Masters in East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies
Home > Graduate Program > M.A. Modern East Asian Cultural Studies

Our Program
The M.A. program in Asian Studies at UCSB emphasizes advanced language training as the foundation for research on East Asian cultures. The philosophy of the EALCS M.A. program is to provide students with a solid foundation in one or more East Asian languages in addition to broad opportunities for cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary studies of East Asian modernities and traditions. Coursework concentrates on the humanities, including history, literature, religious studies, anthropology, linguistics and the arts. Students progress through a sequence of core seminars that provide a shared foundation in key methodological and theoretical issues in the academic study of East Asia.

FEATURES

Language Training
The Department offers a full curriculum of five years of instruction in Chinese and Japanese, and three years in Korean. This basic curriculum of language study is supplemented by specialized courses in conversation (elementary and advanced), grammar, and business applications of the languages. The Chinese and Japanese language programs are each run by a tenured faculty member with a Ph.D. in linguistics. These directors supervise full-time lecturers who teach first- through third-year language courses. Language courses are thus taught by experienced professionals. The use of graduate student teaching assistants in language courses is kept to a minimum (no more than one hour per week). At the advanced levels, Chinese and Japanese are taught by professorial rank faculty who specialize in language and literature. Year-long course sequences are offered in the pre-modern forms of each language, essential for true mastery of written Chinese or Japanese.

Core Graduate Seminars
The department has recently established a series of core graduate seminars that will give M.A. students a common grounding in methodological and theoretical issues that all scholars in East Asian Studies confront. One seminar is offered each quarter, and the entire series of four seminars is required of all students. They are: (1) Topics in East Asian Cultural Studies, which takes up broad topics within the study of modern and contemporary East Asian cultures in an interdisciplinary perspective; (2) Canon Formation, Periodization, and Disciplinarity in East Asian Studies, which analyzes classical, medieval, and modern sets of "canons," including myth, historiography, literature, and the arts, with a view to consider the ways in which these fields mutually distinguished (disciplinarity) and changed through time (periodization); (3) The Art and Theory of Translation, an introduction to the literature of translation studies, and practice in translation from Chinese and Japanese, in which students are encouraged to explore the extent to which translation theory can be usefully applied to translations in progress; and (4) Pro-seminars on Bibliography, Reference Works, and Documentation in Chinese studies and Japanese studies (2 separate courses).

Subject Emphases
Faculty expertise and course offerings in the department span a broad range of areas, including Chinese and Japanese film, linguistics, modern cultural studies and popular culture, literary translation, Taiwan studies, religious geography, Edo period studies, Sino-Japanese cultural contact, literati culture, and performance arts. Two or more faculty specialize in each of these subject areas, which students may combine as they choose. Our department is also home to three endowed chairs: two in Japanese studies (literature and religion), and one in Taiwan Studies.

Two tracks or plans of study are available, one academic, for students who will go on to pursue the Ph.D., and the other for students who will go into careers in business or government or combine their M.A. with other professional degrees. Students admitted to the emphasis may pursue the degree under Plan 1 (thesis) or Plan 2 (comprehensive examination).

Students from both tracks have gone on to successful careers in teaching, research, international business, law and the arts.

PLAN 1
Plan 1 is the academic track, intended for students who go on to pursue the Ph.D. It requires a total of 60 units of coursework in Chinese, Japanese, or East Asian Cultural Studies, and 12 units of thesis work. The 60 units will come from a combination of graduate or upper division courses on the country of specialization, advanced modern language, classical language, and courses outside of the country of specialization. The thesis should demonstrate the student’s ability to do original research using sources in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.

PLAN 2
Plan 2 is the track intended for students who will go on to careers outside of academia. It requires 66 units of coursework in Chinese, Japanese, or East Asian Cultural Studies, and 6 units for the comprehensive exams. The 66 units will come from a combination of graduate or upper division courses on the country of specialization, advanced modern language, classical language, and courses in other departments (economics, communications) commensurate with the student’s career goals. Under this plan, a comprehensive examination is substituted for the thesis. Candidates will be examined in two fields to be determined in consultation with an advisory committee.

Graduate students are welcome to participate in lecture series and research focus groups EALCS offers or sponsors and are encouraged to take advantage of other Asian resources on the UCSB campus as well.

East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian Studies are well represented in other departments on campus, including Anthropology, Drama, Film Studies, Global Studies, History, History of Art and Architecture, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Feminist Studies. Each of these departments has one or more faculty whose research and teaching focuses on Asia. Courses taken in any of these departments count toward the M.A. degree. Faculty in those departments may also serve on the M.A. committee for EALCS students. This interdepartmental flexibility greatly expands the range of courses students have to choose from and ensures that students are free to design the program of study that best suits their individual needs and interests.

UCSB’s Davidson Library is a major research facility. As a member of the Association of Research Libraries, it participates in cooperative programs and policy development with other major research libraries to provide collections and services for the UCSB community. The library has about 1.8 million books and bound journals; its collection grows by about 60,000 volumes annually. CD-ROMs are available for free researching of MLA bibliographies, Dissertation Abstracts International, and other sources. Researchers may request on-line searches in such databases as MLA’s complete on-line files and the arts and humanities citation index. The East Asian section of the library contains over 100,000 books and periodicals in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. A professional staff of librarians specializing in East Asian studies oversees the collection, maintains a website with an extensive set of links to digital resources, indices, and library catalogs throughout the USA and Asia and provides assistance to faculty and students with research questions.