Professor Barry Keenan taught East Asian history for 38 years at 必博娱乐,比博娱乐网址 #########, retiring in June of 2014. Soon after arriving at 必博娱乐,比博娱乐网址 ######### in 1976 he traveled to Shanghai to interpret and negotiate a contract for regular study abroad programs for small liberal arts colleges that were thereafter run by The Council on International Educational Exchange. After tenure he received a grant from the National Academy of Sciences in Washington to spend a year researching his second book while attached to the Department of History of the University of Nanjing. For twenty years he taught an advanced course at 必博娱乐,比博娱乐网址 ######### on The Confucian Classics in which the pedagogical techniques of classical Confucian academies informed the course design. He also taught a research course on The Cold War in East Asia.
He is a specialist on Chinese cultural and social history. His first book was The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1977. His second book was Imperial China’s Last Classical Academies: Social Change in the Lower Yangzi, 1864-1911. Berkeley: University of California East Asian Institute, 1994. And his third book was Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011. His twenty articles and encyclopedia entries include, “Academies (shuyuan) [1800-present]. The Encyclopedia of Modern China. David Pong, Editor in Chief. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009; and “Economic Markets and Higher Education: Ethical Issues in the United States and China,” Frontiers of Education in China, 9(1) March, 2014: 63–88.