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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Benjamin Hopkins is a professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University and author of Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, published by Harvard University Press and winner of the 2022 AAS Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book […]
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 […]
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 […]
