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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Society & Culture
History
1351
Paul Roquet, “Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospher...
Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectiv...
71 min
1352
Mark R. E. Meulenbeld, “Demonic Warfare: Daoism...
Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi),
60 min
1353
David Brophy, “Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolu...
Bringing together secondary and primary sources in a wide range of languages, David Brophy’s new book is a masterful study of the modern history of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia...
67 min
1354
Noriko Manabe, “The Revolution Will Not Be Tele...
Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that limit and censor people–both ordinary citizens and musici...
63 min
1355
Miranda Brown, “The Art of Medicine in Early Ch...
Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persistence of figures including Bian Que, Chunyu Yi,
52 min
1356
Susan Turner Haynes, “Chinese Nuclear Prolifera...
While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power,
54 min
1357
Chuing Prudence Chou and Jonathan Spangler, eds...
Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou, Professor, Department of Education, National Chengchi University, rejoins the New Books Network to discuss her newly edited volume, Chinese Education Models in a Global Age (Springer, 2016), co-edited with Jonathan Spangler,
29 min
1358
Kirk A. Denton, “Exhibiting the Past: Historica...
Kirk A. Denton‘s recent book explores the role of the state in China in shaping particular visions of the past through work in and with museums. Focusing on history museums in particular, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museu...
66 min
1359
Pi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Lau...
The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence.
58 min
1360
Mingwei Song, “Young China: National Rejuvenati...
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman,
65 min
1361
Stephen L. Field, “The Duke of Zhou Changes: A ...
Stephen L. Field‘s new translation and study of the Zhouyi offers an inspiring and fresh take that importantly differs from previous translators approaches to the text. The Duke of Zhou Changes: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Zhouyi (Harrasso...
65 min
1362
Ho-fung Hung, “The China Boom: Why China Will N...
Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to explore the global effects of Chinas capitalist boom and...
67 min
1363
Anthony Rausch, “Japan’s Local Newspapers: Chih...
Anthony Rausch‘s recent work looks closely at newspapers and journalism in modern Japan, focusing especially on the nature and significance of local newspapers. Though the local newspaper in Japan accounts for nearly half the consumption of newspapers ...
59 min
1364
Robert S. Boynton, “The Invitation-Only Zone: T...
The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. The headline read,
65 min
1365
Matthew H. Sommer, “Polyandry and Wife-Selling ...
First things first: Matthew H. Sommer‘s new book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and/or the history of gender. Based on 1200 legal cases from the central and local archives of the Qing dynasty,
68 min
1366
Brian James DeMare, “Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama...
The Chinese Revolution was a profoundly theatrical event. Brian James DeMare’s new book explores the relationship between drama and political action in China, from the earliest era of communist Red Drama to the establishment of Mao’s cultural army and ...
60 min
1367
Seth Jacobowitz, “Writing Technology in Meiji J...
Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and script. Inspired, in part,
69 min
1368
Beverly Bossler, ed., “Gender and Chinese Histo...
Beverly Bossler‘s wonderful new edited volume is a must-read for anyone interested in histories of and with gender in China. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters (University of Washington Press,
46 min
1369
Douglas Clark, “Gunboat Justice: British and Am...
Douglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnational histories as it shaped modern China and Japan.
63 min
1370
Sigrid Schmalzer, “Red Revolution, Green Revolu...
Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press,
80 min
1371
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Eight Juxtapositions: Chi...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom‘s wonderful new book in the “China Specials” series at Penguin opens with two main premises. First, it is more important than ever to have “illuminating lenses through which to view the People’s Republic of China,
63 min
1372
Minsoo Kang, trans. “The Story of Hong Gildong”...
Minsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classic…prose fiction of Korea.” Though Hong Gildong is a popular figure in mod...
64 min
1373
Erik Hammerstrom, “The Science of Chinese Buddh...
Erik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs devoted to the topic in the 1920s and early 1930s.
61 min
1374
Pamela D. Winfield, “Icons and Iconoclasm in Ja...
What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ...
41 min
1375
Eubanks, Abel and Chen, eds., “Verge: Studies i...
Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel,
63 min