New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
David Ambaras, "Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThrough a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the spatial and ideological formations of modern Japan in its first seven decades or so as a nation-state and empire, especially vis-à-vis China. The slippage between the individual and collective/national (geo)body is a critical theme as Ambaras highlights the roles of ...
Richard McBride II, "Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn" (U Hawaii Press, 2016)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts. During a time of contention between the the doctrinal (敎) and meditation (禪) schools, Ŭich’ŏn traveled to Song (宋), China (96...
Antony Dapiran, "City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong" (Scribe, 2020)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the streets, in shopping malls, in residential buildings. Driven by Hong Kong’s young people with their ‘Be Water!’ strategy, the pro-democracy movement grew into a massive force, receiving support from all demographics – from the ‘silver-hairs’, to mothers, from healthcare workers, to journalists and banke...
Yue Hou, "The Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
April 30, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesIn China, roughly 60% of GDP and 80% of employment comes from the private sector – yet half of private entrepreneurs report that they faced expropriation of property by local governments. Yue Hou’s rich, detailed, and ambitious book documents how private entrepreneurs protect their property from expropriation by running for office – and using their public roles to advance their private economic interest. Entrepreneurs who hold local legislative seats can leverage their political status to det...
Chris Courtney, "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
April 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which ...
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
April 28, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesSlavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary res...
Gregory Scott, "Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China" (Oxford UP, 2020)
April 16, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesGregory A. Scott's Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the first major work in any language to address the topic of Buddhist monastery reconstructions. This book focuses on reconstructions of Buddhist monasteries in modern China that took place in the period from 1866 to 1966, beginning with the Taiping War in the late Qing and ending with the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China. Making extensive use ...
Margaret Hillenbrand, "Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2020)
April 02, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history. Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to...
Jin Y. Park, "Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp" (U of Hawaii Press, 2017)
March 31, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWomen and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Korean Buddhist nun, Kim Iryŏp’s life and philosophy, which takes place from 1896-1971. Park eclectically references philosophers, feminists, and Buddhists from a variety of traditions as the context for the events that led to Iryŏp’s transition from a well-known feminist, and writer to a Buddhist nun....
G. Clinton Godart, "Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2017)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 26 minutesIn Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of Global Japanese Studies) brings to life more than a century of ideas by examining how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously th...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesParadox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt C...
Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020)
March 27, 2020 04:00 - 49 minutesWe often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access inf...
Kunio Hara, "Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
March 26, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesA beloved Japanese anime move released in 1988, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, as they deal with the separation from their mother who is in the hospital, and their adventures with the forest creatures they meet called the Totoro. In Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro Soundtrack (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Kunio Hara analyzes the film’s score and image song collection composed by Joe Hisaishi. The movie’s catchy theme song, along with the res...
Norman A. Kutcher, "Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule" (U California Press, 2018)
March 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourEunuchs. Nobody liked them, everybody seems to have hated them, but, even so, they were an essential part of many states – even in the Qing. Norman A. Kutcher's book Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule (University of California Press, 2018) looks at these little-acknowledged eunuchs, focusing on how the first Qing emperors managed their eunuchs, and in turn what their various management styles reveals about them. Drawing on case reports of crimes committed by eunuchs, official do...
Michelle Murray, "The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 18, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesIs a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrinsically destabilizing to the international order. In her new book The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (Oxford UP, 2020), Michelle Murray counters that political actors and scholars of politics should focus on how the actions of rising powers...
D. A. Bell and W. Pei, "Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World" (Princeton UP, 2020)
March 18, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesWhat are the arguments in favor of social hierarchies? Are there differences in how hierarchy is viewed and valued in China compared with other countries? Which forms of social hierarchy are morally justified and how can they be promoted in the future? Drawing on a wide range of philosophical arguments, historical examples, and social science evidence from various cultural traditions, Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei have developed their argument that different hierarchical principles should gover...
Kirsten L. Ziomek, "Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples" (Harvard Asia Center. 2019)
March 16, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourUsing diverse sources well beyond the colonial archive such as photographs, postcards, and even headstones, Dr. Kirsten L. Ziomek reveals the stories of colonial subjects in the Japanese empire in Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples (Harvard Asia Center, 2019). The book focuses on four groups of colonial subjects in the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s, namely, the indigenous people of Taiwan, Micronesians, the Ainu of Hokkaido, and Okinawans. Cha...
Cole Roskam, "Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937" (U Washington Press, 2019)
March 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourShanghai’s role in shaping modern China and indeed the very idea of what modernity is in China can hardly be overstated. Much of this long-lasting influence can be seen in how the city itself came into being as a complex product of Chinese and colonial forces, and as Cole Roskam shows us in Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019), it is in the very material actions of architects and town planners that this is most obvious. Acc...
