The year-long undergraduate survey introduces the history of East Asia, defined as present-day China, Korea, and Japan. We proceed chronologically, thematically, and comparatively. That is, we examine regional variations on historical problems within a chronological framework. We base our discussion on political economy and its changes over time (agriculture, industry and their ecological limits; states, ideologies, and revolutions; trade, foreign relations, and wars); but we also look at society (family structure, rural life, urbanization), culture (literature and other forms of representation), and belief (the varieties of thought and practice that go under the names of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Shinto as well as Christianity, nationalism or socialism). In the first term we examine East Asia in its classical and early modern periods, in the second the region’s engagement with the modern world since 1800. This module draws on materials developed for the six volume A Cultural History of East Asia, edited by Christopher Gerteis et al and forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

This second-year undergraduate survey examines Modern Japan — in regional and global context – from the 1600s to the 1990s. Together we examine social and political epochs such as the rise and fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu; the social and political contexts of modernization, industrialization, and the establishment of an overseas empire; the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars; and the stages of Japan’s postwar ‘economic miracle’. Students consider historical narrative alongside film and literature as a means of examining the simultaneous transformations that defined the rise of modern Japan.

This advanced undergraduate module explores how issues of militarism, pacifism, and nationalism have shaped Japanese identity and history through the lens of how the Japanese have struggled to come to grips with its imperial and colonial wars in East Asia. Through lectures, group discussions, and student presentations, we will gain a better understanding of how these issues have influenced Japanese society and its relationship with East Asian neighbors. This course is not a history of war. Rather, it is an interdisciplinary examination of the contemporary impact of the ways that war is remembered. This module draws on materials developed by the international collaborative research project The Hashima Project.

The advanced undergraduate module examines the economic transformations that redefined Japan from the proto-industrial economy of the early modern era to Japan’s twentieth-century emergence as one of the world’s great industrialized nations. Students investigate how the political economy of the nineteenth century, despite political constraints designed specifically to hinder social and economic change, established the proto-industrial roots for Japan’s rapid industrialization during the early twentieth century. This module is built around the three volume History of Industrialization in Modern Japan, edited by Christopher Gerteis and published by Brill.

This undergraduate module offers academic training for all first-year students in East Asian Languages and Cultures. Through interactive teaching and practical exercises students acquire the core study skills and strategies needed to succeed in their academic studies. This includes fundamental academic skills such as finding, assessing and using resources and evidence in their research, writing for different audiences, and practical skills like attributing and referencing others work correctly.

This two-part postgraduate module examines the historiography of early modern, modern and contemporary Japan with particular emphasis on the nexus of social and economic change from the Tokugawa to Reiwa eras. By examining the relationship between early modernity and the radical transformation to industry and empire experienced by Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, students will read and discuss in-depth to the historiography of Japan’s rise to prominence as a global economic power.

This postgraduate seminar is designed to help first-year MA students in Asian Studies to develop their competencies in academic argumentation and writing. Since the focus of the seminar is on student discussion, participants are required to complete all reading assignments and adequately prepare themselves to actively participate in every seminar meeting. By mastering assigned reading and writing assignments students will learn how to fully engage in a graduate-level discussion of Asian Studies and its disciplines.

This advanced undergraduate/postgraduate module asks students to challenge the 'lost decade' and 'terrible devastation' frameworks that have defined the discussion of Japan’s postwar trajectory. Seeking a more nuanced picture of the nation's postwar development, students will read and write on multidisciplinary scholarship that demonstrates its ongoing importance and relevance. Examining the historical context to the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan's postwar development, class re-engages earlier discourses and introduce new pathways for research on postwar Japan. This module is built around the book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-bubble, edited by Christopher Gerteis & Timothy George and published by Bloomsbury.

Taught in Kyoto or Tokyo as an experiential learning class, this advanced undergraduate module offers students the opportunity to critically review the history of Japan within a contemporary setting. We visit key historical sites while we discuss Japan’s progression from a medieval hierarchy to a World Power, its march to wars with China and the world, and its reemergence as a postwar economic power.

This first-year undergraduate module introduces students to the History of the part of the world that was profoundly influenced by the Chinese cultural sphere. Students will engage with the ideological foundations and the social, economic and political structures that supported the expanding states, their relationships Korea and Japan, and Inner Asia, and the introduction of new systems of belief and knowledge and the challenges and innovations that came with it. Class concludes with an exploration of Neo-Confucianism as the political orthodoxy of the later dynasties and the revolutionary transformations that marked its end. This module draws on materials developed for the six volume A Cultural History of East Asia, edited by Christopher Gerteis et al and forthcoming from Bloomsbury.