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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1501
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of H...
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University...
68 min
1502
Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultura...
Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press,
66 min
1503
Christina Laffin, “Rewriting Medieval Japanese ...
Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and also a prolific writer.
64 min
1504
Craig Clunas, “Screen of Kings: Royal Art and P...
Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “state” (guo), and mapping the Ming in terms of guo‘s is a way of mapping Ming space in units that had centers,
74 min
1505
Wensheng Wang, “White Lotus Rebels and South Ch...
Wensheng Wang‘s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. In White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014),
71 min
1506
James Carter, “Heart of Buddha, Heart of China:...
Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press,
70 min
1507
Stephen R. Platt, “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingd...
Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books,
73 min
1508
Robert A. Rhoads, et al., “China’s Rising Resea...
Robert A. Rhoads, Xiaoyang Wang, Xiaoguang Shi, Yongcai Chang are the authors of China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Dr. Rhoads is the Director,
51 min
1509
Anne Allison, “Precarious Japan” (Duke Universi...
“[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...
70 min
1510
Xiaojue Wang, “Modernity with a Cold War Face: ...
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,
74 min
1511
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, “The Rel...
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.
99 min
1512
Michelle King, “Between Birth and Death: Female...
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,
69 min
1513
Michael Wert, “Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory...
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.
63 min
1514
Miriam Kingsberg, “Moral Nation: Modern Japan a...
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,
65 min
1515
Tobie Meyer-Fong, “What Remains: Coming to Term...
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...
72 min
1516
Andrea Bachner, “Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writi...
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,
72 min
1517
Christopher P. Hanscom, “The Real Modern: Liter...
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...
68 min
1518
Benjamin A. Elman, “Civil Examinations and Meri...
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...
73 min
1519
Marc L. Moskowitz, “Go Nation: Chinese Masculin...
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.
73 min
1520
Emma Teng, “Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the U...
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...
63 min
1521
Patricia Ebrey, “Emperor Huizong” (Harvard Univ...
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,
65 min
1522
Daisuke Miyao, “The Aesthetics of Shadow: Light...
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...
68 min
1523
Joshua Fogel, “Japanese Historiography and the ...
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.
67 min
1524
Scott Cook, “The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Stu...
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),
60 min
1525
David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Politica...
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...
73 min