Jay Carter’s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China, yet it is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood. You can listen to our … Continue reading Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: An Interview
What has it looked like to translate expletives and curses across languages, and what might we learn from looking closely at an example of a text that tries to do just that? I recently (and very briefly) wrote about this phenomenon in the context of a Qing-era pentaglot dictionary. My thoughts on this text and phenomenon are very much in-progress, but you can find a snapshot … Continue reading Maggots, Jawbones, and a Multilingual Archive of Decay: An Essay
Wensheng Wang’s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. Wang’s book aims to transform how we understand this crucial period in light of the eruption of major social and political crises and the consequences of imperial response to those crises for Qing and world history, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: An Interview
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
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
Michelle King’s wonderful new book explores the intertwined histories of imperialism and infanticide, situating the histories of infant killing and abandonment in China within a broader account of these practices in western Europe and across Eurasia. You can listen to our recent conversation about it here. Continue reading Between Birth and Death: 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
Carla Nappi 