<p>Hello, guys.
I am a student majoring International Relations in one of the top 30 schools in the United States. Master of International Relations will be completed after I finish my undergraduate program in my current institution. BTW, I would like to continue my studies in a different field: East Asian Studies. I just want to know which schools have great East Asian Studies PHD programs, also If you guys don’t mind, Can you guys tell me Is EAS really good major to study as for a PHD program? (Rankings please)</p>
<p>I believe there’s already a thread about it… use the search function and type in the keyword “East Asian History”</p>
<p>Basically, there’s no such thing as a PhD in “East Asian Studies” so you would need to be more specific. Do you want to specialize in economics? History? Political science? From there, you can focus on East Asia as your geographical focus.</p>
<p>Interdisciplinary graduate programs are on the rise, but ticklemepink is correct: you generally have to come at it from a specific angle – history, art, government, literature, etc.</p>
<p>interdisciplinary PhD programs are bad news. and in general, new PhD programs are bad news. you have no idea how successful they’ll be at placing students into professorships or other positions because you are the guinea pig.</p>
<p>that said… harvard and princeton have extremely strong east asian studies masters programs, and if you don’t know what you want to focus on yet (history, geography, anthropology, politics), you can aim for one of those two programs and then earn a PhD in a single discipline afterward. those two schools will set you up for admission to any PhD program anywhere.</p>
<p>also, look at department websites for east asian studies and look at where those professors got their degrees. chances are the departments are full of economists, historians, geographers, political scientists, and literary theorists. very few, if any, will have received their degrees in “____ studies.” it is extremely difficult to get hired with an interdisciplinary degree.</p>
<p>if you’re unsure of your exact focus, my suggestion (a biased one) would be to look into history programs. anthropologists and historians can find a lot of common ground, and historians and economists or political scientists can find a lot of common ground, but anthropologists and political scientists tend to really butt heads. if you like observation and human experience and interacting with the people you study, lean towards anthro/history. if you like models, systems, categories, and compartments, lean towards poli sci or economic history.</p>
<p>i leave out economics because you need a lot of math and a lot of econ classes to get into an economics PhD program, and an international relations degree usually doesn’t have enough econ exposure to qualify you.</p>
<p>But the OP doesn’t need to abandon his thoughts of getting a MA in IR. Within his/her curriculum, s/he can choose electives relating to East Asia in different departments to get a feel of what discipline would be the best. That’s what I really like about IR programs as opposed to straight political science.</p>
<p>History is history. You look at everything from historical perspectives and some statistics models. You’ll go so far as recent as the 1980s. Very, very few history courses on the 1990s and early 2000s exist because historians don’t believe that the field is ready to examine those decades objectively. So if you want to look at the fall of the Soviet Union or Rwanda conflict, go for the IR masters and choose another discipline. You have to give about 20-30 years between today and then in order for those events to appear in the field and be taken seriously. So we won’t really see anyone working on the Clinton years until about late 2010s in the field of history.</p>
<p>A case in point, my history professor just finished her first semester of teaching graduate students for the FIRST time since 1984. She used a very similar syllabus with an updated book list. Back in 1984, she told me that she went as far as late 1960s in terms of course materials. In THIS class, she was able to go into late 1970s and had some final papers about the early 1980s, totally unthinkable at that time. In her concluding remarks, she said that she’s very excited to go into the 1980s and there’s so much that needs to be done now that enough time has passed for a more objective examination of that decade. She thought going into the early 1990s was just pushing it.</p>
<p>So the question is, does the OP want to spend more time looking at historical models or more contemporary ones?</p>
<p>i think it depends on the professor and the department regarding how recent an event they’re willing to study. many look at history as a process rather than a series of isolated events, and i’ve read countless books that reserve an introductory or concluding chapter for “the present day.” yeah, that can’t be the focus of the research in its entirety, but it can be the initial seedling from which the rest of the historical examination grows.</p>
<p>i think it just comes down to the rigidity of advisers and departments.</p>