Dr. Keith Knapp
Professor
A native of Pound Ridge, New York, Dr. Keith Knapp received his B.A. in History and Asian Studies from 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. He has lived in China, Japan, and Taiwan. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and competent in Japanese (He can read and write Japanese, but his spoken Japanese could use more work). His research focuses on the cultural and social history of early medieval China (100-600 CE). He is particularly interested in this tumultuous period’s religious and social values, conceptions of the animal world, material culture, and utopic dreams and actions. He has authored Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China (2005), as well as fourteen journal articles and twenty-eight book chapters. He is one of the co-editors of Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographic Guide (2015), and the Cambridge History of China, Volume Two: The Six Dynasties 220-589 (2019). Presently, he is the editor of Bloomsbury Academic’s forthcoming Cultural History of Confucianism in Medieval China, which is volume 3 of The Cultural History of Confucianism. He is working on a book manuscript titled: “The Lives of Filial Children: A Study of Two Medieval Chinese Manuscripts Preserved in Kyoto, Japan.”
Knapp is the Chair and co-founder of the Southeast Early China Roundtable, which will hold its 30th annual conference this fall at Vanderbilt University. He is former President and now an executive board member of the Early Medieval China Group. He is on the Board of Directors of Sarasota’s Elling Eide Center (Research Library and Preserve), which is one of North America’s largest private collections of materials concerning premodern East Asia. Last year, he was elected to the Editorial Board of the Association for Asian Studies, the world’s largest professional organization of scholars who do research on Asia. He has created and maintains the China Roundtable listserv, which includes over 440 scholars from across the globe.
Knapp is the History Department’s specialist in East Asia. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses on pre-modern China, modern China, Japan, East Asian concepts of leadership, Chinese utopian thought, violence and warfare in Chinese history, and concepts of wellness in China. At the graduate level, he has taught courses on pre-modern China, pre-modern Japan, historiography, the history of the non-Western world, the military history of China.
Featured Publications
Degrees
Ph.D. History (University of California, Berkeley)
M.A. History (University of California, Berkeley)
B.A. History and Asian Studies (State University of New York at Albany, magna cum laude)
Research Interests: East Asia, Pre-Modern China