This 4 credit hybrid course for CSI undergraduates teaches the history of premodern Central Asia and Southeast Asia, switching off each week, in a global context with 1 scholarly textbook focusing on each of the regions in premodernity. Weekly lecture videos with brief online quizzes, and in-class contributions from research focus groups into which the 45 students self-select, round out most of the work in the course. Students who have already taken another of my classes on Asia at CSI turn the research paper proposals that concluded their previous semester into full research papers.

This 4 credit hybrid course for 2nd year CSI undergraduates leads its 45 students through the 1st 1/3 of Edwin O. Reischauer’s Japan: Story of a Nation. This light reading of just a dozen or so pages per week is supplemented by primary source excerpts, and by weekly video lectures with brief online quizzes concluding each of them. In its weekly in-person class sessions, research focus groups of students chime in each Wednesday to relate and interpret what Reischauer has to say about each of their research topics in premodern Japan. Students who have already taken another of my classes on Asia at CSI turn the research paper proposals that concluded their previous semester into full research papers.

This 4 credit hybrid course for CSI undergraduates centers itself around Valerie Hansen’s The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800. The readings are deliberately light; the course’s 45 students read a couple dozen pages of Open Empire per week, and their video lectures and in-person discussions clearly identify every single emperor of every single major dynasty of premodern Chinese history, at a pace determined by the number of pages that Hansen devotes to each in her textbook. For discussion, the 45 students self-select into research focus groups by field — art, science, literature, religion & philosophy, military & poltical history, or economic history — and each week must contribute live in-person by commenting upon the coverage of that topic within the week’s readings from Open Empire. Students who have already taken another of my classes on Asia at CSI turn the research paper proposals that concluded their previous semester into full research papers.

This 4 credit hybrid course for 2nd year CSI undergraduates features a video lecture and an in-person discussion each week. The students are divided into groups by research focus, so that a 45 student class is manageable in discussion. Each week the students take a brief quiz online after watching the video lecture, and then in person, each research focus group leads 1 hour of class discussion on the week’s readings. For 8 weeks the course teaches the cultural history of ancient & medieval Asia, then the students take an interpretive midterm based on translated primary sources. The remaining 8 weeks are devoted to the chronological political history of Asia right up to the present, and to a group-based drafting process for individual research paper proposals.

In my ABD years at Columbia I began to teach City College undergraduates. I quickly worked my way up to 3 full sections per semester of such students, ~100 in total, and for 3 years now I have continuously taught and improved this course, to CCNY’s specifications. It centers itself around the textbook The Earth & its Peoples, and primarily asks students to learn to find library books that confirm or deny claims made in Earth & its Peoples, then present their findings to the class. In so doing the students learn well how to cite sources in Chicago style, and to read such citations.

In summer & fall of 2022 I designed this in-person course to the specifications of St. Francis College, teaching a great deal of early modern & modern world history to ~16 undergraduates of diverse backgrounds, helping them to understand the effects on Asian & African peoples of such global processes as the Age of Imperialism & the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Decolonization movement.

This course, designed as an exercise in the Columbia graduate school class Early Modern Japan, introduces undergraduates to the question of whether nations existed before nationalism. It deals with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean precursors to full national consciousness in the modern period.

This is the first course that I am designing explicitly for junior college and community college students. It’s still in its earliest stages of development, be kind.

It focuses upon early modern global history from 1400 to 1800, telling the stories not only of the 13 colonies that became the US, but the stories of the empires that founded them, and the empires against which those great powers competed.

This course, designed for and taught to 3rd year Columbia undergraduates, follows Chinese interactions with Central Asia and Southeast Asia - switching off each week - from 200 BCE to 1930 CE.