Teaching
Courses taught and offered:
Introductory survey courses:
Histories of East Asia: From Premodern to Modern Times
Introduction to Japanese History: 2020-600
Global Korean History and Culture
Korean History 1-3.
Varieties of Edo/Tokyo: The Aesthetics of Japanese Life and Culture
More specialized courses for graduate and advanced undergraduate students:
Japan and the Japanese: Society, Identity, History
China and the World through Humans and Objects
The Self and the Other: Power and Identity in Imperial Japan (transnational Japanese-Korean colonial relations)
20th century Korean History 1-2.
Korea in/and the World: Premodern and Modern Times
Technology in History/History in Technology: The View from East Asia
Japan and East Asia, Japan and the World
Digital Humanities and Asian Studies: Theory and Practice
Multilingualism and Criticism in DH
Representations of Hungarian-East Asian Relations
Advanced research methods seminar: Skill-building immersion
My full teaching portfolio, including my statement of teaching philosophy, syllabi, ITC (individual teaching consultation) report, course evaluations and the outcome of my self-initiated surveys, as well as the components of my multilayered pedagogical training and the video recording of one of my class sessions, is available upon request.
I also have an official College Teaching Certificate earned at the University of Chicago in 2019.
Mentoring:
I really enjoy mentoring and advising and have served as thesis advisor for 20 BA and MA-level students in three departments and as thesis reader of more than 25 student projects. Much to my happiness, one of my students has recently won a prestigious student research project award at Eötvös Loránd University with a paper on the representation of hwarang in the contemporary Korean media, and her paper has also been recommended for publication.
I have also been invited to serve as cabinet leader for the Sinology section of the Atelier for Oriental Studies at Eötvös Collegium. As a part of Eötvös Loránd University, Eötvös Collegium has a long history of providing specialized training for the most talented students to complement their studies and to strenghten their professional development. I look forward to working with three enthusiastic students this coming year to help them develop and present their individual research projects.
Sample assignment: The "blog + image" project
In my teaching practice, I treat students as “co-creators” by making them the protagonists of their own learning process through a collaboration-based experience. This process involves the enhanced connection of the classroom environment and “the outside world”. For example, in the “blog+image” project, which we created together with my students in the Japan and the Japanese: Society, Identity, History course, the group aimed to think through the nature and roots of Japan’s foreign relations by selecting a chapter of their choice from Miyoshi Masao’s As We Saw Them and juxtaposing the main arguments of the text with an image that they were asked to find from specific recommended historical image collections.
Workability and accessibility were key to allow students to experiment with writing for a different audience on a novel platform, while still keeping their focus on the main questions and themes of the readings and the course. Therefore, the project was based on a WordPress blog platform, integrated into the course’s Canvas site, allowing smooth and direct access for students which they were able to master with minimal preliminary guidance.
According to the solicited feedback I received from my students, the juxtaposition and interplay between text and image involved in this public historical project not only encouraged them to consider the main topics and questions at hand more profoundly and in a more multifaceted manner, but also helped them enrich their knowledge regarding copyright issues, online image usage, while practicing a different writing style adapted to the characteristics of the platform.
In order to facilitate "co-creation" with my students, we have together experimented with diverse digital platforms to see how these influence the way we express our thoughts. Some recent examples include a collaborative digital "book" project on East Asia in Hungary (produced on Scalar as part of a special seminar on digital East Asian studies for MA students), as well as an online exhibition on the representation of the relationship between China and the external world (created on OMEKA as part of my China and the World course for MA students). These projects not only served as effective means to enrich the students' skills in writing for diverse audiences and in using and annotating images online, but also constitute accessible contributions that they can even include in their portfolio.
Akin to research, I enjoy connecting different disciplines and integrating diverse methodologies into my teaching practice to expose students to diverse approaches to similar topics and problems and thus further strengthen their critical thinking skills through discussion, collaboration, and thinking together. I am also always open to novel techniques and aim to construct various platforms for students for effective “co-creation” in the form of visual storytelling, for example.