New Books in East Asian Studies

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to...

Seungsook Moon, "Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Seungsook Moon’s Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism was published by Columbia University Press in...

Jaqueline Berndt, "The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

11 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, manga and anime have attracted increasing scholarly interest beyond the realm of Japanese studies. This Companion takes a unique appr...

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing sch...

Andrew Campana, "Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media" (U California Press, 2024)

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Cinepoems, tape recorder poems, protest performance poems, music video poems, internet sign language poems, and augmented reality poems: these poems m...

Yujie Zhu, "China’s Heritage through History: Reconfigured Pasts" (Routledge, 2024)

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China’s Heritage through History employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary Ch...

Lionel Barber, "Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son" (Atria, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appet...

Petya Andreeva, "Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

25 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodie...

Brian Hioe, "Taipei at Daybreak" (Repeater, 2025)

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Brian Hioe is a Taipei-based writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ who is best known for his journalism regarding Taiwan’s social and politi...

Jing Xu, "'Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making mo...

Catherine Butler, "British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

20 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-theme...

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomad...

Willingness for climate action in South Korea and Finland: A cross-cultural comparison

12 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Climate change is among the most significant challenges facing modern society, and it impacts everyone across the world. How do people in different so...

Professional Chat – Working with the most marginalised people in Taiwan, AIDS/HIV and undocumented migrants, with Yi-Fan Feng

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host Lara Momesso interviews Yi-Fan Feng (馮一凡), the Deputy Chief Executive at Harmony Home Taiwan, to discuss the work that...

Sandy Ng, "Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The early twentieth century was a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese history, complete with new conflicts, new technologies, and — as Portray...

Sixiang Wang, "Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China" (Columbia UP, 2023)

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with Ming China, a relationship that was carefully cultivated and achieve...

Peter Hessler, "Other Rivers: A Chinese Education" (Penguin, 2024)

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in pa...

Aurelia Campbell, "What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming" (U Washington Press, 2020)

06 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden C...

Austin Dean, "China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937" (Cornell UP, 2020)

05 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using s...

Jie Li, "Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era" (Duke UP, 2020)

04 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories...

Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)

04 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender for...

Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea" (Columbia UP, 2024)

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defe...

Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)

01 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then o...

Language Rights in a Changing China

31 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Alexandra Grey about Dr. Grey’s book entitled Language Right...

Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

26 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one...

Hannah Gould et al., "Death and Funeral Practices in Japan" (Routledge, 2024)

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Death and Funeral Practices in Japan (Routledge, 2024) is an essential introductory text an often overlooked element of cultural expression. The boo...

Academic Chat – From Academic Work to Social Impact: A Scholar’s Commitment to Raise Awareness on Migrant Experiences in Taiwan

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host Lara Momesso interviews Dr Isabelle Cockel, an academic based in the UK, to discuss the wider impact of her academic work. I...

Timothy Gitzen, "Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses" (Helsinki UP, 2023)

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For more than 70 years, South Korea has woven the threat of North Korea into daily life. But now that threat has become mundane, and South Korean nati...

Kerry Smith, "Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

07 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) takes seriously attempts to r...

Russell Thomas, "Tofu: A Culinary History" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. How...

Book Chat: Home & Queer Writing – "Ghost Town," with Kevin Chen

03 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Taiwanese Queer author, Kevin Chen, to talk about his LGBTQ novel, Ghost Town (Europa Editions, 2022) 鬼...

Ken Wilcox, "The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice" (John Wiley & Sons, 2024)

01 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Ba...

Samantha A. Vortherms, "Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

30 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The redistribution of political and economic rights is inherently unequal in autocratic societies. Autocrats routinely divide their populations into i...

Ryan Moran, "Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance" (Cornell UP, 2024)

29 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ryan Moran’s Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell UP, 2023) is a history of th...

Chris Berry et al., "Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

27 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (Edinburgh UP, 2024), edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri, and Ming-yeh T. Ra...

Margaret Mehl, "Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert" (Open Book, 2024)

23 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or...

Mimi Okabe, "Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultu...

Park Jeong-Mi, "The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea" (U California Press, 2024)

19 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Park Jeong-Mi uncov...

Peter Worthing, "General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

17 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China (Cambridge UP, 2016) is a revisionist study of the career of General He Yingqin, one of t...

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

16 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule o...

John Duffus, "Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)

07 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmo...

Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)

29 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital...

Dennis Wuerthner, "Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

28 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner’s Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is the first complete English t...

Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate Our Future

25 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why should we focus on Taiwan to understand the future risks facing the world? Professor Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the...

Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

24 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India ...

Tamara Jacka, "Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China" (Anu Press, 2023)

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on Chin...

Anna Lora-Wainwright, "Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China" (MIT Press, 2021)

20 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and...

Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, "Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

20 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee expands the theoretical horizons of feminism by using ...

