World Civilizations, Asian Histories, and Other Topics

As I see it, the classroom is the place where we can best learn about the world, alongside and through one another. We are all teachers and students. In addition to becoming more knowledgeable about a particular topic, my goal is that students in my classes come away with:

    • A clearer understanding of our global interconnectedness
    • A greater awareness of their agency as political actors, consumers, environmental stewards, and as members of families, communities, and cultures
    • A stronger capacity for critical analysis, written and oral expression
    • An enhanced ability to discern between scholarly knowledge and expertise and their opposites
    • An appreciation for the humanities through an interdisciplinary, historical approach to the subject

I encourage my students to become scholars themselves, Towards that end, and through my classes, many have written editorials for school newspapers, submitted entries to Wikipedia (e.g. on Women in Contemporary Vietnam, the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909, the Solana Beach neighborhood La Colonia de Eden Gardens), uploaded projects to YouTube (e.g. on stories of survivors of the Cambodian Genocide, primers on education in Cambodia), created digital projects (e.g. on Philippine folklore, Confucian influences in contemporary Vietnam, recent Indonesian blockbuster action films) and received external research grants.

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Classes I Teach at SMC
History 5: Colonial Latin America
History 11: US History to 1877
History 24: Premodern East Asia, Prehistory to 1600
History 25: Modern East Asia, 1600 to Present
History 27: History of Southeast Asia
History 33: World Civilizations from Prehistory to 1500
History 34: World Civilizations since 1500

Classes Previously Taught at UCLA, CSUSM and IVC
China and the World, 1600 to the Present (CSU San Marcos)
History of Modern Asia, 1600 to the Present (CSUSM)
Southeast Asian Crossroads, Prehistory to the Present (UCLA)
Modern Southeast Asia, 1815 to the Present (UCLA)
History of New Media in Asia (UCLA)
US History to 1877 to the Present (CSUSM, Irvine Valley College)
US History since 1877 (CSUSM, IVC)
World Civilizations to 1500 (IVC)