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
1376
Ping Foong, “The Efficacious Landscape: On the ...
Ink landscape painting was distinctive to the Song dynasty, and the Northern Song period was a special time for the medium. By the tenth century, this kind of painting emerged as a “scholars’ category” whose “values were especially worthy of support” i...
67 min
1377
Linda Rui Feng, “City of Marvel and Transformat...
Linda Rui Feng‘s beautiful new book shows us the Tang city of Chang’an as we’ve not seen it before. City of Marvel and Transformation: Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China (University of Hawai’i Press,
69 min
1378
Joseph R. Dennis, “Writing, Publishing, and Rea...
In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom?
59 min
1379
Eric Tagliacozzo, et al., “Asia Inside Out: Con...
Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first two volumes were released this year.
47 min
1380
Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and t...
Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press,
73 min
1381
Minghui Hu, “China’s Transition to Modernity: T...
Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends aft...
63 min
1382
Chuck Wooldridge, “City of Virtues: Nanjing in ...
Nineteenth-century Nanjing was a “city of virtues,” the raw material out of which a series of communities in China built the time and space of their utopian visions. Chuck Wooldridge‘s beautifully written and thoughtfully composed new book City of Virt...
61 min
1383
Anna M. Shields, “One Who Knows Me: Friendship ...
Anna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press, 2015) is the first book-length study of friendship in ...
68 min
1384
Gordon H. Chang, “Fateful Ties: A History of Am...
“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself.
69 min
1385
Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s E...
Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press,
60 min
1386
Paul A. Christensen, “Japan, Alcoholism, and Ma...
Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai, Japan, Alcoholism,
65 min
1387
Parks M. Coble, “China’s War Reporters: The Leg...
Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press,
61 min
1388
Barak Kushner, “Men to Devils, Devils to Men: J...
Barak Kushner‘s new book considers what happened in the wake of Japan’s surrender, looking closely at diplomatic and military efforts to bring “Japanese imperial behavior” to justice. Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justic...
66 min
1389
Kirsteen Kim and Sebastian C. H. Kim, “A Histor...
Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionaries coming into the country. In their new book,
67 min
1390
Jonathan M. Reynolds, “Allegories of Time and S...
Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, home, and culture in modern Japan.
67 min
1391
Barry Allen, “Vanishing into Things: Knowledge ...
What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much...
63 min
1392
Carlos Rojas, “Homesickness: Culture, Contagion...
Carlos Rojas‘s new book is a wonderfully transdisciplinary exploration of discourses of sickness and disease in Chinese literature and cinema in the long twentieth century. As its title indicates, Homesickness: Culture, Contagion,
71 min
1393
Steven E. Kemper, “Rescued from the Nation: Ana...
In his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and argues that this figure has been misundersto...
68 min
1394
Emily T. Yeh, “Taming Tibet: Landscape Transfor...
Emily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation of the Tibetan landscape since 1950,
73 min
1395
Ruth Hayhoe, “China Through the Lens of Compara...
Dr. Ruth Hayhoe, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, has dedicated her academic career to the study of Chinese education. Now, after several decades of becoming one of the most recognizable names in...
33 min
1396
Tenzin Chogyel (trans. Kurtis R. Schaeffer), “T...
Kurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eighteenth century,
61 min
1397
Brett Sheehan, “Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capi...
Brett Sheehan‘s new book traces the interwoven histories of capitalism and the Song family under a series of five authoritarian governments in North China. Based on a wide range of sources a range of sources including family papers,
59 min
1398
Winnie Won Yin Wong, "Van Gogh on Demand: China...
An interview with Winnie Won Yin Wong
66 min
1399
Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and...
Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate C...
58 min
1400
Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories”...
China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of work spurred the creation of a new generation of autoworkers with increased bargaining power.
63 min