Results for category: Books

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 […]

Cover of John Delury, Agents of Subversion

Agents of Subversion: A Q&A with Author John Delury

On March 12, 1973, John T. “Jack” Downey walked across the Lo Wu Bridge from mainland China into Hong Kong—a crossing more than two decades in the making. In November 1952, Downey had been a young CIA agent tasked with a covert mission near the border between China and Korea. Chinese forces, however, had prior […]

Cover of Yumeji Modern, by Nozomi Naoi

#AsiaNow Speaks with Nozomi Naoi

Nozomi Naoi is Associate Professor of Humanities (Art History) at Yale-NUS College and author of Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan, published by University of Washington Press and received Honorable Mention of the 2022 AAS John Whitney Hall Prize. See a media gallery to accompany the book at Art History Publication Initiative. […]

Cover image of Archana Venkatesan, Endless Song

#AsiaNow Speaks with Archana Venkatesan

Archana Venkatesan is Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California Davis and author of Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi, published by Penguin Classics, India, and winner of the 2022 AAS AK Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. Endless Song is a […]

Cover of Silvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation

#AsiaNow Speaks with Silvia M. Lindtner

Silvia Lindtner is Associate Professor in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing at the University of Michigan and author of Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, published by Princeton University Press and winner of the 2022 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize (Post-1900). To begin with, […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Durba Mitra

Durba Mitra is Associate Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University and author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, published by Princeton University Press and winner of the 2022 AAS Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book […]

Dream Super-Express: A Q&A with Jessamyn R. Abel

Interviewed for #AsiaNow by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham When two blue-and-ivory “dumpling-nose” engines departed from Tokyo and Osaka train stations and started racing toward each other at 6:00am on October 1, 1964, the world’s fastest train officially became a reality. Japan’s bullet trains took the old-fashioned railroad industry and updated it with new technology and a […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Wai-yee Li

Wai-yee Li is 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. She translated and edited Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans, by Mao Xiang and Yu Huai, published by Columbia University Press and winner of the 2022 AAS Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation. To begin with, please tell us what […]