Results for category: Books

Developing Mission: An Interview with Historian Joseph W. Ho

Missionaries who left the United States for China in the early 20th century packed for overseas assignments that lasted years at a time. They needed clothing, of course; Bibles and other religious texts were tools of the trade. If they had additional responsibilities—as medical missionaries, for example—they would need equipment to carry out that work. […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Ruth Mostern

Ruth Mostern is Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and author of The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History, published by Yale University Press and winner of the 2023 AAS pre-1900 Joseph Levenson Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi

Tania Murray Li teaches at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto; Pujo Semedi teaches at the Department of Anthropology at Gadjah Mada University. They are the co-authors of Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone, published by Duke University Press, awarded Honorable Mention for the 2023 AAS George McT. Kahin […]

Generation and the Politics of Memory in China: Sociologist Bin Xu on Chairman Mao’s Children

Back in September 2017, I interviewed Emory University sociologist Bin Xu about his first book, The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford University Press, 2017). At the end of our exchange, Xu told me about his next project—an examination of collective memory among the zhiqing, or 17 million “educated […]

AsiaNow Speaks with Tao Jiang

Tao Jiang is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and the author of Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China, published by Oxford University Press, which received Honorable Mention of the 2023 Joseph Levenson Prize for distinguished scholarship on pre-1900 China. To begin with, please tell us what your […]

AsiaNow Speaks with Michael K. Bourdaghs

Michael K. Bourdaghs is Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, and author of A Fictional Commons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Literature, published by Duke University Press and winner of the 2023 Honorable Mention, John Whitney Hall Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your […]

AsiaNow Speaks with Aurelia Campbell

Aurelia Campbell is Associate Professor at Boston College and author of What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming, published by University of Washington Press and winner of the 2023 AAS Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. My book is about the […]

Cover image of Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China

Historian Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China

Solid, stately buildings line Shanghai’s waterfront Bund, their ornate facades standing in stark contrast to the sleek skyscrapers of Pudong across the Yangtze River. Today, Pudong is the city’s financial district, but a century ago the heart of Shanghai’s financial sector beat on the Bund. One by one, foreign banks arrived in the late 19th […]

Reproductive Realities in Modern China: An Interview with Sarah Mellors Rodriguez

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University and author of Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Many readers will be familiar with the politics of reproduction in contemporary China, via media stories about the One Child Policy in effect from the late […]

How Can Asianists Write General Guides to Research and Teaching?

#AsiaNow speaks with Thomas S. Mullaney, Professor of History at Stanford University, and Christopher Rea, Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, about their new book, Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (Chicago, 2022). Where Research Begins is not an “Asian Studies” book, but […]

Cover image of Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine, by Maura Dykstra

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine – An Interview with Maura Dykstra

As the Qing dynasty wrested control over the Chinese empire from Ming rulers in the mid-1600s, officials in Beijing needed information. Administering a state both geographically large and bureaucratically deep, the central government relied on reports from below to ascertain events outside the capital city and assess the performance of officials who operated beyond its […]

Cover of Americans in China: Encounters with the People's Republic, by Terry Lautz

Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic — An Interview with Terry Lautz

When historian and lifetime AAS member Terry Lautz arrived in mainland China for the first time in December 1978, he visited a country that had been slowly mending ties with the United States after a rift of more than two decades. By the time he departed the mainland three weeks later, Sino-American relations had undergone […]