University Bulletin (2024-2025)

• Minor

The Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies program brings together scholars within the creative arts, humanities, and social sciences to explore the histories, literatures, cultures, and contemporary realities of Asian American and Pacific Islander peoples. Emerging out of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, the field offers not only an understanding of race and inequality beyond a Black/white binary, but is also an intervention in studies of U.S. global power—or what some scholars call U.S. empire.

The learning goals for students completing the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies minor are threefold: (1) knowledge about Asian American and Pacific Islander peoples and communities, (2) core skills that can be used in graduate study or in a variety of professions, and (3) critical awareness and engagement as the basis for social justice and global citizenship.

Knowledge 

Students completing the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies minor will come away with a strong understanding of: 

1. The histories and cultures of Asian American and Pacific Islander peoples and communities, their contributions to US society and culture, as well as their critiques.
2. The ambiguous positioning of Asian American and Pacific Islanders within U.S. racial hierarchy, with emphasis on their relationships to one another and to other racial groups.
3. Oppressive systems and structures central to Asian American and Pacific Islander experience and contemporary realities including racial capitalism, settler colonialism, U.S. militarism, and empire.
4. Hemispheric and global connections between the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, as well as other places and peoples.
5. The history of the field itself, including important topics and debates among Asian American and Pacific Islander studies scholars.
6. Different methods and disciplinary orientations to approach the study of Asian American and Pacific Islanders including but not limited to History, English, Anthropology, Sociology, Theater Arts, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

Core Skills

Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies students acquire core skills that can be used to pursue graduate study in AAPI or a related field, or in a variety of other professions. Law schools, medical Schools, MBA programs, technology industries and others favorably view applicants with strong backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, who have training in complex social and cultural issues. These fields also prefer candidates who can think critically, analyze issues, and write clearly and persuasively. These are all skills that Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies minors develop in our courses through an emphasis on:

1. Reading and writing at the graduate level.
2. Engaging with and critiquing scholarly arguments.
3. Participating in critical dialogue with peers and professors.
4. Training in methods pertinent in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies including close reading, field work, oral history, and (digital) archives.
5. Designing and conducting research projects and presenting research findings through oral presentations, creative projects, and papers.
6. Discussing important issues such as diversity, cultural difference, racism, and discrimination.

Critical Awareness and Engagement

 The United States is a multiethnic, multinational, and multiracial nation in a modern world marked by migration, displacement, and interdependence. The Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program reflects that reality and prepares students with the knowledge and perspectives needed to participate as informed citizens in a global society. Further, the possibility of curricular or extra-curricular experiential learning components, such as community engaged courses working with Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the Boston area, field study in relation to a thesis, internships, and more, also provides tools and opportunities for those committed to Brandeis' ideal of learning in service of social justice.

Yuri Doolan, Program Director

The minor in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies requires five courses.

1. Four distinct courses in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies consisting of one core course and three elective courses.
2. A fifth AAPI Course or one course in another area of Ethnic Studies or related field, as approved by the program director on a case-by-case basis.  A variety of academic units offer courses with Ethnic Studies or related content that may fulfill this requirement. Such units include (but are not limited to): AAAS, ANTH, EAS, ENG, HIST, LACLS, SAS, SOC, THA, WGS, etc. The related course should critically engage with major themes and issues important to the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies and broaden a student’s understanding of society and the human condition broadly speaking.
3. A minimum of three of the five courses required for the minor must be taken from Brandeis faculty. Courses taken at other institutions for credit must be approved by the student’s advisor and the program director.
4. No course with a final grade below C-, nor any course taken pass/fail, may be counted toward the AAPI minor. 
5. No more than two courses taken for the AAPI minor can double count toward any other single major or minor.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.

AAPI/ANT 155a Political Violence in the Philippines and Filipinx America
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Examines mass-scale political violence through an anthropological lens, with the Philippines as the main focus of study. Topics to be explored include: anthropological approaches to political violence and genocide; Spanish, Japanese, and US colonial regimes in the Philippines and Transpacific; the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos; the “war on terror” in the Philippines and President Duterte’s “war on drugs;” COVID authoritarianism and environmental political violence; and how the colonial experiences of Philippine peoples—under the Spanish, US, and Japanese empires—have impacted and informed the lives of Filipinx Americans. Sources will include anthropological ethnographies, historical and theoretical texts, novels, media sources, and art works. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Literature
[ djw hum ]

What we have come to call the Vietnam War fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese American literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English; no Vietnamese language knowledge is required. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/HIS 163a Asian American History
[ deis-us dl ss ]

