Mission The graduate program in East Asian Studies at UC Irvine emphasizes rigorous training in language and textual analysis, with equal attention given to the historical, social, and theoretical dimensions of literary and cultural studies. In addition to more traditional vocabularies of criticism and theory, the curriculum encourages exploration of recent challenges to establish 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 UC Irvine.