AHA Session 213
Sunday, January 5, 2020: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Murray Hill West (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Kevin Fogg, University of Oxford
Panel:
Bradley Camp Davis, Eastern Connecticut State University
David W. Del Testa, Bucknell University
Kevin Fogg, University of Oxford
ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball, University of Utah
Session Abstract
According to research reported in AHA’s Perspectives magazine in May 2013 (Clossey and Guyatt, “It’s a Small World After All”), Southeast Asia has the worst population-to-history professors ratio of any geographic region. That disparity brings a variety of negative consequences for the teaching of the region’s history. First, those experts that do focus on the region are driven to cover just the countries of the region or think only in connection with Asia. Second, there are fewer historians (and less historical scholarship) of Southeast Asia to provide resources that feed global history survey courses. This means that Southeast Asian history has been insufficiently integrated into global history teaching—which should otherwise be deeply interested in this region that has historically served as a major crossroads and emporium in world history. With the exception of American coursework on the Vietnam War (which often leans more towards the American experience than the experience of Vietnamese or how this conflict connects with other decolonization and Cold War conflicts around the world), most colleagues teaching global history struggle to integrate Southeast Asia into their global history curriculum, and many Southeast Asian historians struggle to translate their regional work into good global history teaching.
This panel calls for historians on both sides of that divide to remedy this issue. The four panelists and chair, coming from a state flagship university, a regional public university, an elite private university, a liberal arts college, and a research university abroad, and ranging from the early modern period to the 20th century, have experience teaching on Southeast Asia and the world. They will provide suggestions and directions for integrating Southeast Asia content into the teaching of global history. At the same time, they will encourage scholars of Southeast Asia to think about how they can teach broader questions or subjects building from their regional knowledge. The roundtable asserts that Southeast Asia should naturally be a core component of any global history course, and that historians of Southeast Asia have great potential to teach comparative and connective global history.
