I’m interested in the ways that recipes and other drug literature were spaces of translation and exchange for people who spoke and wrote different languages and lived in different healing contexts in the early modern world. Some years ago I wrote an essay on this that used the translation of theriac (an extraordinarily important compound drug and poison antidote in medieval and early modern Europe) into … Continue reading Bolatu’s Pharmacy: An Essay
Craig Clunas’s new book is a wonderfully and productively revisionist account of Ming history and its artifacts. Screen of Kings emphasizes the importance of members of the Ming imperial clan (i.e., those who were NOT emperors) and their courts as sites of cultural innovation, production, and reproduction, and of Ming kings as producers, collectors, and patrons of the arts. You can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Screen of Kings: An Interview
Andrea Bachner’s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. It is an exceptionally thoughtful work, it was such a pleasure to talk with Andrea about it, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Beyond Sinology: An Interview
Tobie Meyer-Fong generously made time to talk with me at the recent Association for Asian Studies annual conference about her fantastic new book. The book is a gorgeously written and masterfully argued exploration of the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurative) of the Taiping Civil War in nineteenth-century China. You can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading What Remains: An Interview
Ben Elman’s new book explores the civil examination process and the history of state exam curricula in late imperial China. Elman’s work is a careful, deeply researched, and elegantly written account of the Ming and Qing exam systems, it’s a great book to teach with, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China: An Interview
By any measure, David Tod Roy’s five-volume translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, translation studies, and world literature. It was an honor and a great pleasure to talk with David about his work on the occasion of the publication of the fifth and final volume of his translation, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading The Plum in the Golden Vase: An Interview
Xiaojue Wang’s new book reimagines the history of literature in modern China by considering the work of authors writing across the 1949 divide in the context of the global Cold War. It’s a careful, thoughtful, and ambitious study, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Modernity with a Cold War Face: An Interview
Emma Teng’s wonderful new book explores the history of discourses about Eurasian identity and the lived experiences of Eurasian people in China, Hong Kong, and the US between 1842 and 1943. She generously made the time to talk with me about it recently, it was such a pleasure, and you can listen to our conversation here. Continue reading Eurasian: An Interview
Today & tomorrow on The Recipes Project: a two-part experiment in translating Qing Manchu medical recipes into steamy melodrama. Pt. 1 is here, and Pt. 2 (where it gets all steamy all up in there) is here! For further installments in this ongoing project, see the Publications page of this site. Continue reading Translating Qing Recipes: An Experiment
Timothy Brook’s beautifully written new book explores the secrets of a map in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. I recently had the pleasure of talking with Tim about it for New Books in History, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Mr. Selden’s Map of China: An Interview
Carla Nappi 