Results for tag: History

Reproductive Realities in Modern China: An Interview with Sarah Mellors Rodriguez

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University and author of Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Many readers will be familiar with the politics of reproduction in contemporary China, via media stories about the One Child Policy in effect from the late […]

Screenshot of the Association for Chinese Art History website

Introducing the Association for Chinese Art History

Scholars of Chinese art history now have a new home to share news, events, and find their communities! The Association for Chinese Art History (ACAH) is a newly-formed committee of AAS, associated with the East and Inner Asia Council (EIAC). It seeks to promote communication and community among scholars of Chinese art and architectural history […]

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 […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Anne Prescott

Anne Prescott is Director of the Five College Center for East Asian Studies in Massachusetts and one of four authors (the others are John Frank, Arlene Kowal, and Yurika Kurakata) of Walking the Tōkaidō: A Multi-Disciplinary Experience in History and Culture, an online curriculum created for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia at the […]

Beyond the Book cover

Excerpt: Beyond the Book

AAS Publications is pleased to announce the newest volume in our Asia Past & Present monograph series. Beyond the Book: Unique and Rare Primary Sources for East Asian Studies Collected in North America is edited by Jidong Yang (Stanford University) and includes chapters from over twenty contributors, writing on nonbook sources such as “manuscripts, archival […]

In Memoriam: Chang Hao 張灝 (1937-2022)

Dr. Chang Hao, the renowned Sinologist and scholar devoted to the intellectual history of modern China, died April 21 at age 85 in Albany, California. Dr. Chang was born in 1937 in Xiamen, and after living in Chongqing and Nanjing he moved with his family to Taiwan in 1949. He studied with well-known China scholars […]

Cover image of Opening to China, by Charlotte Furth

Charlotte Furth (1934-2022)

Charlotte Furth, Professor Emerita of Chinese history at the University of Southern California, died on June 19, 2022, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 88. Furth received her B.A. in French from the University of North Carolina and her Ph.D. in Chinese history from Stanford University. Her early work was in the intellectual […]

#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 […]

In Memoriam: Barbara Sato (1942-2021)

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 […]

Cover of Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar’s Opening—and Closing, by Erin Murphy

Excerpt: Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar’s Opening—And Closing

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 […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Heonik Kwon

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. […]

Cover image of Carbon Technocracy, by Victor Seow

Carbon Technocracy: An Interview with Historian Victor Seow

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 […]

Promotional poster for Minamata (2022)

Sacrificed for the Prosperity of the Nation: Telling the Story of Minamata through Film

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 […]