Intellectual interests of mine that might work particularly well for Senior Project proposals include: (1) The biographical and political background of any Chinese or Japanese writer; (2) The history of Chinese education, from Confucius and Confucian academies to Mao's educational policies; (3) The Confucian classics in China, Japan, or Korea, or The New Confucianism that is reviving today in China, and has proponents around the world; (4) American-trained students from China who returned to China in the twentieth century to assume often frustrating positions as leaders in fields such as political and educational reform; (5) The May Fourth Movement; (6) The intellectual and political side of reformers such as the Deathsong of the River reformers of the late 1980's in the People's Republic of China.

Barry Keenan teaches courses ranging from: "East Asia Since WW II," to "The Confucian Classics." He teaches a comprehensive introduction to "Modern East Asia" focusing on China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam since 1700, and a comprehensive introduction to "Traditional East Asian Civilization" that covers China and Japan from early statehood to 1700 C.E..

Professor Keenan is a specialist on Chinese intellectual and social history, and his doctoral dissertation was published as The Dewey Experiment in China:  Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass: Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University Press, (1977). His second book was Imperial China's Last Classical Academies: Social Change in the Lower Yangzi, 1864-1911 (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1994. His most recent of eighteen published articles is: "The Re-conceptualization of Ritual (li) as Reverence in Early Confucianism." (2005). A recent panel paper was:"The Wuxingpian (Five modes of proper conduct) and Ritual Propriety (li)," an analysis of the newly excavated text written by the grandson of Confucius (Honolulu: Ninth East-West Philosophers' Conference, the University of Hawaii, 2005). He serves with only two other foreigners on the editorial board of China's Education: Research & Review, published in Beijing.

His undergraduate training was in philosophy at Yale University, that included a fifth-year diploma from Les Cours de Civilisation Francaise at the Sorbonne in Paris, and his Ph.D. is from Claremont Graduate University in the discipline of history. Professor Keenan is currently writing a volume on Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation for the series Dimensions of Asian Spirituality at the University of Hawai'i Press supported by a grant from the Lilly Foundation.