WEAI Fellows teach new, global courses this spring; new seminar on modern Taiwan open to public

 

NEW UNDERGRADUATE COURSE

 

Modernity and Nation in the 20th Century (HIST W3919)

Instructor: Reto Hofmann                                                           

Day/Time: MW 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM

This course compares and contrasts the paths to modernity of four societies: China, Germany, Japan, and Italy. By adopting a comparative approach, and looking closely at the way that international contexts influenced domestic developments, this course will give students the chance to view history from outside the nation-state focus that tended to dominate history in the past. In this sense, while students are expected to expand their familiarity with the basic history of these countries, more important will be the capacity to think about the world from multiple perspectives. Key topics include national consolidation, the growth of nationalist sentiment, imperialism and fascism, the impact of World War II and the Cold War, and historical memory. Based largely on primary sources, the course presents modernity both as understood by each of these societies and also in its global interconnectedness, an interconnectedness that shapes our world today.

 

 

NEW GRADUATE COURSE

 

Nation, State and “Global” Society in Southeast Asia (REGN U6638)

Instructor: Kristy Kelly                                                  

Day/Time: W 11:00 AM to 12:50 PM

This course will examine Southeast Asia as a region, from intersecting historical, cultural, political and economic perspectives. We will take as our starting point that transnational processes have shaped and continue to shape personal biographies, specific nation-building projects and international economic and political relations. This course draws on in-depth field work from the social sciences, and takes an intersectional approach (race, class and gender), to introduce students to how transnational processes of globalization – namely economic integration, cross-border migrations, and technological innovations – are shifting what it means to be “global” in Southeast Asia. This course will examine the challenges local communities face in managing education, health care, their environment, borders, capital and their families in the context of increasing urbanization, immigration and digitization. Throughout the course, students will be asked to critically examine how global-local binaries have been constructed to explain social change, what relationship this has to how change is experienced at different levels of social scale, and how these binaries are being resisted, challenged, ignored and transformed in social science research in and about Southeast Asia.

 

 

SEMINAR ON TAIWAN

 

Professors Myron Cohen and Murray Rubinstein will co-teach a seminar this semester on modern Taiwan. The seminar can be taken for course credit and is open to the public. For more information and the schedule, please visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/moderntaiwan.html .