Asia and the Pacific
The Asia and Pacific concentration—which encompasses East, South, and Central Asia along with the Pacific and the Indian Ocean—offers students the opportunity to explore gender, class, race, and ethnicity through the examination of premodern and modern empires and nations, their borders and peripheries, and their flows of people, materials, and ideas. Major topics of focus include the early modern and modern eras, Western and Japanese imperialisms, labor and other major social movements, socialist transformations, and cultural, intellectual, and science history.
Major Requirements
The history major requires a minimum of 12 unique courses. At least eight of the 12 courses must be upper-division (HIS 100-199). A maximum of four courses, including the introductory survey course, may be lower-division (HIS 1-99).
Major Planning Worksheet
Copy a History Major Planning Worksheet and Sample Academic Plans to your UCSC Google Drive.
Region of Concentration: Asia and the Pacific (6 courses)
I. One lower-division introductory survey course:
- HIS 40A, Early Modern East Asia
- HIS 40B, The Making of Modern East Asia
- HIS 44, Modern South Asia, 1500 to Present
HIS 40A and 40B satisfy the Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC) general education requirement. HIS 44 satisfies the Ethnicity and Race (ER) general education requirement.
II. Four additional Asia and the Pacific courses, three of which must be upper-division
III. One Asia and the Pacific Comprehensive Requirement
Historical Skills and Methods (1 course)
IV. HIS 100, Historical Skills and Methods
HIS 100 introduce history majors to historical methods and provides preparation for advanced historical research. Students develop critical reading, historical analysis, research, and disciplinary writing skills. HIS 100 also satisfies the Textual Analysis and Interpretation (TA) general education requirement.
Students who enter UCSC as frosh are expected to complete HIS 100 by the end of their second year. Transfer students are expected to complete HIS 100 no later than their second term at UCSC.
Catalog of Course Requirements
The History Catalog of Course Requirements indicates what region(s) of concentration and what chronological distribution requirement(s) individual history courses may apply toward.
Breadth Requirements (4 courses)
V. Two courses from each of the remaining two regions of concentration:
Upper-Division Elective (1 course)
One additional upper-division history course of your choice from any of the three regions of concentration
Distribution Requirements
Of the 12 courses required for the major, at least three must meet chronological distribution requirements. One must be set before 600 C.E., and two must be set in periods prior to the year 1800 C.E.
Intensive Major Option
The intensive history major offers students a pathway to enrich their study of history, refine their skills in writing and research, and receive a designation on their transcripts that signals their ambition and accomplishment to potential employers and graduate schools. All history majors are eligible to declare the intensive track, including junior transfers. If a student attempts but does not complete the intensive track they may still graduate with a standard history degree, provided the appropriate major coursework has been completed.
- Title
- Research Professor and Distinguished Professor of History Emer.
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- History Department
- Affiliations East Asian Studies, Feminist Studies Department
- Phone
- Fax 831-423-4780
- Website
- Office Location
- Humanities Building 1, 533
- Office Hours By appointment: email gbhers@ucsc.edu
- Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services
- Mailing Address
- 1156 High Street
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Asian Studies, China, Communism, Cultural Studies, Pacific Rim, Gender Studies, Oral History, History, Labor and Social Movements, Sexuality
Summary of Expertise
history of modern China
labor history, China
gender and sexuality, China
Research Interests
Modern Chinese social and cultural history, labor history, women's history, history of sexuality, feminist theory; history, oral narratives, and memory
Biography, Education and Training
B.A. Hampshire College
M.A. Stanford University
Ph.D. Stanford University
Honors, Awards and Grants
2012-13 Faculty Research Lecturer
2011-12 President, Association for Asian Studies (currently Past Past President)
2008 Distinguished Professor of History
2007 Guggenheim Fellowship award recipient
2007 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Fellowship, Stanford University
2003 John Dizikes Teaching Award
1997 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, American Historical Association
Selected Publications
- “Gender Trouble’s Afterlife in Chinese Studies,” Journal of Asian Studies, November 2020.
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“Foreword,” China Perspectives, No. 2020.3, special issue on Femininities and Masculinities, https://www.cefc.com.hk/issue/china-perspectives-2020-3/.
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“On Learning to Resist Verdicts and Disappearances: Teaching about Gender in Mao’s China,” PRC History Review 4.2 (August 2019), http://prchistory.org/review-august-2019/; prchistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/4_Hershatter_Gender.pdf.
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“Women and China’s Socialist Construction, 1949–78,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 17:12:2 (June 15, 2019). https://apjjf.org/2019/12/Hershatter.html.
- Women and China’s Revolutions. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
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“Oral Narratives and the Disappearing Past,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Summer 2016, 40-42.
- The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. University of California Press, 2011
- Jiyi de xingbie记忆的性别 (Chinese translation of The Gender of Memory, trans. Zhang Yun 张赟). Zhongguo renmin chubanshe, 2017.
- “Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis”, American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (Dec. 2008), 1404-1421 (with Wang Zheng).
- Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (University of California International and Area Studies Project, in conjunction with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library, 2007).
- "State of The Field: Women in China's Long Twentieth Century," Journal of Asian Studies 63.4 (November, 2004).
- Guide to Women's Studies in China, ed. with E. Honig, S. Mann, and L. Rofel. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998.
- Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in 20th-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. (Winner of American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History.) Chinese translation: Weixian de yuyue, trans. Han Minzhong and Sheng Ning, Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2003.
- Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain. Ed. with Emily Honig, Jonathan Lipman,and Randall Stross. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
- Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State. Ed. with Christina Gilmartin, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994
- Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998 (with Emily Honig).
- The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949. Stanford University Press, 1986.
- “Disquiet in the House of Gender.” Journal of Asian Studies 71.4 (November 2012), 873-894.
- “Getting a Life: The Production of 1950s Women Labor Models in Rural Shaanxi,” in Hu Ying and Joan Judge, eds., Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History University of California Global, Area, and International Archive, Print ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 36-51.
- co-editor and co-compiler, Prosperity's Predicament (Rowman and LIttlefield 2013)
