History
Barry Keenan teaches courses on: Post-WWII East Asian History,
The Confucian Classics, Classical China, and Introductions to
the sweep of ideas and institutions in traditional Chinese and
Japanese history, and in modern East Asian history.
Professor Keenan is a specialist on Chinese intellectual and social
history, and serves with only two other foreigners on the editorial
board of China's Education: Research & Review, published in Beijing.
His dissertation was published as The Dewey Experiment in China:
Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic
(Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University Press,
1977), and 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 articles is: "The Re-conceptualization of
Ritual (li) as Reverence in Early Confucianism." (2005). His most
recent panel paper was: "The Wuxingpian (Five modes of proper conduct)
and Ritual Propriety (li)," an analysis of the newly excavated
pamphlet written by the grandson of Confucius (Ninth East-West
Philosophers' Conference, Honolulu, 2006).
His undergraduate training was at Yale University, including a
fifth-year diploma at Les Cours de Civilisation Francaise at the
Sorbonne, and his Ph.D. is from Claremont Graduate University.
Professor Keenan is currently writing a popular book on Confucian
Self-Cultivation supported by a grant from the Lilly Foundation.
