Courses

ENGL B223 The Help: Asian American Literature & Care Work

Not offered 2026-27

This course surveys Asian American literature and cultural productions that feature the work of care: jobs, whether official or unofficial (such as mothering, nursing, and nannying) that are essential, yet so often undercompensated and overlooked. We will examine how Asian American immigration history has led to the burgeoning of industries around care work. We will see how narrative and fiction portray the troubling entanglements between economic structures, race and gender roles, and personal feeling in the labor of care. This course operates under the premise that an attentiveness to how care unfolds is essential to creating a more just world. Collectively, we will not just talk about care as an abstract set of ideas but concretely practice it with one another in the space of our classroom.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Asian American Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.

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ENGL B230 Speculative Asias

Fall 2026

From Seoul as the glittering metropolis of Korean music, fashion, and cuisine to TikTok and the "Turning Chinese" trend that celebrates Chinese consumer culture, we seem to be firmly in what scholars have deemed "The Asian Century" of East Asia's economic and technological ascendence. Yet in Ridley Scott's classic cyberpunk film Blade Runner (1982), Asia is the setting of a regressive future in which synthetic humans are cloned as a source of cheap, disposable labor. This course examines how Orientalism, or the West's racialized imagination of the East, intersects with anxieties around the Asian Century. We will trace how techno-Orientalist tropes emerge through a range of English-language speculative fictions including novels, poetry collections, graphic novels, films, and music, moving from 19th century fears around the Yellow Peril to 21st century engagements with these tropes by authors of Asian descent. Our reading practice will cohere around two, interrelated poles: how to critique appropriations of Asia in the western imagination by reading against the grain, and how to identify re-appropriations, looking backward to search for futurity, collectivity, and hope. By the end of the semester, you will be given the opportunity to analyze a speculative Asian text of your own choosing.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Asian American Studies.

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ENGL B313 The Art of Minor Feelings: Asian American Emotional Lives

Not offered 2026-27

In her essay collection Minor Feelings (2020), Cathy Park Hong argues that Asian Americans experience a "racialized range of emotions"-what she calls "minor feelings"-when their concerns about racial injustice are repeatedly dismissed as inconsequential. What do emotions have to do with Asian American history and identity? And how do we talk about emotions critically? This seminar revolves around the cultural history of affect for Asian Americans in a variety of contemporary literary works by Asian Americans since the 90s including essays, short stories, novels, and genre fiction. Over the course of the semester, we will learn to understand and critically analyze affect-or feelings and emotions-in ways that are not just psychic and personal but also embodied and socially, politically, and historically specific. We will examine different affective states (e.g., anger, disgust, and detachment but also the beautiful and joyous), considering how specific affects have contributed to the stereotyping of Asian Americans both as unassimilable foreign threats (the Yellow Peril) and as idealized, upwardly mobile American citizens (model minorities). More importantly, we will explore how Asian Americans themselves have used affects to challenge and exceed the categorizations that have been laid out for them

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Asian American Studies.

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