EASC: Teaching About Asia

Matthew Levey is Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at Birmingham-Southern College. His area of scholarly and teaching passion is memory of World War II in Asia Europe, and the United States. Dr. Levey was trained as an intellectual historian of middle period (Sung-Ming Dynasties) China, and wrote a dissertation and a few articles on the interactions among the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions of that time. He received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and ivilizations at the University of Chicago in 1991. Beginning in 1989, Dr. Levey has been teaching East Asian history, first at the University of Puget Sound and the College of William and Mary and, since the Fall of 1993 as a member of the history faculty at BSC. Dr. Levey regularly teaches courses on early and late Chinese history: at the introductory level, a two-semester introduction to Chinese and Japanese civilizations; at the intermediate level, a two-semester overview of “Modern” China and Japan; and at the advanced level, two seminars on contemporary China and Japan. In addition to these courses, Dr. Levey teaches a course on the history of the Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist traditions in China and Japan, a two-course sequence on memory of World War II, one focused on the wars in Asia and the Pacific and the other focused on the wars in Europe and the Holocaust, and a course on “Western Images of Asia” from Marco Polo to the present. Dr. Levey is presently working on a manuscript in which he intends to give an overview of World War II memory in Asia (chiefly Japan, China and Korea), Europe (chiefly Germany, France, the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia, and Poland), and the United States. The objective of this work is to show that one gets the best look at how any one country remembers the past by placing the evolution of its “memory culture” into a multi-national comparative framework.