“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment he had occupied for 20 years. His is just one of many voices of the precarity of everyday life and death that...

1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature have written 1949 as a radical break,

Social phenomena that some people like to call ‘religion’ has long shaped Chinese culture. In the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of what constitutes ‘religion’ has been central to the construction of a modern nation.

Michelle King‘s new book explores the intertwined histories of imperialism and infanticide. Situating the histories of infant killing and abandonment in China within a broader history of these practices in western Europe and across Eurasia,

Michael Wert‘s new book considers the construction of memory around the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration, individuals and groups whose reputations suffered most in the late nineteenth-century transition from Tokugawa to imperial rule.

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press,

Tobie Meyer-Fong‘s beautifully written and masterfully argued new book explores the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurative) of the Taiping civil war in nineteenth-century China. Often known as the “Taiping Rebellion” in Engl...

Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, film, visual and performance art, design,

In The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Christopher P. Hanscom explores literary modernism in the work of three writers who were central to literary production in...

Benjamin A. Elman‘s new book explores the civil examination process and the history of state exam curricula in late imperial China. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2013) is organized into three major sections that...

In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect and control of the Confucian gentleman, the rationality of the modern scientist.

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943...

Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press,

In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese cinema. A commentary on the history of modernity, the book considers how an aesthetics of shadow emerged fr...

Joshua A. Fogel‘s new book is a carefully researched and wonderfully thoughtful exploration of the transformations of an artifact as read through the transformations in the way that artifact has been understood historically.

It’s always a joy when I have the opportunity to talk with the author of a book that is clearly a game-changer for its field. In The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Cornell University East Asia Series, 2012),

So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieva...

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? In Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest C...

By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, translation studies, and world literature.

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global circulation and emerges from it. It has depended on the live-ness of embodied performance whil...

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The opening is the illumination of a grave as you,

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film are today. In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture...

In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals in the West enjoyed political participation and protection, people in Japan did not,

A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press,

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those determinations?