Barry Keenan teaches advanced courses on: Post-WWII East Asian history, The Confucian Classics, a 200-level course on Classical China, as well as comprehensive surveys of the sweep of ideas and institutions in: (1) Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Civilization with attention to the connections of the Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongol states to all three, and (2) in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Civilization from 1600 to the present.

Professor Keenan is a specialist on Chinese cultural and social history, and has served with only two other foreigners on the editorial board of China's Education: Research & Review, published in Beijing and is a reviewer for its successor, Frontiers of Education in China. His first book was The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1977. His second book was Imperial China's Last Classical Academies: Social Change in the Lower Yangzi, 1864-1911. Berkeley: University of California East Asian Institute, 1994. And his third book was Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011.
 

His undergraduate training was in Philosophy at Yale University that included a fifth-year diploma from Les Cours de Civilisation Francaise at the Sorbonne, and his Ph.D. is from Claremont Graduate University in History. Among twenty articles and encyclopedia entries he has published was, "Academies (shuyuan) [1800-present]. The Encyclopedia of Modern China. David Pong, Editor in Chief. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009; and he presented a panel paper on, “Economic Markets and Higher Education: Ethical Issues in the United States and China,” at The First Frontiers of Education in China Seminar at East China Normal University in September 2012 in Shanghai.