FACULTY PROFILE
Dr. Yu Shen
From Beijing, China, to the serene river town of New Albany, Indiana, Dr. Yu Shen is a professor of history and international studies with the goal of expanding East Asian Studies offerings at IU Southeast. With a grant sponsored by the U.S. Government’s National Defense Education Act (NDEA), she is currently converting some of her traditional face-to-face courses into online courses.
The NDEA was originally passed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1958 to encourage U.S. educational programming that enhanced our competitiveness and defense systems. Today, additional reasons exist for this funding connected to those original goals, including supporting students’ understanding of foreign languages and to create a globally competent workforce.
Dr. Yu Shen was born and raised in Beijing, China and completed her doctoral work at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is particularly interested in the histories and cultures of China and Japan, as well as foreign relations between the United States and East Asian countries.
Her dissertation focused on U.S. Naval Intelligence operations that cooperated with the nationalists in China during World War II, and the political implications and usage of that collaboration by communists in later eras to secure their authority.
Dr. Yu Shen moved to Indiana after graduating, and has been teaching at IU Southeast for over twenty years. She has witnessed several changes. “The quality of teaching and services, the online trend, and housing for students have improved.” In terms of enrollment, there has been much more success with the online courses. With the help of a course designer, the progression of her online classes is doing much better than she had anticipated. Dr. Shen and her colleagues across Indiana University plan to continue to develop the online courses in Asian history and educate the next generation of East Asian Studies scholars.
— Morgan Spencer