This seminar explores Asian American literature and culture intensively; specific course topics will vary from year to year. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

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.

This seminar delves into the global imprint of contemporary Chinese diasporic communities, examining their significant influence from the lens of multiple sectors and regions—from Wenzhou migrants shaping the fashion industry in Italy to copper mining enterprises in Zambia to Chinese-owned nail salons and massage parlors dotting New York City. This exploration situates Chinese communities within the context of an interconnected world. As China has ascended to become the world’s second-largest economy, its impact is not confined within its borders but extends into international politics, culture, commerce, technology, and beyond. This class endeavors to unpack the complexities of China’s global engagement and deepen students’ understanding of Chinese communities worldwide. The course is divided into two main sections. The first section provides an overview of the historical journey of China on the global stage and an introduction to research methods specific to studying this phenomenon. In the second half, the course adopts a more granular approach, delving into critical topics such as race and ethnicity, gender and family dynamics, transnational identity, educational achievement, labor, entrepreneurship, and soft power.

Madness, however conceived, can trouble the limits of our worlds. Since COVID-19, questions of mental health have resurfaced with a sense of urgency, as many faced unprecedented changes in collective and intimate life. This course explores madness and mental health in East Asian worlds, across geographies, histories, social-political transformations, and racialized imaginations. How do East Asian therapeutics approach madness, through and beyond the concepts of psychiatry, neuroscience, or even ‘mental health’? What happens when Euro-American diagnostic categories and treatments travel to East Asia as part of missionary and empire-building projects? Bringing together readings in medical and psychological anthropology, as well as history, literature, psychoanalysis, and transcultural psychiatry, we will explore themes such as: shifting concepts of madness in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese medical and spiritual cures, colonial legacies of ‘culture-bound syndromes,’ and race as a site of psychic struggle in Asian American diasporas.

From shopkeepers to motel owners, the Asian American entrepreneur is frequently celebrated and offered as proof that the American Dream is achievable and that the United States is a meritocracy. This seminar challenges this view. Through interdisciplinary texts, qualitative research assignments, and speakers, we will explore the transnational forces and structural limitations within the United States that produce Asian ethnic niches and the bamboo ceiling which limits the success of Asian Americans.

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.

This course examines the legal history of the United States to illuminate one of the most urgent issues of our time: immigration. From the late nineteenth century, immigration to the United States changed the legal landscape of the country by challenging the bounds of national citizenship, “separate but equal,” Congressional powers, home ownership, and an array of other topics. In this course, we will trace how immigrants challenged existing orders of their time through major state and federal supreme court cases, and the subsequent aftermaths of their trials. In addition to considering the key legal issues at stake in these cases, this course compels us to consider the dynamics of race, disability, gender, and labor that define the construction of US law in the context of immigration.

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.

Most if not all fiction and nonfiction requires some kind of research. Our readings will explore how writers incorporate scientific knowledge into their prose without compromising craft. This course will explore ways to bring real science into our pieces and make them fun, exciting and fresh. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

An overview of Asian American literature from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century to the present. This course covers a wide range of Asian American novels, plays, and poems, situating them in the contexts of American history and minority communities and considering the variety of formal strategies these different texts take. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.