Keith Knapp
Westvaco Professor of National Security Studies

Office: 427-C Capers Hall
Phone: 843-953-5044
email: keith.knapp@citadel.edu

Dr. Knapp's c.v.

Syllabi for Courses:

History 206

History 365

History 590

Worksheets:

Dr. Knapp's Writing Rules of Thumb

How to Write a History Paper

Bibliographies:

The Samurai

A native of Pound Ridge, New York, Keith Knapp received his B.A. in History and Asian Studies at the State University of New York at Albany, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in East Asian History from the University of California, Berkeley. Having lived and studied language intensively in China for a year, Taiwan for two years, and Japan for a year, he is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and can speak passable Japanese. Through the generosity of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies' Committee on Scholarly Communication with China and the Citadel Foundation, in the spring of the year 2000, he spent five months doing fieldwork in northern China. The University of Hawai'i Press recently published his book Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China. The manuscript he is presently working on is entitled " The Lives of Filial Children: A Study of Two Medieval Chinese Manuscripts Preserved in Kyoto." He is interested in all facets of the cultural and social history of early medieval China (AD 100-600), but he is particularly consumed with reconstructing the lenses through which people of this period viewed their world. With an eye to discerning how they lived their lives, he has also recently developed an interest in archaeology, which has led to his participation in excavations in China and Mongolia.

Knapp is the History Department's specialist on East Asia. Hence, he regularly teaches courses on the history of Japan, modern China, premodern China, and the Silk Road. He has also taught "The History of Chinese Religion" as an Honors seminar. As for more general survey courses, he teaches the "History of Western Civilization," "History of World Civilization," and "History of the Non-Western World." At the graduate level, he regularly offers "History of China to 1800," "Historiography," and the "History of the Non-Western World." In the future, he plans to offer graduate courses on women and the family in premodern China, a history of premodern Japan, and premodern China and its frontiers. As for upper-division undergraduate courses, he hopes to teach a new course on East Asian religions, as well as one that looks at East Asian history through its material culture.

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