The Global Asia Research Center will organize five courses for the 2019 academic year. These courses will be available to full-time, Waseda University graduate students. To register, please apply during course registration period.
For more information, refer to the flyer below or contact the Global Asia Research Center at [email protected]
Spring semester
“Writing and Publishing Articles for Peer-reviewed Academic Journals”
Lecturer: Jeffrey Hall (Waseda University)
Thursdays, 4th period (14:45 – 16:15)
This graduate seminar is an introduction to the complex world of academic publishing and is designed to give writers in the humanities and social sciences practical experience in getting their work published in peer-reviewed journals.Using Wendy Laura Belcher’s guidebook Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, the course explains the publication process to students and shares strategies for achieving success in the academic writing arena, including setting up a work schedule, identifying appropriate journals for submission, working with editors, writing query letters, clarifying arguments, and organizing material.In a supportive environment, participants revise a paper and submit it for publication. The goal of this course is to aid students in revising papers, taking them from classroom quality to academic journal quality
Summer quarter
“Seminar in Japanese Cultural History II: The Limits of Modern Japan”
Lecturer: Jordan Sand (Georgetown University)
Fridays, 5th and 6th period (16:30 – 18:00, 18:15 – 19:45)
The limits of modern Japanese history have expanded, as scholarship has turned toward the colonial empire, the experience of migrants and minorities, the Asia-Pacific natural environment, and the global context of modernity generally. What kind of narrative of modern Japanese history should be written for English language readers today? Following the summer 2018 seminar, which focused on the nineteenth century, this seminar will focus on the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taking up eight large themes roughly chronologically, we will explore the recent scholarly literature for new issues and methodologies that might reshape the standard historical narrative of modern Japan. For background, we will read Andrew Gordon’s textbook A Modern History of Japan (available in Japanese translation as well) and excerpts from other English-language studies of Japan. In short papers and class presentations, students will introduce new historical studies relevant to the theme of the week and primary sources that add new dimensions to our understanding of the era.
“The end of empire and the search for postwar justice in the Cold War”
Lecturer: Barak Kushner (University of Cambridge)
July 3 – July 27, 2019 on Wednesdays and Saturdays
The story of the Japanese empire’s surrender in August 1945 is well known but we understand much less about what followed this downfall during the process of “de-imperialization” and the reordering of East Asia after war. How did power and authority in postwar East Asia transform and what forces shaped the regional postwar hierarchy when Japanese power and command dissolved? How were political and social stability re-established and within what framework, employing what ideology to gain public support? With the end of Japan’s empire, approximately nine million people, almost a tenth of Japan’s imperial population, needed to repatriate in one of the largest human migration moments in history and one hundred million Chinese were uprooted as well. The situation was anything but stable or predictable. For too long Japanese, Chinese and Korean histories have been written within a national framework and within such narrow confines the larger and more important key regional narrative has been lost. Most Japanese imperial aggression took place on and around the Chinese mainland, not in Japan proper, yet Hiroshima and the Tokyo Trial are what is most remembered about Japan’s war domestically and in the West. Precisely how the political realm was restructured in postwar East Asia and the impact of that legacy needs to be examined beyond the national history paradigm. Our overemphasis on national history and its connection to ideas of justice have blinded us to what was happening regionally and an acknowledgement of the fact that victors are not the only ones who write history or the history of justice reminds us of the ignored story of the history of defeat in East Asia. The legal restructuring of East Asia and Japan’s relations with its neighbors played a vital function in redressing former imperial relations in the Cold War and the class will also analyze those important aspects.
