This course provides a broad introduction to the history of Christian conversion and its legacies in the regions now known as South, East, and Southeast Asia. Our focus will be largely limited to the period during which Christian conversion was contemporaneous with other forms of global expansion such as colonialism. Drawing from a range of primary and secondary source materials, we will try to understand who Christian missionaries were, the many motivations that drove them, the diversity of methods they used to convert native populations, and, of tantamount importance, the ways in which local populations resisted and transformed Christianity to suit or blend with their own social and political structures, spiritual beliefs and practices, and notions of temporal and divine power.

Throughout the semester, we will engage these central themes through the lens of religious conversion. Questions considered include: What role did religious conversion play in constructing racial and ethnic categories? To what extent was race and religious difference conflated by missionaries and those they attempted to convert? How did pre-existing structures of racial and ethnic diversity affect the receptivity of different Asian communities to Christianity? How did race and ethnicity intersect with other forms of discrimination such as those based on class?