New Books in East Asian Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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1301
Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time M...
Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press,
69 min
1302
Elizabeth McGuire, “Red at Heart: How Chinese C...
If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic h...
69 min
1303
James M. Dorsey, “China and the Middle East: Ve...
For all that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, books which dissect and analyse developments from a regio...
59 min
1304
Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses ...
Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (...
69 min
1305
Stephen R. Platt, “Imperial Twilight: The Opium...
The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and continue dealing in the lucrative commodity, opium.
59 min
1306
Nick Kapur, “Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict ...
Nick Kapur’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) is an ambitious look at the transformations of Japanese society after the massive protests against renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (abbrev...
64 min
1307
Ruth Gamble, “Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism...
Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa,
42 min
1308
Michael Szonyi, “The Art of Being Governed: Eve...
At the heart of Michael Szonyi’s new book are two questions: 1) How did ordinary people in the Ming deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army?, and 2) What were the broader consequences of their behavior?
71 min
1309
N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining...
N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th a...
120 min
1310
Tom Cliff, “Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjian...
Compared to the provinces’s native Uyghur population, Han Chinese settlers in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not attracted as much scholarly or indeed journalistic attention of late. But in a profoundly troubled and troubling present fo...
65 min
1311
Fabio Lanza, “The End of Concern: Maoist China,...
If you work in Asian studies as a scholarly field, you should read Fabio Lanza’s new book. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) takes as its central case study the Committee of Concerned Asian Scho...
75 min
1312
Laura Neitzel, “The Life We Longed for: Danchi ...
Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan (MerwinAsia, 2016) is a chronicle of the large, government-sponsored housing projects called danchi that were built during Japan’s high-growth years,
32 min
1313
Philip Thai, “China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Ec...
From petty runs to organized trafficking, the illicit activity of smuggling on the China coast was inherently dramatic, but now historian Philip Thai has also identified China’s history of smuggling as a significant narrative about the expansion of sta...
66 min
1314
Lily Wong, “Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work,...
Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of ...
48 min
1315
Zhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull), “The Pidgin Warr...
“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small),
61 min
1316
Andrew B. Kipnis, “From Village to City: Social...
“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25).
65 min
1317
Reginald Jackson, “Textures of Mourning: Callig...
Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures.
77 min
1318
Kate McDonald, “Placing Empire: Travel and the ...
Kate McDonald‘s Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) is a thoughtful and provocative study of the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism.
54 min
1319
Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Ae...
Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.
45 min
1320
Michelle C. Wang, “Mandalas in the Making: The ...
Michelle C. Wang’s new book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) joins a growing body of scholarship on esoteric Buddhism in China. Her work is an important contribution for the way in which she draw...
65 min
1321
Gordon Mathews, “The World in Guangzhou: Africa...
When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a magnet for foreign traders.
52 min
1322
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasse...
“Knowing about China,” Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey Wasserstrom note in the preface to China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), is today “an essential part of being an engaged citizen” (p.
59 min
1323
Ross King, “Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the ...
Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne,
52 min
1324
Ronald P. Loftus, “The Turn Against the Modern:...
Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”), the trajectory that the government had mapped out fo...
72 min
1325
Ji-Yeon O. Jo, “Homing: An Affective Topography...
For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo,
60 min