Our Program:

We are proud to announce a new Ph.D. program in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  The program will accept its first students for Fall 2007.  To ensure consideration for financial aid, applications should be submitted by December 15, 2006.  Other applications will be considered until April 1, 2007.

Features:

The new degree is designed to prepare students for academic and other professional careers that increasingly demand research and expertise across traditional disciplinary boundaries within the humanities, as well as between the humanities and social sciences.  We are especially interested in building bridges at this historical juncture between national, regional and transnational studies.  We also seek to explore issues of national identity within and beyond East Asia, to examine the pre-modern and contemporary gendering of East Asian societies, and to engage and challenge conventional Western humanistic and social scientific theories of modernity and globalization. 

The new program is open to students concentrating in Chinese or Japanese.  The curriculum is structured around a number of subject specializations that are transdisciplinary and, depending on student interest, may be transnational as well.  The specializations include modern East Asian cultural studies, cinema and the performing arts, religion and geography, Buddhist studies, early modern Japanese cultural studies, literati culture, Taiwan studies, Chinese language pedagogy and linguistics, and translation studies.  Seminars in these specialization supplement required core courses in methodological and theoretical issues in the study of East Asia.  Language instruction through advanced levels is offered in Chinese and Japanese, including the pre-modern languages, as well as instruction in Korean and Tibetan. 

The program has extensive links through cross-listed courses and faculty affiliations with other departments and programs at UC Santa Barbara, including History, Film, Art History, Comparative Literature, Dramatic Art, Religious Studies, and Global Studies. Students are encouraged to take courses outside of the Department and to create their own interdepartmental specializations.  Department faculty include Michael Berry, Ronald Egan, Sabine Frühstück, Allan Grapard, John Nathan, Hyung Il Pai, William Powell, Katherine Saltzman-Li, Kuo-ch’ing Tu, Mayfair Yang, Hsiao-jung Sharon Yu, Laurie Freeman, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Yunte Huang, Luke Roberts, Peter Sturman, and Miriam Wattles.

Financial aid is available through U.S. Dept. of Education Title VI funding (FLAS), UC Santa Barbara campus-wide doctoral fellowships, and other Departmental sources. Teaching Assistantships in language and non-language courses are also available.  The Department has three endowed professorial chairs, in Japanese cultural studies, Shinto Studies, and Taiwan studies, as well as the Pai Hsien-yung Endowment for Chinese Literature and Culture.