Results for tag: History

#AsiaNow Speaks with Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci

Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci is Assistant Professor at Koç University and author of Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan, published by Stanford University Press and winner of the 2020 AAS John Whitney Hall Book Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. My book follows the […]

Historian Jeremy Yellen on the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Jeremy A. Yellen is an assistant professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, published by Cornell University Press in 2019. Yellen’s work is a thorough investigation of Japan’s vision for the Greater East […]

Finding the Taejon Massacre in Independence, Missouri

By Sandra H. Park At the Truman Library last April, I learned of a vast photograph collection donated by the local Center for the Study of the Korean War (CSKW) before its closing. The archivists were still processing this collection, and the photographs I handled featured mostly commemorative or touristic scenes. These were all originally […]

Elizabeth Chatterjee on “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism”

This is Number 5 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series. Elizabeth Chatterjee is Lecturer in Regional and Comparative Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Chatterjee’s article, “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” appears in the February 2020 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. […]

Rethinking India’s Eighteenth Century, from the Perspective of Twentieth-Century Japan

By Weijia Vicky Shen, University of Pittsburgh On November 8, 2019, I attended the “Rethinking India’s Eighteenth Century” workshop at the University of Pittsburgh. The day-long gathering began with me sitting uncomfortably at a round table in the Humanities Center, surrounded by established scholars of South Asia. My anxiety stemmed in part from being the […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Ananya Chakravarti

Ananya Chakravarti is Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University and author of The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India, published by Oxford University Press and recipient of an honorable mention for the 2020 AAS Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. To begin with, please tell us […]

“Production, Circulation, and Accumulation”: Andrew Liu on the Historiographies of Capitalism in China and South Asia

This is Number 4 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series. Andrew B. Liu is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University and author of “Production, Circulation, and Accumulation: The Historiographies of Capitalism in China and South Asia,” published in the November 2019 issue of […]

Railroads and the Transformation of China: A Q&A with Historian Elisabeth Köll

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 […]

Meet the JAS Editorial Assistants: A Discussion about Childhood Studies and Food Studies

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 Plays, Socialist Modernity, and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century China

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 […]

“Living with a Postcolonial Conundrum”: Hieyoon Kim on Korean Film Historiography

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 […]

The Other Milk: A Q&A with Historian Jia-Chen Fu

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 […]

Q&A with Jennifer Altehenger, Author of Legal Lessons

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 […]

“The Invention of Madness”: A Q&A with Historian Emily Baum

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 […]

Excerpt – “Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture”

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, […]

Agrarian Labor, Caste, and the Limits of Conversion: A Conversation with Navyug Gill

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 […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Jonathan Schlesinger

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 […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Bryan D. Lowe

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. […]