The East Asian Studies Concentration

The educational and intellectual objectives of the Concentration in East Asian Studies are: 1) to develop a multi-disciplinary perspective on the study of East Asia, 2) to attain basic proficiency in one of the major East Asian languages, and 3) to study in some depth particular aspects of East Asian culture and society. The concentration serves students with two different types of academic and professional interests: those who wish to pursue active professional careers related to the East Asian region with a variety of government agencies, international organizations, or in the private sector; and those who will continue their education at the graduate level in the humanities or social sciences with special emphasis on China, Japan or Korea.

Brown has, for an institution of its size, one of the most vigorous and distinguished faculties in East Asian Studies in the country. Students have responded to globalization by thinking of the languages and cultures of East Asia, not as the exclusive domain of esoteric study, but as opportunities that are part of their general education. Even a decade ago, an American addressing a Chinese, Japanese or Korean on the street in their own language would have been a curiosity, but no longer. Faculty and students have all demonstrated outstanding dedication to bringing the study of East Asia into the mainstream of Brown's curriculum and intellectual community.

 

East Asian Language Programs

The goal of the three language programs in East Asian Studies is to develop the four language modalities (speaking, listening, reading and writing proficiency) in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and to teach various aspects of the cultures in relation to language, offering opportunities for students who have attained proficiency to use it in the study of East Asian literature, culture and society. East Asian Studies concentrators and all serious students of East Asian languages are all strongly encouraged to spend time abroad.

 Chinese, Japanese and Korean do require more intensive methods of instruction than other languages taught at American universities. This is in part because in addition to unfamiliar language structures, they have writing systems utterly unlike English, and they are both modern and classical languages. All three traditions are continuous from their earliest records until today. Unlike the other classical languages taught at Brown, which are taught as "dead" languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are first taught as living languages always.