New Books in East Asian Studies

Interviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
1026
Takashi Miura, "Agents of World Renewal: The Ri...
Miura examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of “world renewal” (yonaoshi)...
36 min
1027
Gina Anne Tam, "Dialect and Nationalism in Chin...
Tam takes us through the ways that people in China have navigated the country’s complex linguistic landscape while also negotiating profound questions over the meanings of modern Chinese identity itself...
66 min
1028
He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Cult...
Bian offers a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China..
80 min
1029
Macabe Keliher, "The Board of Rites and the Mak...
Keliher challenges traditional understandings of state-formation and helps us rethink how we tell the story of the founding of the Qing...
66 min
1030
Michael Schuman, "Superpower Interrupted: The C...
The biggest question of the twenty-first century is: What does China want?
50 min
1031
Charlotte Bruckermann, "Claiming Homes: Confron...
Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside...
45 min
1032
John Harney, "Empire of Infields: Baseball in T...
Harney argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese...
62 min
1033
Brian DeMare, "Land Wars: The Story of China’s ...
Key to the psychological, political and economic transformations which unfolded in China’s million villages in the 1940s and ‘50s was a powerful narrative impulse – a Maoist “script”...
63 min
1034
Frederik H. Green, "Bird Talk and Other Stories...
Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s...
66 min
1035
Elisheva A. Perelman, "American Evangelists and...
Perelman examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth....
89 min
1036
Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongo...
The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia.
64 min
1037
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Mat...
Greene offers the the reader a theory of everything...
117 min
1038
Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (C...
Formichi helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities...
66 min
1039
Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, "Branding Japan’s Food: ...
The authors argue that the definition of washoku in the UNESCO nomination is part of a longer history of manipulative place branding in Japan that has its roots in the premodern period....
56 min
1040
Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanf...
Bukh provides critical historical perspective on the social construction of territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia...
77 min
1041
Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mo...
Nobbs-Thiessen traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia...
59 min
1042
Diana Fu, "Mobilizing Without the Masses: Contr...
When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do?
41 min
1043
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: Hong Kong on the B...
Wasserstrom provides a nuanced yet accessible overview of the struggle between Hong Kong and China over self-governance and civil liberties...
50 min
1044
Johan Elverskog, "The Buddha’s Footprint: An En...
Elverskog challenges the popular image of Buddhism as a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment...
86 min
1045
Julia C. Strauss, "State Formation in China and...
Strauss offers a comparative study of regime consolidation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) after 1949...
95 min
1046
Courtney J. Fung, "China and Intervention at th...
Fung finds that social constructions by way of public discourse of regime change matter when embedded in wider material conditions. She argues that anxieties about loss of status help explain China’s choices...
49 min
1047
Wasana Wongsurawat, "The Crown and the Capitali...
One can’t understand modern Thailand without understanding the role of the ethnic Chinese...
51 min
1048
Sarah Schneewind, "Shrines to Living Men in the...
What recourse did you have in Ming China if your very excellent local official was leaving your area and moving on to a new jurisdiction? You could try to block his path, you could wail and tear your hair out – or you could house an image of him in a temple, make offerings before it, and create a ‘living shrine.’
53 min
1049
Tatiana Linkhoeva, "Revolution Goes East: Imper...
As Russia’s 1917 October Revolution distended itself across north Asia and reverberated globally, socialism acted – not unlike today’s pandemic – as a Rorschach test revealing divisions in societies and politics, and to some offering cautious hope for a new world which might be constructed in the aftermath...
63 min
1050
Richard McBride II, "Doctrine and Practice in M...
McBride offers a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts...
69 min