theoretical terms as a phenomenon, a question, a problematic (such as modernism or nationalism). The third and final examination is on the prospectus, bibliography, and methodological statement of the student's dissertation. The students are expected to present a substantive proposal of their dissertation research, a detailed projection of the progress of the dissertation, and, preferably, a sample chapter. Successful passing of the third exam qualifies the students as Ph.D. candidates

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