Visiting Professor of History
B.A. Georgetown University; M.A. Harvard University; Ph.D. Princeton University
Claire E. Cooper teaches courses on Asian history, with a particular focus the global encounters and exchanges that occurred across East Asia and the Indian Ocean from earliest times to the present.
Dr. Cooper received her B.A. in Japanese Studies from Georgetown University, her MA in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in East Asian Studies. Her research centers on Japanese engagement with objects, ideas, and peoples brought by the United East India Company (VOC) to Japan between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Beyond dismantling the narrative of “seclusion” that pervades most analyses of early modern Japan, her work also challenges the Eurocentric nature of histories of India Companies in Asia.
While Dr. Cooper has lived and conducted research across Europe and Japan, the latter of which was supported by a Fulbright IIE fellowship, she is excited to return to teach in her home state of Tennessee.
Courses at Sewanee:
HIST128 Adventures at Sea: The Indian Ocean World History
HIST211 China: Inside the Great Wall
HIST212 Modern East Asia
HIST216 History of Japan
HIST395 Science and Medicine in East Asia, 1500 to the Present
HIST455 European Empires in Asia