Loretta E. Kim, "Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019)
March 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourEthnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) is the first monograph published in English on the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has inhabited northeast Asia for centuries. Since the seventeenth century, the Orochen has settled in the region of Manchuria that became the eastern borderland between China and Russia after the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk. In this book, Loretta E. Kim shows that the Oroc...
Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, "Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice" (Indiana UP, 2020)
February 27, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded. With thousands of scholars across the country, it is surprising then that there is relatively little understanding of the research and contributions of Chinese folklorists to the discipline. This despite the fact that Chinese folklorists are well-acquainted with many of the latest advances in folkloristics research globally. As the first English language attempt to discuss the historical development, ...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
February 25, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesHow does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identitie...
Charlene Makley, "The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China" (Cornell UP, 2018)
February 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourRebgong, in the Northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (China’s Qinghai Province), is in the midst of a ‘Battle for Fortune.’ That is, a battle to both accumulate as much fortune, but also a battle to decide which definitions of fortune are going to dominate Tibetan society: a material fortune based in ‘authoritarian capitalism’ or a Buddhist form of ‘counterdevelopment’ based in traditional ideas about language, landscapes, and compassion. In The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, ...
Daniel Mattingly, "The Art of Political Control in China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
February 04, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesTocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in rural China leads him to conclude that civil society offers officials leverage over citizens that strengthens the state’s coercive capacity. In his book The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Mattingly argues that civil society can encourage contributions to public goods like roads, schools, and charities, civil as...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIf you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the sam...
Eric Setzekor, "The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps: The Republic of China Military, 1942-1955" (U Oklahoma Press, 2018)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesFollowing the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, two antipodal ideologies vied for control of China's military. The first, advanced by Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), maintained that the military was little more than an organ of the KMT party apparatus. As such, the Chinese army was a "party-army," beholden to the KMT's will, and subservient to KMT demands. Opposing the "party-army" ideology was a cadre of nationalistic, cosmopolitan Chinese officers, who sought to fashion the arm...
Mark Gamsa, “Manchuria: A Concise History” (Bloomsbury, 2020)
January 29, 2020 09:00 - 51 minutesThe term ‘Manchuria’ conjures up all manner of evocative associations for people interested in East Asian and world history, from the Manchu founders of China’s last imperial dynasty, to Russian railroads and Japanese empire on the Asian mainland. Up to now, however, there hasn’t really been a particularly obvious place to look for a satisfying source of information about these and other aspects of the region’s fascinating past and present. Mark Gamsa’s Manchuria: A Concise History (I. B. Tau...
Filippo Marsili, "Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China" (SUNY Press, 2018)
January 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourHeaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographi...
Ching-yuen Cheung, "Globalizing Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline" (VR Unipress, 2017)
January 16, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourChing-yuen Cheung's and Wing-keung Lam's edited volume Globalizing Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline (V&R Unipress, 2017) is a collection of essays written by scholars of Japanese philosophy from all over the world, from Asia to Europe to the Americas - as is appropriate for a book whose aim is to reflect on the potential and enjeu of Japanese philosophy within the global context. The book is divided into two parts, namely, “Japanese Philosophy: Teaching and Research in the Global...
Elizabeth Economy, "The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State" (Oxford UP, 2018)
January 15, 2020 09:00 - 30 minutesA trade war with China has dangerous implications for the global economy. What began more than a year ago with President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs has become an unpleasant economic reality for many businesses. Recently, the U.S. labeled China a “currency manipulator.” But an even larger long-term threat comes from China’s aggressive espionage offensive that is playing out in behind-the-scenes as of the U.S. and China struggle for global dominance. Our guest is Elizabeth Economy, a se...
Christopher Lovins, "King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea" (SUNY Press, 2019)
January 06, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThough traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (State University of New York Press 2019) explains how as king Chŏngjo governed not as a weak ruler but as an absolute monarc...
Charlotte Brooks, "American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949" (U California Press, 2019)
December 30, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourBetween 1901 and World War II, up to half of all U.S.-born Chinese Americans relocated to China in search of better lives due to the discrimination they faced in the United States. Charlotte Brooks tells the story of these emigres in American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949 (University of California Press, 2019). Initially, Chinese American dual citizens found unprecedented professional opportunities as merchants and government officials in their ancestral home...
Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
December 21, 2019 05:00 - 1 hourInternational and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybern...
Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)
December 18, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourFrom its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks canno...
Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)
December 17, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourIf tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various potential socialist allies during the Cold War to dispel this impression. There is, moreover, another equally important case in which people linked to ‘China’ were involved in transnational affairs at this time – namely that of overseas Chinese populations throughout the world. And, as Taomo Zhou’s f...
Miriam Driessen, "Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia" (Hong Kong UP, 2019)
December 13, 2019 09:00 - 30 minutesI met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiop...
Erin Schoneveld, "Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde" (Brill, 2018)
December 06, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourBefitting an art history book, Erin Schoneveld’s Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Brill, 2018) is a beautifully packaged analysis of the early twentieth-century Japanese modern art collective Shirakaba and its eponymous coterie magazine (1910-1923). Shirakaba, which means “white birch,” is recognized as the most significant art movement of the period, and had a lasting impact on the discourse and practice of art in modern Japan....
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
December 03, 2019 09:00 - 57 minutesWe’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short...
Lian Xi, "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China" (Basic Books, 2018)
November 21, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to the first. She is, judges her biographer Lian Xi, the only Chinese citizen to have openly and steadfastly opposed Mao and his regime–denouncing lies such as those conveyed in the “Great Leap Forward” poster, reproduced ...
Noelle Giuffrida, "Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America" (U California Press, 2018)
November 09, 2019 13:15 - 1 hourNoelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art through the story of renowned curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918-2008). This book provides one of the first forays into post-war North American collecting and exhibiting, carefully reconstructing the rise of the USA as the scholarly hub on Chinese art, in many ways dis...
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
November 03, 2019 09:00 - 40 minutesAs you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestseller...
Wang Gungwu, "Home is Not Here" (NUS Press, 2018)
November 01, 2019 08:00 - 38 minutesWang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, but with strong family, educational, and indeed emotional connections to China. In his new memoir, Home Is Not Here (NUS, 2018), he recollects his upbringing in British Malaya at a time of great political turmoil, which included the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese invasion and occu...
Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg, "Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
October 31, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourOleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a case study to explore aspects of Japan’s modern history including historical memory, cultural heritage, and state-civil society and national-regional relations. The authors show that although castles entered the modern era as a symbol of the dark “feudal” past Japan hoped to leave behind, they quickly...
Christian Sorace, "Afterlives of Chinese Communism” (Verso-ANU Press, 2019)
October 29, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWhat to make of the fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party which detains and arrests people studying Maoism, organising workers, or campaigning for women’s liberation is a difficult task. All the more so when that same Party continues to speak in the language of socialist construction, mass organization and Leninist control of the ‘commanding heights’. This is one reason why the compendium Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (Verso & Australian National U...
Elisabeth Köll, "Railroads and the Transformation of China" (Harvard UP, 2019)
October 28, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourRailroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) looks at the development of railroads in China from the late 19th century to the post-Mao reform period. Treating railroads as institutions, Elisabeth Köll charts how railroads and railway management companies were constructed and developed, how railway lines were disrupted by war, and then how they were re-organized and re-structured – often by re-packaging pre-1949 ideas – in the Communist period. Throughout Köll is ...
Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 55 minutesIn the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because t...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 32 minutesThe things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for ho...
Larry Diamond, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" (Penguin, 2019)
October 21, 2019 08:00 - 43 minutesLarry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, and it’s easy to admire China’s growth while looking past things like increasing surveillance and lack of respect for norms and the rule of law. We’ve wanted to do an episode on China for a long time, and we are very excited to have Larry Diamond with us to discuss it. China plays an integral role i...
Nianshen Song, "Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
October 17, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourLand borders in East Asia have played just as big a role in the region’s social transformations as their more recently debated maritime counterparts, and the boundary between China and Korea offers particularly telling insight into how society, identity and geopolitics have shifted over time. Nianshen Song’s Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines a tumultuous period in the history of this vital northeast Asian bor...
Jolyon Baraka Thomas, "Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
October 17, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourJolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its subjects no religious freedom—that, despite the legal provision in the Meiji Constitution of 1890 affirming freedom of worship, “State Shinto” was the law of the land—and that it was the American-led occupation which finally granted freedom of conscience and worship to the benighted Japanese. Thomas ...
Evan N. Dawley, "Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s" (Harvard UP, 2019)
September 30, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourHow was the Taiwanese identity constructed? Dr. Evan N. Dawley, an associate professor of history at Goucher College, explores this question in his new book Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s(Harvard University Press, 2019). Dawley traces the waves of newcomers to Taiwan beginning with Qing dynasty transplants from the southeastern coast of China. He then largely focuses on the Japanese colonial period and the first decade of ROC rule in Taiwan, relating signific...