Provides students an introduction to the history and study of Asian persons in the United States from the mid-19th century to the present, with a focus on how their presence has shaped American institutions, society, and culture. We ask: How does our narrative of the United States shift when we center the experiences of Asian Americans—a group largely excluded or invisibilized in discussions of our nation’s collective past? How does studying Asian Americans push us to think about race and inequality beyond a Black-white binary? How does understanding anti-Asian racism inform our understanding of the US as a gatekeeping nation, at the same time the nation’s leaders purport it to be a melting pot and nation of immigrants? How do global politics and US imperial ventures into Asia—from formal colonial rule in the 19th century to US-waged wars and military interventions abroad in the 20th century—create waves of displaced peoples who are pushed towards America’s shores? Key themes and major events covered in this course include Orientalism, migrant labor, nativism and xenophobia, Chinese exclusion, US colonial empire, Japanese internment, the Cold War, refugees, the Asian American movement, anti-Asian violence and the murder of Vincent Chin, Asian/Black relations and the 1992 LA uprising, religion, islamophobia, the Global War on Terror, and much more. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/HIS 171a The United States in the Pacific World
[ deis-us djw ss ]

How have U.S. imperial ventures—cultural, military, political, and economic—reconfigured local societies and geographies? What are the afterlives of those ventures and how have they reverberated between American society and the Pacific World? To answer these questions, this course explores the history of American incursion into places such as China, Hawai’i, the Philippines, Guam, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Sāmoa from the nineteenth century to present. We explore issues such as militarism and empire, labor and commerce, race and inequality, intimacy and sex, as well as migration, culture, and identity both in and across the Pacific Ocean. In focusing on the lasting legacies and human consequences of this contact, this course will allow students to: (1) think critically about US power (or what many scholars have called US empire) in the world, (2) deepen their understandings of the multiracial history and character of the United States, and (3) place the American experience within a larger global context. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/HIS 186b Legacies of the Korean War
[ deis-us djw ss ]

The Korean War is often called “The Forgotten War” within U.S. historical memory. But to Koreans, the war was too brutal to be forgotten—resulting in nearly 3 million civilian casualties, mass movement, national division, and the unprecedented militarization of North and South Korean society. Today, Koreans and Americans alike are living with the consequences of a war that is still ongoing. Through insightful and accessible scholarship, media and news reports, oral histories, memoir, and other cultural productions, this class explores the social memory, lasting legacies, and human consequences of the Korean War in a transnational context. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/THA 116a Asian American Performance
[ ca deis-us hwl2 ]

Introduces contemporary Asian American and Pacific Islander choreographers, playwrights, artists, writers, and performance makers. We will then draw from these works and ideas to develop performances. The course focuses on both performance practices as well as critical engagement with conceptual, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. Students will delve into making by combining lectures, reading, discussion, collaboration, and performance skills. Performance techniques will be developed through guided exercises in embodied practice, improvisation, ensemble work, and devising prompts. The course is open to all levels of knowledge and experience in theater and AAPI studies. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 125b Gender, Migration, and Sexuality in a Global Asia
[ ss ]

Provides an overview of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration in Asia. It begins with studies that provide a big picture of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration. It then proceeds to highlight how gender shapes institutions of migration and various forms of mobility followed by case studies of different groups of women and minoritarian subjects such as students, factory workers, and sex workers.This course will pay particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and global economy; changing constructs of masculinity and femininity; and how dynamics of gender and sexuality shift across time and space. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 130a Critical Adoption Studies
[ deis-us djw oc ]

Although adoption has a storied past spanning a range of diverse cultural, geographic, and temporal settings, the adopting of children across national boundaries is a relatively new phenomenon—one that emerged in tandem with America’s postwar expansion into Asia. Today, international adoption is a normalized and accepted institution that helps to express dominant US ideologies of humanitarianism, internationalism, and multiculturalism. But American’s sudden and unprecedented desire to adopt children from abroad was anything but natural, informed instead by the dynamic geopolitical imperatives of the early Cold War years. Since then, the discourse surrounding international adoption in the United States has been dominated by American social workers and adoptive parents, rather than adoptees themselves or those who lose children in adoption. This course interrogates the knowledge production about international adoption that has historically privileged perspectives from the receiving country or that of adoptive parents in particular. Instead, we investigate the cultural, ethnic, and racial experiences of transnationally, transracially adopted individuals as well as their birth families long overlooked in adoption studies. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarism and hypersexualization, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Students will leave this course with a strong understanding of how media and culture shapes the racial and sexual formation of Asian Americans, as well as how to interact with that media and culture beyond just consumption but instead towards analysis and critique too. Usually offered every second year.

