The Department offers a Ph.D. program in East Asian Studies, with specializations in Chinese, Japanese, and East Asian Cultural Studies. The M.A. may be awarded to Ph.D. students in progress toward the doctoral degree.<br><br>The graduate program emphasizes rigorous training in language and textual analysis, with equal attention given to the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of literary study. In addition to more traditional vocabularies of criticism and theory, the curriculum encourages exploration of recent challenges to established conceptual and methodological frameworks. The program builds on the foundation of a faculty whose research interests engage major issues in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature and culture, while developing connections with the larger community of scholarship at UCI.<br><br>Because the graduate program is designed to prepare students for both college-level teaching and advanced research, each student will be required to serve, under direct faculty supervision, as a teaching assistant in an appropriate undergraduate course offered through the Department.<br>The Emphasis in Visual Studies exposes students to a variety of contemporary methodologies in the Humanities, and helps train a generation of scholars capable of engaging in cross-disciplinary inquiry and responding to the emergence of new research paradigms. Students explore an ever-expanding array of objects and visual experiences produced in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, television, video, and digital technologies. The student who satisfactorily completes the emphasis will be given a letter of certification from the Director of Visual Studies after certain requirements have been met.