Upcoming Events
Asian Film Series: Sita Sings the Blues / February 10, 2011 at 7:00 pm
The Asian Film Series continues with Sita Sings the Blues (2008). Directed by the American cartoonist Nina Paley, this modern transformation of the ancient Indian epic Ramayana into a fascinating mixture of animation techniques sheds new light on meaning and relevance of Hindu gods and morals. The parallel between the legendary story of Rama and Sita and the life of a twentieth-century American couple bridges distant cultural identities and offers a striking timeless religious narrative. Introduction before and discussion after the film hosted by Suchismita Sen, senior lecturer of religion.
The final film in the series is Dreaming Lhasa (February 24, 2011). This and all films in the series screen in 110 Wartik.
About the Program
Welcome to the Asian Studies Program at Penn State.
Asian Studies offers undergraduate majors in Asian Studies, Chinese, and Japanese, and minors in those same fields. We also offer four semesters of Korean and Hindi.
Asian Studies offers dual-title PhD degrees in a number of fields. These interdisciplinary degree programs will draw on programmatic strengths in East and South Asian history, East-West compartative literature, religious studies, comparative politics, political economy, the literature and history of the Asian diaspora, comparative colonialism and ethnicity, and historical and cultural linguistics. If all goes well, we hope to begin enrolling students in Fall 2010. Please check back here for updates.
Our award-winning, widely published faculty have research interests in a wide variety of fields, including Islam in China, the Ryukyu Islands, the architecture of the Indian city, Mughal political culture, East-West comparative literature, Confucian philosophy, contemporary Asian American fiction, medieval Japanese Buddhism, the history of Empire, the politics of democratization, and more. They come from a wide range of disciplines, including Applied Linguistics, Art and Art History, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Comparative Literature, Economics, English, History & Religious Studies, International Affairs, Labor Studies & Employment Relations, Political Science, and Women's Studies.
Information on this website may change rapidly over the course of the 2010-11 academic year. Please check for updates before relying on its content.
