Teaching

Many courses on Chinese art history leave little time for the real objects and end with the eighteenth century, leaving students wondering how the material is relevant to their own lives. I seek to counteract that perception with a two-pronged method that engages the students more closely with the material and demonstrate its personal relevance.

First, I prioritize direct experience with the art by using object facsimiles, teaching collections, interactive technology, virtual site visits and museum visits as teaching tools. Second, I include modern and contemporary works in the syllabus to help students relate the art to their own lives and future careers in the global economy. By teaching in a way that makes the art personally relevant to the students, I hope to inspire a lifelong curiosity for East Asian art regardless of a student’s professional path.

As a teacher, my experience covers Chinese and Japanese art from the Neolithic period through today. As a Head Teaching Fellow at Harvard, I managed course logistics and taught discussion sections on Japanese art and Japanese woodblock prints. As a stand-alone lecturer for the Loyola University Chicago’s China Studies Program in Beijing, I have also designed and taught original seminars on Chinese art and architecture during the High Qing (1661-1799), and on the monuments of Chinese visual culture from ancient bronzes and jades through contemporary art and Olympic architecture.

In addition to these classes, I am currently developing three new courses. The first, an introductory survey, uses the Forbidden City and its six-hundred-year history as a lens to examine major topics and issues in Chinese art and architecture. This course incorporates virtual site visits to recreate the experience of being at the Forbidden City itself and thereby encourage a deeper understanding of how it continues to function as a major cultural symbol. The second course is an innovative survey of Chinese painting history that seeks to make the material more accessible and therefore provide students with a practical proficiency in the subject. Rather than cover hundreds of paintings that can seem indistinguishable to students, this course covers fifty masterpieces of Chinese painting in intense connoisseurial, critical, and historiographical detail. The third course is an advanced critical seminar that compares East Asian visual responses to European art and science from the sixteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. This course uses a theoretical framework centered on cross-cultural aesthetics to conceptualize the art produced in China and Japan during this time that incorporated new imported objects and ideas.

In the near future, I will be developing courses on monuments of Japanese art and architecture, the Japanese woodblock print tradition, and modern and contemporary Chinese visual culture.

Syllabi and course plans can be found on the downloads page.