Christopher Smith, "Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

18 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching i...

Andrew G. Walder, “China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed” (Harvard UP, 2015)

18 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution." Building from this premise,...

Xiaoming Wang, "Muslim Chinese: The Hui in Rural Ningxia" (de Gruyter, 2019)

14 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the predominantly Muslim Chinese who claim ancestry from Persian and Arabic-speaking regions in Central Asia and the Middle East, the Hui people in...

Satoru Hashimoto, "Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2023)

11 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature beca...

Helena F. S. Lopes, "Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

11 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empir...

Victor C. Shih, "Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao's Stratagem to the Rise of Xi" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

10 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Coalitions of the Weak (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the ...

Zach Fredman, "The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949" (UNC Press, 2022)

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China...

S4E9 The Fragility of China: A Conversation with Dennis Unkovic

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Dennis Unkovic to discuss his latest book, The Fragility of China (Encounter Books, 2024). Unk...

Critique, Wonder, and Chinese Anatomy, with Lan A. Li

08 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicin...

Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

07 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known...

James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)

30 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived...

Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)

27 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. Ho...

Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)

26 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the...

Caterina Fugazzola, "Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China" (Temple UP, 2023)

26 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After China officially “decriminalized” same-sex behavior in 1997, both the visibility and public acceptance of tongzhi, an inclusive identity te...

Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky, "Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

24 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global inf...

Andrea E. Pia, "Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

20 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On the podcast today, I am joined by anthropologist Andrea Pia (London School of Economics and Political Science) to talk about his new book, Cutting...

Steven K. Bailey, "Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War" (Osprey, 2024)

19 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On January 16, 1945, dozens of U.S. Navy aircraft took off for China’s southern coast, including the occupied British colony of Hong Kong. It was pa...

Gil Hizi, "Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today: A Keyword Approach" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

15 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On this podcast today, I am joined by three scholars: postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, Gil Hizi; assistant professor a...

Meg Rithmire, "Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

14 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian re...

Thomas White, "China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier" (U Washington Press, 2024)

14 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have target...

Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)

13 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most ...

Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)

12 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, i...

Yiu Fai Chow et al., "It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

07 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) is unique in focusing on just o...

Jinhyun Cho, "English Language Ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the Past and Present" (Springer, 2017)

06 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho, Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie ...

James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024)

06 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. ...

Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

02 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) s...

Tarryn Li-Min Chun, "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024), "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

30 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2024) offers a fascinating approach to m...

Christopher Lovins, "King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea" (SUNY Press, 2019)

27 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent d...

Christopher Brown, "Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-2020: Environments, Poetics, Practice" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

27 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Accounting for the unique characteristics of Taiwan’s cinema from 2008 to 2020, Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-2020: Environments, Poetics, Practic...

Francisca Yuenki Lai, "Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)

25 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who devel...

Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)

25 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty...

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, "Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2023)

23 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing s...

Le Lin, "The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s s...

Muslimness in China

09 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode Salman Sayyid talks to Haiyun Ma about Muslimness in China. This is the second episode in this series which addresses this topic: in ...

Na'ou Liu, "Urban Scenes" (Cambria Press, 2023)

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"In this tango palace everything was swaying rhythmically to and fro, bodies of men and women, beams of colored light, brilliant wine glasses, red and...

Forgotten Ummah--Muslims in China

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Blyer about his book T...

Everyday Architecture in Context: Public Markets in Hong Kong (1842-1981) (Chinese U of Hong Kong Press, 2023)

01 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do public markets, as ordinary as they seem, carry the weight of a city’s history? How do such everyday buildings reflect a city’s changing po...

On Sino-Vietnamese Border Relations

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Q...

Matthew H. Sommer, "The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China" (Columbia UP, 2024)

30 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024) is a fascinating study o...

Kate McDonald on Asian Mobility History as Labor History

29 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascin...

Kristie Flannery, "Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

28 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in t...

Christina Yi et al., "Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

27 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections ...

Ed Pulford, "Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea" (Stanford UP, 2024)

25 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former...

Mark Baker, "Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou" (Harvard Asia Center, 2024)

24 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary...

Steven K. Bailey, "Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War" (Osprey, 2024)

23 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warshi...

Muslim Literacies in China

23 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of ...

Yanagawa Seigan, "The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran" (Columbia UP, 2024)

21 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of tradi...

Eric Reinders, "Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

20 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Approaching translations of Tolkien's works as stories in their own right, Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation (Bloomsbury...

Stephanie Balkwill, "The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century" (U California Press, 2024)

20 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she h...

Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko, "Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi" (Brill, 2024)

19 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two ...

Bill Lascher, "A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Melville Jacoby was a U.S. war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and, later, the Second World War, writing about the Japanese advances from C...

Diana P. Parsell, "Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees" (Oxford UP, 2023)

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geogra...