New Books in Chinese Studies
Episodes
Matthew W. Mosca, “From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China” (Stanford, 2013)
22 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of ...
Erica Fox Brindley, “Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China” (SUNY Press, 2012)
16 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Erica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated te...
Aminda M. Smith, “Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
19 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Aminda M. Smith‘s fascinating new book traces the history of transformations in the way that the PRC understood social control, deviance, and though...
Elizabeth J. Perry, “Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition” (University of California Press, 2012)
05 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Anyuan was a town of coal miners. It was a place where local secret societies held power, where rebellion and violence were part of the life of local ...
Gene Cooper, “The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire” (Routledge, 2013)
10 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Gene Cooper‘s new book is a multi-sited ethnographic study of market and temple fairs in the region of Jinhua, a city on the east coast of China and...
Christopher Bush, “Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media” (Oxford UP, 2010)
13 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christ...
Shih-Shan Susan Huang, “Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012)
31 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Shih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Pict...
Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)
13 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Nugent‘s wonderful recent book will change the way you read. At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circu...
Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012)
13 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions,...
Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings” (Bantam Books, 2012)
30 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to ...
Kenneth Brashier, “Ancestral Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
17 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
If New Books in East Asian Studies were an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe and if one of the perks that came along with being an All-Powerf...
Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
11 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Roel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do ...
Daniel Vukovich, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.” (Routledge, 2012)
17 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Using materials that range from poetry and fiction to historiography and film, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (Rou...
Xiaofei Tian, “Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Xiaofei Tian‘s Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a mode...
Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011)
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine livi...
Xiaofei Tian, "Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China" (Harvard UP, 2011)
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Xiaofei Tian's Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a mode...
Rowan K. Flad, “Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
27 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to...
Rowan K. Flad, "Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China" (Cambridge UP, 2011)
27 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to...
Thomas Mullaney, “Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China” (University of California Press, 2011)
02 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In telling a clear story about the emergence of ethnic categories in modern China, Tom Mullaney‘s Coming to Terms With the Nation: Ethnic Classifica...
Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010)
24 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on ma...
Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011)
16 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; ...
Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011)
01 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
First things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China an...
Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011)
24 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imaginati...
Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010)
01 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Med...
Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
31 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University ...