UC Berkeley has developed a reputation as a world-class center for the study of Asian languages and cultures. The Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies will enhance this reputation by serving all three components of East Asian studies at Berkeley — the East Asian Library, the Institute of East Asian Studies, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
The East Asian Library is at the heart of Berkeley’s research and teaching in East Asian studies. It is one of Berkeley’s — and the world’s — treasures. The library has carefully built collections that are unparalleled outside of Japan, China, and Korea. It offers a superb array of East Asian books, serials, documents, manuscripts, and filmed materials — one of the two most complete collections in the nation outside of the Library of Congress.
The library’s Chinese, Japanese, and Korean collections are ranked among the top four academic library collections in the United States. The library attracts visiting scholars from around the world. The Center for Chinese Studies Library, a branch of the East Asian Library, offers more than 68,000 volumes and serves as the nation’s leading academic resource for research on contemporary China.
The Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS) unites the Centers for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean studies, the Chao Yuen Ren Center for Chinese Linguistics, and the Group in Asian Studies — an interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate degree program. This prestigious institute aims to strengthen the teaching program on East Asia, to promote research on East Asia in all of the disciplines and professional programs, to disseminate information about East Asia through outreach programs both inside and outside the University, and to establish close ties with Asian research institutes. One of the most frequently visited centers at Berkeley, the Institute of East Asian Studies hosts up to 50 scholars from East Asia per year. The subjects of its publications range from cross-cultural interpretations of “Chinese-ness” to the post-war labor movement in Japan; from studies of modern Shanghai to social stratification in Japan; and from nationalism in Kore to geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific Region.
The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is a core teaching department for the study of East Asia at Berkeley. It is the one department where all East Asian studies students, no matter what their discipline, can attain the language skills necessary for their degrees and later professional work. Full four-year sequences of modern standard Chinese, Japanese and Korean are offered, along with training in the classical languages of China and Japan. The department grants B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in Chinese and Japanese and plans to increase its offerings in Korean literature and culture. It offers a rich array of courses. Undergraduate classes using materials translated into English allow access to the cultures of East Asia for those not specializing in or not yet fully competent in an East Asian language. Advanced undergraduate classes study Chinese, Japanese or Korean literature, culture and linguistics in the original languages, while doctoral seminars treat specialized research topics at a highly advanced level.
The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures also works in cooperation with the Group in Buddhist Studies. Under a new initiative in the planning stages among a core group of faculty, the program will emphasize the study of Buddhism in its cultural contexts in the countries of East Asia. Typical scholarly concerns might include such topics as Buddhist art and iconography, the Buddhist philosophical underpinnings of literary culture, or the interaction between Buddhism and earlier indigenous religious cultures in each area of East Asia.
For further information please contact:
Director of Development