Western Literature of Chinese History (481-0-20)

Instructors

Melissa A Macauley
847/491-3418
Harris Hall - Room 344

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L05: Tues 3:00PM - 5:50PM

Overview of class

This is a graduate field seminar on Chinese history from roughly 1550 to 1912 (some of our readings will take us to 1937). The course focuses on the early modern transformation of China under its last imperial rulers, the Qing. The seminar has two goals. The first is to introduce advanced students to some of the influential English-language scholarship published on Chinese history over the past twenty-five years, and we will focus in particular on topics that have transformed the field during this time. These topics include Chinese-Inner Asian relations and the "new Qing history," gender and sexuality, and Chinese legal culture. Other issues to be addressed include imperialism, intellectual transition, commercialization, and the social and religious roots of late imperial peasant uprisings. We will critically engage with the issue of periodization, for the course begins in a late imperial or "traditional" context and, by the end of the seminar, we will be knee deep in the scholarly literature on "modern" China. Two questions that will engage us, therefore, are: 1. can the early Qing be characterized as China's "early modern" period and 2. how did China "become modern?" The second goal of the course is to enable students to explore in greater detail a topic of particular interest to them and one that will help advance their personal research agendas. This latter goal will be achieved through the writing of a term paper on the most important secondary sources (in any language) relating to that topic.

Learning Objectives

Improve critical reading ability and writing skills as well as gain a background in China's transition into "modernity."

Evaluation Method

Seminar discussion, short paper, term paper.