Courses for Spring 2025 | Asian American Studies Program

	Title	Instructors	Time	Description	Cross listings	Fulfills
ASAM 0102-401	Introduction to Asian American History	Eiichiro Azuma	MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	This course will provide an introduction to the history of Asian Pacific Americans, focusing on the wide diversity of migrant experiences, as well as the continuing legacies of Orientalism on American-born APA's. Issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality will also be examined.	HIST1155401	Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. History & Tradition Sector
ASAM 0270-401	The Immigrant City	Domenic Vitiello	T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM	This course focuses on immigrant communities in United States cities and suburbs. We survey migration and community experiences among a broad range of ethnic groups in different city and suburban neighborhoods. Class readings, discussions, and visits to Philadelphia neighborhoods explore themes including labor markets, commerce, housing, civil society, racial and ethnic relations, integration, refugee resettlement, and local, state, and national immigration policies. The class introduces students to a variety of social science approaches to studying social groups and neighborhoods, including readings in sociology, geography, anthropology, social history, and political science. Ultimately, the class aims to help students develop: 1) a broad knowledge of immigration and its impacts on U.S. cities and regions; 2) a comparative understanding of diverse migrant and receiving communities; and 3) familiarity with policies and institutions that seek to influence immigration and immigrant communities.	LALS0270401, SOCI0270401, URBS0270401	Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. Society Sector
ASAM 1166-401	A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered	Hardeep Dhillon	MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people.	AFRC1166401, HIST1166401, LALS1166401
ASAM 1400-401	Asian American Gender and Sexualities	Rupa Pillai	TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	This course explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in Asian America. Through interdisciplinary and cultural texts, students will consider how Asian American gender and sexualities are constructed in relation to racism while learning theories on and methods to study gender, sex, and race. We will discuss masculinities, femininities, race-conscious feminisms, LGBTQ+ identities, interracial and intraracial relationships, and kinship structures.	GSWS1400401, SAST1400401	Cultural Diviserity in the U.S.
ASAM 1500-401	Asian Americans In Contemporary Society	Tahseen Shams	MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	This course will explore Asian America through sociological frameworks and research. At the outset, we will establish a strong theoretical foundation by studying key sociological theories related to race and ethnicity, assimilation, and racial stratification. Additionally, we will briefly review key turning points in Asian American history. Throughout the semester, we will explore a broad range of contemporary topics, such as racial and ethnic identities (including multiracial identities); racialized desire and interracial relationships; controlling media images and subversive representations; transracial adoption; affirmative action; anti-Asian racism; and the role of the "model minority" myth in contemporary U.S. politics. Above all, this class will critically evaluate the viability of an Asian American panethnic identity while also exploring important axes of heterogeneity (e.g., class, gender, and sexuality) within the broader Asian American category.	SOCI1140401	Society Sector Cultural Diviserity in the U.S.
ASAM 1520-301	Asian American Activism	Robert V Buscher	W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM	Providing a broad introduction to the history of activism in the United States, this course		Cultural Diviserity in the U.S.
ASAM 1910-401	Policing, Prisons, and Asian America	Sonya Chen	T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	In the era of Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate, how do Asian Americans fit into national conversations about the role of police and prisons in society? Some Asian Americans have pushed for prosecuting anti-Asian incidents as “hate crimes” and activating other carceral responses in light of pandemic-related anti-Asian violence. Others have grappled with how Asian Americans themselves face different forms of carceral violence and what solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement looks like. This course asks: What are the varied ways Asian Americans are entangled with the prison industrial complex, as invested in, impacted by, and seeking to resist policing? What can the experiences of Asian Americans tell us about the politics of race, violence, and the carceral state? First, we will examine the debates over “hate” frameworks and carceral solutions in the Stop Asian Hate movement and the broader contemporary movement against anti-Asian violence. Second, we will consider how Asian Americans are impacted by the carceral state in multiple ways, including but not limited to post 9/11 surveillance, immigrant detention and deportation, and the policing of sex work and other forms of gendered and precarious labor. Third, we will explore how Asian Americans have been resisting carceral violence, building alternatives, and engaging in projects for police and prison abolition.	PSCI1293401
ASAM 2100-401	The Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans	Eiichiro Azuma	T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This research seminar will consist of a review of representative studies on the Japanese American internment, and a discussion of how social scientists and historians have attempted to explain its complex backgrounds and causes. Through the careful reading of academic works, primary source materials, and visualized narratives (film productions), students will learn the basic historiography of internment studies, research methodologies, and the politics of interpretation pertaining to this particular historical subject. Students will also examine how Japanese Americans and others have attempted to reclaim a history of the wartime internment from the realm of “detached” academia in the interest of their lives in the “real” world, and for a goal of “social justice” in general. The class will critically probe the political use of history and memories of selected pasts in both Asian American community and contemporary American society through the controversial issue of the Japanese American internment.	HIST3150401	Cultural Diviserity in the U.S.
ASAM 2110-401	Yellow Peril, Red Scare: Cold War Asia in America	Mark Tseng-Putterman	W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This course explores how the Cold War in Asia has shaped dominant ideas about race, militarism, and citizenship, with particular consequences for both Asians and Asian Americans. As decolonization movements in Asia confronted a growing US empire, Cold War paranoia became linked to longstanding tropes of Asian invasion—merging the so-called “Yellow Peril” and “Red Scare” in the American imagination. Taking a cultural history approach, students will draw on both archival sources and popular media to examine the Cold War emergence of lingering tropes such as the communist spy, the war bride, the peasant insurgent, and the model minority. Topics covered include the Korean and Vietnam Wars, McCarthyism, the Third World movement, Asian/American military service, Cold War refugee policy, anti-imperialist activism, and the legacy of Cold War geopolitics in Asia today.	HIST1120401
ASAM 2159-401	The History of Family Separation	Hardeep Dhillon	M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States.	AFRC2159401, GSWS2159401, HIST2159401
ASAM 2272-401	In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique	Bakirathi Mani	W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This interdisciplinary seminar examines how popular cultural representations frame Asian Americans as either invisible or hypervisible—our explorations will move across race and national origin, language and class, gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.	ARTH3749401, ENGL2272401, GSWS2272401
ASAM 2600-401	Asian American Food	Fariha Khan	TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	You are what you eat. Asian American Food explores the history, politics, and ethnic identity of food through a cultural lens. Growing food, eating, and sharing meals serve as intimate expressions of self and community. By examining the production and consumption of food, the course investigates the ways that Asian Americans navigate traditions, gender norms, religious dietary laws, food habits, and employment as they create lives in the United States. The course overviews the history of Asian American foodways, but has a particular focus on Philadelphia's Asian American communities.	SAST2600401, URBS2600401	Cultural Diviserity in the U.S.
ASAM 3356-401	Asian American Nonfiction Workshop	Weike Wang	M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM	Contemporary literature has seen a recent rise of Asian American nonfiction writing, particularly in the form of essays and memoirs. Asian American writers are reshaping the form of the immigration story and the personal narrative, and are adding their voices to the pressing topics of political activism, STEM, and mental health. This course will include readings by authors such as Hsu, Hong, Nunez, Chang, Fan, Wang, Jacob, and Kalanithi, amongs others. For memoir and personal pieces, we will discuss how these writers transform their own material through craft, structure, and perspective. For essays, we will discuss how writers use research (and, yes, craft!) to present difficult and/or technical information in an engaging way. Students will write and workshop their own pieces of nonfiction (8-12 pages), with a choice of memoir or essay. No prior experience is necessary except for an eagerness to engage with the material and an open-mindedness during workshop discussions.	ENGL3356401