Ho-fung Hung is Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins University and author of City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule, published by Cambridge University Press and winner of the 2024 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize (Post-1900). To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. The unrest and crackdown […]
When World War II ended in August 1945, Laos was among many Japanese-controlled territories in Southeast Asia facing the future with uncertainty. Would the country once again become part of French Indochina? Could it escape re-colonization and establish itself as a sovereign nation-state? On October 12, 1945, the Lao Issara—an anti-French nationalist movement—declared Lao independence, […]
“Many scholars, colleagues, and friends told me that Indian Buddhism was dead,” Douglas Ober notes, “so I had better seek out a different subject.” Undeterred, Ober continued working on his dissertation project on the history of Indian Buddhism, which in 2023 he published in revised form as Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism […]
Richard Jacob (“Dick”) Smethurst, a noted scholar of modern Japanese history at the University of Pittsburgh, passed away on May 4, 2024, at the age of 90 in the Westminster Place Senior Living facility in Oakmont, PA. Dick was born in 1933 in Carlisle, PA, the youngest son of Edward William (“Bill”), Sr. and Helen (nee […]
Morgan Pitelka is a professor of history and Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan, published by Cambridge University Press and winner of the 2024 Honorable Mention, John Whitney Hall Prize. To begin with, please tell us what […]
Nicole Willock is Associate Professor at Old Dominion University and author of Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China, published by Columbia University Press and winner of the AAS 2024 E. Gene Smith Inner Asia Book Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. Lineages of the Literary […]
In workshops and industrial spaces across North India, artisans practiced their trades: tailoring and carpentry, lithography, stonemasonry, and electroplating. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these skilled workers adapted to new tools and technologies, saw transmission of knowledge move from family workshops to technical schools, and dealt with the expanding presence of the […]
Joseph W. Esherick is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, San Diego and author of Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China, published by University of California Press and winner of the 2024 AAS post-1900 Levenson Prize honorable mention. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. […]
In this interview, AAS Membership Manager Bill Warner speaks with historian Dr. Sudev Sheth, Senior Lecturer at the Lauder Institute at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, about his recent book Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The book focuses on the Jhaveri family in the western […]
Christian de Pee is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100, which was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2022 and which has received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize (Pre-1900). To begin with, please tell us […]
“How did an impoverished country that was fully reliant on US military support until the 1970s modernize its defense and commercial industries in less than a decade?” This question propels the story that Peter Banseok Kwon (Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY) traces in his new book, Cornerstone of the […]
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. […]
Mark Elvin, Emeritus Professor of Chinese History at the Australian National University and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, sadly passed away on 6 December 2023 in Oxford (England). Mark Elvin was an eminent scholar of Chinese history and the author of several ground-breaking works that changed the way in which China and its […]
Robert E. Entenmann, a longtime member of the Association for Asian Studies, died January 7, 2024 in Northfield Minnesota, having taught Chinese history at St. Olaf College for 36 years. A native of Seattle, Bob earned a B.A. in Chinese History from the University of Washington, an M.A. from Stanford, and a Ph.D. from Harvard […]
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. […]
Emily Honig, a historian of China and retired University of California, Santa Cruz professor, passed away on October 14. She first visited the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution as part of a student delegation touring the country. Honig then embarked on graduate study in Chinese history at Stanford University and spent two […]
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 […]
Bringing together stories and reflections spanning more than thirty years, Women in Japanese Studies: Memoirs from a Trailblazing Generation will be released by AAS Publications in December 2023. Edited by Alisa Freedman (University of Oregon), the volume includes chapters from thirty-one scholars, who share stories of achievements, frustrations, and choices—both professional and personal. In Japan […]
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 […]
Nathan Sivin, Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, died on June 24, 2022 in Philadelphia at the age of 91. His wife of 58 years, Carole Delmore Sivin, a talented artist best known for her masks and ceramics, preceded him in death in December 2020. Many AAS […]
