By W. Puck Brecher We are pleased to share this excerpt adapted from the newest Asia Shorts volume, Animal Care in Japanese Tradition: A Short History, by W. Puck Brecher (Washington State University). In this book, Brecher offers a brief overview of animals in Japanese culture and society from ancient times to the 1950s. Brecher […]
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 […]
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 […]
Barbara Sato (née Wool) came to Asian Studies with little or no Asia in her personal background. However, as a high school student she was chosen to go to Japan under the auspices of the American Field Service, perhaps one of the last cohorts to actually make the journey by ship across the Pacific. This […]
In spring 2008, recently hired CIA analyst Erin Murphy was tasked with a one-month assignment to cover Myanmar in the lead-up to the country’s first vote since 1990. One month soon turned into a career: over the past fourteen years, Murphy has moved between the public and private sectors, keeping Myanmar at the center of […]
Heonik Kwon is Professor, Senior Research Fellow of Social Anthropology, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, and a member of the Mega-Asia research group at Seoul National University Asia Center. Kwon is author of After the Korean War: An Intimate History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and winner of the 2022 James B. […]
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Discussions of how to address climate change frequently note that one of the most important factors will be breaking China’s “addiction” to coal. Coal-fired power plants have provided electricity to the country’s manufacturing sector and growing cities for decades, while at the same time creating toxic air pollution and carbon dioxide […]
Minamata (Andrew Levitas, director, 2020; Sakamoto Ryūichi, music; Benoît Delhomme, cinematography) Inspired by true events in Minamata, Japan, where the Chisso chemical factory poisoned residents by dumping mercury into the sea from 1932 to 1968, Andrew Levitas’ film shows Minamata through the eyes of the great photojournalist W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith, who move […]
It is with great sadness that we report the passing of our friend, colleague, and mentor of Philippine and Southeast Asia history, John A. Larkin, who left us on July 29, 2021 after a long struggle against Parkinson’s disease on what was his 85th birthday. Known to all simply as “Jack,” his contribution to Philippine […]
With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Kabul at the end of August and the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Afghanistan has recently received a great deal of attention in the wider news media. In that context, our new Membership Manager, Bill Warner, reached out to AAS member Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, professor of […]
Sumit Guha holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at the University of Texas at Austin and is author of Tribe and State in Asia through Twenty-Five Centuries, the latest Asia Shorts title released by AAS Publications. In this volume, Guha analyzes the history of the term “tribe,” excavating the different ways the […]
By Paula R. Curtis Since at least the 2008 economic collapse, scholars of all academic disciplines have been anxious about what the future holds for their fields of study. Even before the global pandemic of 2020-2021 exacerbated those concerns, large organizations like the American Historical Association showcased alarming data on the precipitous decline in academic […]
By Jing Jiang Jing Jiang is Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College and author of Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction, the latest Asia Shorts title released by AAS Publications. Chinese science fiction (SF) has flourished in the last ten years. Writers who had been toiling quietly in […]
Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam, published by Yale University Press and winner of the 2021 AAS Harry J. Benda Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book […]
May 28, 2021Issued by the AAS Board of Directors AAS expresses grave concern at the recent announcement regarding the demolition of the Annex of the National Archives in Delhi. We urge the Government of India to disclose its plans for safely transferring held documents and artifacts, their intermediate and long-term storage, and their availability to […]
Michael O’Sullivan is a Junior Research Fellow in the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and author of “Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860–68,” which appears in the May 2021 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. O’Sullivan’s article discusses a travelogue published in 1868 by Damodar […]
AAS Publications has recently released the latest title in its Asia Past & Present monograph series. In The Fifty Years That Changed Chinese Religion, 1898–1948, Paul R. Katz (Academia Sinica) and Vincent Goossaert (EPHE, PSL [Paris]) examine a time of significant political and social upheaval in China and demonstrate how religious life was also transformed […]
Macabe Keliher is Assistant Professor in the Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University and author of The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China, published by University of California Press, which won the 2021 AAS Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize honorable mention. To begin with, please tell us what your book […]
Charles Sanft is Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and author of Literate Community in Early Imperial China, published by SUNY Press and winner of the 2021 AAS Pre-1900 Joseph Levenson Prize Honorable Mention. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. Literate Community examines the ways that people […]
Durba Mitra, assistant professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, is author of “‘Surplus Woman’: Female Sexuality and the Concept of Endogamy” published in the February 2021 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. Mitra’s first book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality […]
