David Kenley Named New Editor of Asia Shorts Book Series

Profile photo of David Kenley

The Association for Asian Studies welcomes David Kenley as the new editor of the AAS Publications Asia Shorts book series. Kenley, who is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Cyber Leadership and Intelligence at Dakota State University, succeeds Asia Shorts founding editor Bill Tsutsui. Tsutsui will remain involved in AAS Publications as chair of the Editorial Board.

David Kenley holds a Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Hawaii and previously taught at Elizabethtown College and Marshall University. He is author of New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919-1932 (Routledge, 2004), edited Contested Communities: Identities, Spaces, and Hierarchies of the Chinese in Havana, 1902-1968 (Brill, 2017), and has published articles in a wide range of journals. Kenley also has deep engagement with AAS Publications, as author of Modern Chinese History (Key Issues in Asian Studies, second edition 2020), a contributor to the Education About Asia teaching journal, and editor of the 2020 Asia Shorts open-access volume Teaching about Asia in a Time of Pandemic.

AAS Publications launched Asia Shorts in 2018. As Tsutsui and Publications Manager Jon Wilson explain, the series is dedicated to “concise, readable books, written by highly qualified authors—scholars, teachers, journalists, and policymakers—that engage broad audiences with up-to-date scholarship on important, timely topics in Asian Studies.” Nine Asia Shorts volumes have been published to date, with two more soon to appear, and can all be ordered from our distribution partner, Columbia University Press. Book topics have ranged from the history of alcohol and drug use in Japan to a meta-meditation on conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai. Asia Shorts volumes also examine current events, such as the pandemic volume Kenley edited in 2020, a companion book (The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi), and Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law, by Michael C. Davis.

The AAS thanks Bill Tsutsui for his service and leadership as founding editor and looks forward to working with David Kenley as we continue to develop the Asia Shorts series. Anyone interested in proposing a volume for Asia Shorts is invited to read the Call for Proposals posted on the AAS website and contact David Kenley, david.kenley@dsu.edu, to discuss their work.