This course takes “new cultural history” approaches since the 1980s as its main analytical frameworks. It guides students through its fundamentals and key case studies in Chinese history, and enables them to rethink China’s cultural histories through new lens. With this, students learn to define and explain culture as well as its making in a more rigorous, sophisticated, and up-to-date fashion. They will also gain the ability to understand, and explain with historical examples, why culture is not static and how its components intersect with power. This course does not teach cultural history as an unchanging record of facts, but as an on-going, developmental process open to argumentation and debate through evidential interpretation. The course exposes students to examples that transcend the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history, including: urban space and urban life, material culture, intellectual ideas, nationhood, history of media and information, gender, historical memory, Hong Kong popular culture, etc.

Continuous Assessment: 100%