UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

ALC: 8-year Self Review
Readings in Sino-Korean in the Korean division and the Introduction to Reading Japanese Academic
Texts in the Japanese division. Such courses as these, however, have been the first to suffer due to
budgetary problems and the failure to fill vacant ladder faculty positions. It has, for example, been three
years since the Department has been able to offer Reading Japanese Academic Texts. Since these are
courses on which our graduate students rely heavily to acquire research skills, these cutbacks have had a
strong negative effect on our graduate program, as well as on advanced undergraduates seeking to
develop high level reading skills.
“Content” Courses
The Department offers a wide variety of courses taught in English that examine the rich historical and
modern cultures of Asia. These include lower division survey courses on the civilizations of China, Japan,
Korea, language and culture in China, Japan, and Korea, the aforementioned course on popular culture in
East Asia, various survey courses on religions, including those on South and Southeast Asian Religions,
and introductory courses on such topics as Japanese Aesthetics and the Tea Ceremony or Images of Japan:
Literature and Film. We consider these courses to be highly important, not only because they serve as
gateways to our upper division offerings, but also because they often are the only courses on Asia that
many undergraduates with majors outside the humanities will take and thus offer a rare opportunity to
impart basic knowledge about Asia to large numbers of students. Enrollments in these courses have
tended to run as high as 200 or more, although we have recently found it necessary to cap enrollments
because of the lack of funding for teaching assistants to handle discussion sections.
The Department originally began as a language and literature program. Thus in earlier years, the
Department’s upper division course offerings were largely limited to literature, in both English and
original languages, along with some courses on Buddhism. Over the ensuing decades, and particularly in
the past 20 years, the Department has greatly diversified, hiring many scholars specializing in other areas
of the humanities. The Department now offers substantial upper division coursework not only in
literature and Buddhist Studies, but also in such fields as aesthetics (Japan), cultural history (Vietnam and
Korea), archaeology (China), Christianity (Korea) film (China, Vietnam, and occasionally Japan and
Korea), folklore (Korea), intellectual history/philosophy (China, Japan, and Korea), linguistics (China,
Japan, and Korea), and popular and folk religions (Korea). These courses are not only taken by our
majors and minors, but also by students in such interdisciplinary majors as East Asian Studies and
Southeast Asian Studies and by many of our graduate students who come to us from institutions that do
not offer such coursework. They are also popular as upper division electives among the general student
population.
In addition, the Department offers undergraduate seminars that allow students to explore selected
topics not covered by regular courses (recent seminars have covered such topics as women’s history,
popular rebellions, and controversies in ancient history). These undergraduate seminars are valuable not
only for allowing students to explore specific topics but also for giving our majors an opportunity to
experience smaller, more intimate classes (hard to find at large public institution such as UCLA) and to
write the research papers needed to fulfill their graduation requirements.
This expansion in our undergraduate content course offerings is not simply a consequence of
serendipitous hiring decisions, but a response to changing intellectual interests among our students and to
the major shifts in the humanities that have arisen in the wake of the rise of cultural studies some years
back. We are proud of the breadth and quality of our undergraduate course offerings and believe they
offer students at UCLA an unmatched opportunity to explore the richness of Asian cultures, both past and
present. We hope, as mentioned in the General Overview, to be able to expand our course offerings in
such key areas as film, linguistics, Korean literature, and Southeast Asian studies once the University has
recovered from its current fiscal crisis.
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