Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies (APIA)

An exploration of significant questions and concepts, beliefs and creative visions, theories and discoveries in APIA for first-year students. Although topics vary, the courses also seek to improve students' communication skills beyond the written word.

An exploration of a specific topic in APIA. A grade of C- or better fulfills the COLL 150 requirement. Although topics vary, the courses emphasize academic writing skills, reading and analysis of texts, and discussion.

This core course employs interdisciplinary approaches to critically examine Asian and Pacific Islanders Americans, including their histories, communities, cultures, socioeconomic development, political organizations, their relationships with ancestral homes, and their role within the racial fabric of the United States.

This class examines the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments (Islamophobia) in the United States and compares it to Orientalism, the ideology used to justify Western colonialism during the 19th and 20th centuries. We analyze the relationship between United States’ foreign and domestic policies, popular culture, and the mainstreaming of Muslim-baiting rhetoric. In doing so, we will ask whether Islamophobia is new? Is it only the purview of the fringe right-wing in the United States or are Islamophobic stereotypes and precepts shared throughout the political spectrum from liberal to conservative wings of each party? Is it an issue of race linked to American culture and racial history or does it have to do exclusively with American global power, security, and/or a misunderstanding of Islam? To answer whether Islamophobia in the Unites States is something new or just a refurbished paradigm of a bygone-political era, we will also keep a journal noting examples of Islamophobia, Orientalism, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism but also ways that it is being rejected.

This course will understand the history of decolonization as well as how colonialism and its effect impact and structure the world today.

Relevant and critical topics explored through diverse courses taught by the affiliated and core faculty of the program of Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies. Students may enroll for multiple sections as long as the topics are not duplicated.

This course focuses on allowing the students to academically process within a classroom setting and build on the experiences, expertise, and cultural knowledge that they acquired during their internship, study abroad, and experience in Asia and the Middle East.

Through the use of fictional and other texts, this course will examine how the Asian American is constructed in literary settings that situate this subject in multiple worlds. At several turns the model minority, the perpetual foreigner, or terrorist, how does the Asian American figure in various transnational contexts as represented by fiction? This course will analyze the intersectional constructs of race, gender, class, and sexuality in investigating how Asian Americanness is constituted within and against the concept of the nation. In so doing, the focus will be on texts that engage with colonialism, (im)migration, diaspora, and globalization as markers of identity in perpetual flux. Accordingly, we will attend to how literature characterizes the subjectivity of Asian Americans within the United States as simultaneously American and Other. At the same time, we will also scrutinize how Asian Americanness functions transnationally in literary depictions of racial and national identity at the margins of, and across, notions of inclusion and exclusion.

Seminar on history, culture, and arts of Filipinos and their global diaspora rooted in Southeast Asian maritime mercantile polities and matriarchal cultures. Students learn how Filipinos fight for agency through humor, performing arts, film and digital space, fashion, food, basketball, beauty pageants and boxing as they navigate and negotiate European, Japanese, Chinese and American colonizations.

Interdisciplinary seminar on the imagination, creation, and evolution of Korean communities that allow Koreans to influence the diasporic spaces they inhabit such as the United States, the Americas and the world.

The senior seminar for topics in APIA Studies provides in-depth exploration and examination of contemporary topics, theories, issues, and events in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

Student directed, designed and implemented course work towards a scholarly or creative output, after approval from solicited supervising faculty.

Students meeting the requirements to pursue Honors study design their scholarly inquiry or creative engagement of a thesis or theme previously approved and supervised by an approving faculty supervisor. Solicited faculty will only consider written proposals with project descriptions and preliminary timelines for completion. To successfully receive credit for APIA 495, students must have completed the first draft of their research output, be it a creative work or scholarly paper by the end of examination week. Faculty will decide whether the student will continue on to APIA 496 on the basis of their assessment.

Students pursuing Honors study only enroll in APIA 496 upon approval from supervising faculty of their successful completion of APIA 495. The main thrust of this course is for revision, refinement, and elaboration on the first draft. The candidate for Honors will present their body of work to the public and will be examined by their faculty committee at least two weeks before the end of the semester. In the event that faculty and/or student discern that the current progress of the work is not at full completion or if the faculty committee makes the same decision, APIA 495 and 496 will be converted into APIA 480: Independent Studies.

This course provides graduating students the opportunity to create a culminating project demonstrating their application of knowledge they have learned in Asian Pacific Islander American Studies. In addition to scholarly research papers and creative work, students may also design practical projects or feasibility studies based on their interests.