Foreign visitors to China today often remark with fascination and no small amount of wonder on the country’s extensive high-speed rail network. Constructed only in the last decade or so, the lines form a spider’s web across the map of China, stretching from the industrial northeast to Hong Kong in the south and westward to […]
Journal of Asian Studies editor Vinayak Chaturvedi works with an Editorial Assistant in the JAS office at the University of California, Irvine. Kyle David held this position during the 2018-19 academic year. He has recently stepped down, but remains with the JAS as Book Review Editor for the Transnational and Comparative Asia section. Clare Gordon […]
Ghost and goblins, spirits and specters … such supernatural beings manifest in stories told around the world, including many classics of the Chinese stage. Yet these spooky tales presented a problem for twentieth-century reformers, who struggled to reconcile their condemnation of “superstition” with the fact that some of the country’s best-known artistic works included superstitious […]
This is Number 3 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series. Hieyoon Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on South Korean cinema, and she is currently working on a book about dissident […]
In the 1980s, American children were subject to a deluge of advertising punctuated by the tagline “Milk: It Does a Body Good.” The campaign, funded by the dairy industry, encouraged kids to drink milk by emphasizing its contributions to physical development—the calcium and protein contained in the beverage, the ads stated, would help youths grow […]
Jennifer Altehenger is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King’s College London (Associate Professor in Chinese History at the University of Oxford from September 2019) and author of Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018). In Legal Lessons, Altehenger surveys how knowledge about the law […]
When did “madness” become transformed into “mental illness”? How did this affect the treatment of those afflicted by such conditions? And how did it change the way those deemed mad—or mentally ill—were viewed by their families, as well as by the state, society, and medical professionals around them? Historian Emily Baum, associate professor at the […]
The newest volume in the AAS Key Issues in Asian Studies series of short texts for the undergraduate classroom is Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture, by Kathleen M. Adams (Loyola University Chicago). In this book, Adams offers readers an overview of Indonesia’s history from 1.5 million years ago through the present day, examining how trade, colonialism, […]
AAS Publications is pleased to announce the release of A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzō, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War, by Joshua A. Fogel. In this volume from our Asia Shorts series, Fogel, a professor of history at York University (Toronto) and specialist in Sino-Japanese relations, examines […]
This is Number 1 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series. Historian Navyug Gill, Assistant Professor at William Paterson University, recently published an article, “Limits of Conversion: Caste, Labor, and the Question of Emancipation in Colonial Panjab,” in the Journal of Asian Studies. Gill’s research […]
Jonathan Schlesinger is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and author of A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, published by Stanford University Press and winner of the 2019 AAS Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book is […]
Bryan D. Lowe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan, published by University of Hawai’i Press and the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and winner of the 2019 AAS John Whitney Hall Book Prize. […]
By David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald What Bodies and Structures Is Bodies and Structures is a platform for researching and teaching spatial histories of East Asia and the larger worlds of which they were a part. The site combines individually-authored, media-rich content modules with conceptual maps and visualizations. The modules analyze primary sources with significant […]
James L. Huffman is Professor Emeritus of Japanese history at Wittenberg University and the 2017 recipient of the AAS Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies award. A journalist-turned-scholar, Huffman is author of several studies of the history of journalism in Japan, as well as Japan in World History (Oxford University Press, 2010), Modern Japan: A History […]
Paul Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and China Studies at the University of California, San Diego Your discipline and country (or countries) of interest Officially: History of Modern China Reality: Interdisciplinary Modern and Contemporary Chinese Studies How long have you been a member of AAS? 51 years. I think I joined when I […]
James Flowers is a doctoral candidate in the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Your discipline and country (or countries) of interest I call myself a historian of East Asia, with a focus on Korea. How long have you been a member of AAS? I joined AAS in 2016. Why […]
We are pleased to announce the publication of the second book in our new “Asia Shorts” series, The Dream of East Asia: The Rise of China, Nationalism, Popular Memory, and Regional Dynamics in Northeast Asia, by John Lie, C.K. Cho Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. In this concise and engaging volume, Lie analyzes the […]
By Daniel Knorr Recently, the College Board made news for announcing changes to the scope of Advanced Placement (AP) World History. From now on, the AP exam will cover only the period after 1450 CE. High schools could still choose to offer an additional course covering world history before 1450—making it a two-year sequence—but only […]
Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of history at Yale University and a specialist in modern China. She recently published her first book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2018), an examination of the exhibitionary culture of the People’s Republic between 1949 and 1976. In Curating Revolution, Ho explores different […]
By Daniel Knorr G. William Skinner (1925-2008) was an anthropologist of China who taught at Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, and the University of California, Davis during his long and impressive career. President of the AAS in 1983, among Skinner’s many contributions to the field is a trio of articles that appeared in the Journal of Asian […]
