Laurie Sears: Areas of Graduate Study

Division: Pre-Modern Asia

The material and human history of the Southeast Asian region from the beginnings to 1800. Emphasizes local cultures and early kingdoms through the study of religion, architecture, art, archaeology, economics, ecology, and textual studies (literature, laws, chronicles, and oral traditions). Note: Professors Giebel and Sears created this description jointly. Professor Sears' area of specialization is Indonesia.

Division: Modern Asia

Social, political, cultural and economic changes in the region from 1800 to the present. Emphasizes the growth of staes, imperialism, nationalism, the transformations of modernity, independence and the challenges of gendered, ethnic, and religious identities in the post-colonial world. Note: Professors Giebel and Sears created this description jointly. Professor Sears' area of specialization is Indonesia.

Division: Comparative History (Historiography & Comparative Colonialisms)*

The goal of the Historiography field will be to look at the intersection of history and theory through a critical investigation of ideologies, post-modernities, the breakdown of rationalism, and the de-centering effects of postcolonial and feminist theories. How does post-modern critical discourse affect historical studies? What is the fate of history in the postcolonial world? Can one be a feminist, a Marxist, and a post-modernist? (Would one want to be?) By taking an interdisciplinary approach to "culture," theory, and history, this field will blend together a number of different methodologies associated with ethnography, semiotics, Frankfurt school theory, Birmingham school media criticism, feminist theories, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial theories and deconstruction. The emphasis will be on different ways of "seeing" and how these intersect with changing notions of subjectivity. Each student will construct an individual list of required readings for this field specific to his or her research interests.

This field in Comparative Colonialisms approaches the comparative study of colonialism by investigating spatial and temporal constructions of modernity and what is sometimes called post-modernity. The field draws novelists, cultural critics, and scholars of Asia and Europe into comparative historical conversations about "non-western studies". Continuing the dialogues with the social sciences that comparative studies have always entailed, this field integrates literary, historiographical, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories into these discussions by questioning the development of nations and identities, and the disciplinary constructions of modernity, ethnicity, gender, and culture.

For the purposes of this field, we will avoid positing a past time of tradition that has been overcome by modernity. Tradition and modernity both come into focus at the same time, and scholars can only recognize tradition in the light of modernity. What becomes known as "culture" comes into focus in the 19th century as colonial empires are consolidated and colonial scholars begin the process of cultural representation that has sometimes been named Orientalism. What we must call culture, for lack of a better term, cannot be separated from the colonial moment and posited as an unchanging part of non-European civilization waiting for Europeans to uncover, interpret, document, or eventually reconstruct it. What social scientists call "tradition" developed within an atmosphere in which 19th century discourses of progress and science were percolating, both contributing and drawing from European, African, and Asian intellectual interactions. This field strives towards a re-envisioning of European and Asian histories by highlighting the mutual exchanges between Asian and European knowledges and mentalities. Each student will construct a different list of required readings for this field specific to his or her research interests.

*Students may not offer a field in the Comparative History division as a first field.