The Making of Modern East Asia

Catalog description

This course examines Asia in the shaping of the modern world, from competing definitions of empires circa 1800 to the rise of the notion of the twenty-first as a "Pacific Century." It investigates the definition(s) of Asia as a world region, explores transnational interactions and emphasizes Asians as historical actors via written, visual and aural sources. Events are placed in the context of key historical paradigms, including varying definitions of modernity, the rise of the nation-state, birth of mass politics, new mechanisms of war, the language of self-determination, changing views of gender, shifting types of media and consumption, etc.