The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies is dedicated to the study of the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea in all their richness and diversity. We focus on East Asia’s increasingly vital role on the world scene, and on the region’s long and fascinating history.

We offer Bachelor of Arts degrees in three areas: Asian Studies, Chinese, and Japanese.

As the East Asian region becomes ever more relevant globally, what happens there increasingly affects lives in the U.S. and elsewhere. Economic activity, political events, international conflicts, bilateral cooperation, and cultural evolution all play a part.

We seek to make the region more intelligible by providing linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts to current issues, and to challenge mainstream perceptions by offering students, as well as the larger community, in-depth knowledge and alternative visions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean societies past and present.

Related Programs

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Center for Taiwan Studies
Center for Taiwan Studies

The Center promotes Taiwan-related scholarly activities in the humanities, fine arts, and other cultural areas, providing a forum for the public and faculty and students from a variety of disciplines.

East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies News & Features

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Gagaku: A Look into Japan's Imperial Court
Gagaku: A Look into Japan's Imperial Court

Fabio Rambelli, the chair of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, organized a series of workshops exploring the music, dance, costumes, and history of Gagaku, the music and dance of the Japanese Imperial Court. The workshops, held last week, were led by the Hideaki Bunno Gagaku Ensemble, a small group of renowned musicians from Japan.

Focus on Faculty: Kate McDonald Maps Modern East Asian History
Focus on Faculty: Kate McDonald Maps Modern East Asian History

Kate McDonald, A UC Santa Barbara Modern East Asian History professor, has received a $100,000 federal grant to improve and expand her new website “Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History.” McDonald discussed in an interview this new digital platform for researching and teaching histories of Japan and other cultures in the region.

Rediscovering Home: Finding Taiwan through Literature
Rediscovering Home: Finding Taiwan through Literature

“Although I enjoyed experiencing the diverse culture and people on campus, a sense of homesickness would always strike me when I talked to my parents on the phone. I felt lost and disconnected from my own culture,” says Au Yu Hsiao of what led him to try to rediscover his home country, Taiwan, in a literature course in the East Asian Cultural Studies department.

UCSB Welcomes the Year of the Pig
UCSB Welcomes the Year of the Pig

UC Santa Barbara’s Asian Resource Center (ARC) hosted a celebration for Lunar New Years last week with different Asian Pacific Islander clubs organizing activities and performances that showed off traditional aspects of different Asian cultures. “Lunar New Year is not only about family reunion and local communities. It is also about cultural diversity when celebrated globally such as today in this building,” said East Asian Studies professor Xiaorong Li.

Aisuke Kondo: Art Linking the Past to the Present
Aisuke Kondo: Art Linking the Past to the Present

Japanese artist Aisuke Kondo recently spoke about his Diaspora Memoria exhibition from his Matter and Memory series, which explores the idea of reconstructing memories of self and history.

 “In doing research about your own history, you come to see how the larger societal history has developed,” Kondo said Thursday in a talk hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Theater and Dance department. Kondo’s work explores the history of his great-grandfather who immigrated to the United States and was then forced to stay at the Topaz internment camp in Millard County, Utah.

An Environmental Approach to Chinese Rituals
An Environmental Approach to Chinese Rituals

In a two-day International Conference on Chinese Religio-Environmental Ethics and Practice, an array of speakers touched on environmental issues such as the extinction of animals and how traditional Chinese religious cultures view them. Panelists spoke about religious rituals like making trees and forests sacred, the care of animals, preserving sacred sites and native places, and the ethics of these religious practices.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Tyler Devin Clark and Campus K-Pop
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Tyler Devin Clark and Campus K-Pop

Korean pop music [K-pop] has become popular in the United States in recent years thanks to the viral trend of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012. UC Santa Barbara’s department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies in 2014 added a course called the “New Korean Wave.” Clearly,  there is an increasing interest in - and awareness of -  K-pop and Korean culture in general outside of South Korea.

Personifying that trend is Tyler Devin Clark, who goes by Devin. He is co-president of UCSB’s K-pop club, Seoul’d Out. In this interview, Clark shares his perspective on K-pop’s advance into the American market as well as K-pop’s influence in his own life.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Nicholas Wagenseller
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Nicholas Wagenseller

UC Santa Barbara offers 411 study abroad opportunities in 44 countries under its popular Education Abroad Program. One of those programs enabled Nicholas Wagenseller to study abroad in Japan, which he had always longed for. Finally, that dream came true.

“Middle school students looked surprised when they saw I spoke in Japanese, and they asked me to take a picture together,” he said.