AAS/AAPI 129b The Spirit of Bandung: Afro-Asian Insurgency and Solidarity
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Examines the racial conflicts between Black and Asian American communities and develops an understanding of how the Afro-Asia political project is an insurgent coalitional project. To do this, we will explore the historical and contemporary struggles, insurgencies, and solidarities of Black and Asian peoples. We will learn together how Afro-Asia serves as an insurgent site of critique, resistance, and revolutionary aesthetics that connects distant geographies, diasporas, and Black and Asian peoples to a global anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial political imaginary. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Literature
[ djw hum ]

What we have come to call the Vietnam War fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese American literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English; no Vietnamese language knowledge is required. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/HIS 163a Asian American History
[ deis-us dl ss ]

Provides students an introduction to the history and study of Asian persons in the United States from the mid-19th century to the present, with a focus on how their presence has shaped American institutions, society, and culture. We ask: How does our narrative of the United States shift when we center the experiences of Asian Americans—a group largely excluded or invisibilized in discussions of our nation’s collective past? How does studying Asian Americans push us to think about race and inequality beyond a Black-white binary? How does understanding anti-Asian racism inform our understanding of the US as a gatekeeping nation, at the same time the nation’s leaders purport it to be a melting pot and nation of immigrants? How do global politics and US imperial ventures into Asia—from formal colonial rule in the 19th century to US-waged wars and military interventions abroad in the 20th century—create waves of displaced peoples who are pushed towards America’s shores? Key themes and major events covered in this course include Orientalism, migrant labor, nativism and xenophobia, Chinese exclusion, US colonial empire, Japanese internment, the Cold War, refugees, the Asian American movement, anti-Asian violence and the murder of Vincent Chin, Asian/Black relations and the 1992 LA uprising, religion, islamophobia, the Global War on Terror, and much more. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/HIS 171a The United States in the Pacific World
[ deis-us djw ss ]

How have U.S. imperial ventures—cultural, military, political, and economic—reconfigured local societies and geographies? What are the afterlives of those ventures and how have they reverberated between American society and the Pacific World? To answer these questions, this course explores the history of American incursion into places such as China, Hawai’i, the Philippines, Guam, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Sāmoa from the nineteenth century to present. We explore issues such as militarism and empire, labor and commerce, race and inequality, intimacy and sex, as well as migration, culture, and identity both in and across the Pacific Ocean. In focusing on the lasting legacies and human consequences of this contact, this course will allow students to: (1) think critically about US power (or what many scholars have called US empire) in the world, (2) deepen their understandings of the multiracial history and character of the United States, and (3) place the American experience within a larger global context. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/HIS 186b Legacies of the Korean War
[ deis-us djw ss ]

The Korean War is often called “The Forgotten War” within U.S. historical memory. But to Koreans, the war was too brutal to be forgotten—resulting in nearly 3 million civilian casualties, mass movement, national division, and the unprecedented militarization of North and South Korean society. Today, Koreans and Americans alike are living with the consequences of a war that is still ongoing. Through insightful and accessible scholarship, media and news reports, oral histories, memoir, and other cultural productions, this class explores the social memory, lasting legacies, and human consequences of the Korean War in a transnational context. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 125b Gender, Migration, and Sexuality in a Global Asia
[ ss ]

Provides an overview of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration in Asia. It begins with studies that provide a big picture of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration. It then proceeds to highlight how gender shapes institutions of migration and various forms of mobility followed by case studies of different groups of women and minoritarian subjects such as students, factory workers, and sex workers.This course will pay particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and global economy; changing constructs of masculinity and femininity; and how dynamics of gender and sexuality shift across time and space. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarism and hypersexualization, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Students will leave this course with a strong understanding of how media and culture shapes the racial and sexual formation of Asian Americans, as well as how to interact with that media and culture beyond just consumption but instead towards analysis and critique too. Usually offered every second year.

EAS 120b Southeast Asian Literature in English
[ djw hum ]

Explores a range of Southeast Asian literary productions presented in English from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Materials include influential texts by Western observers (W. Somerset Maugham, Marguerite Duras) during the colonial period as well as major works by prominent postcolonial writers (Tash Aw, Eka Kurniawan, Mai Der Vang). We will consider the complex questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, twentieth-century wars, and regional identity formation under late capitalism through intersectional textual analysis. Usually offered every third year.

FA 72b Introduction to Korean Art
[ ca nw ]

Surveys Korean and Korean American art, focusing on later historical periods from the Joseon dynasty to the present. We will examine art and social systems, material culture, and shifting artistic identities in the country’s transition to modernity. The latter part of the course will focus on modern and contemporary art of Korea as well as the works of Korean American artists. Usually offered every fourth year.

SOC 126a South Asian Diasporas
[ ss ]