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
The next two posts are going up in the next installment of the Translating Recipes experiment for The Recipes Project! You can check out the fairy tale here: Translating Qing Recipes 3: Fairy Tale Drugs Translating Qing Recipes 4: The Girl, the Scorpion, and the Doctor Continue reading Translating Recipes: Fairy Tale Dugs
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
I had the pleasure of talking with Andrea Goldman about her wonderful study of opera in late Qing Beijing. It’s a rich book full of nuanced readings of some great historical documents, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Opera and the City: An Interview
Back in November, I was fortunate enough to join a panel of wonderful scholars, all of whom I deeply respect and admire, in the plenary session of the History of Science Society 2013 annual meeting in Boston. We were all talking, in different ways and using different media, about the importance of experimentation with the form of academic narratives about objects and the history of … Continue reading KUNGGUR kanggar!: A landscape of Manchu onomatopoeias
I had the pleasure of talking with Jonathan Hay about his wonderful recent book on decorative objects, materiality, and pleasure in early modern China. It’s one of my very favorite recent books, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Sensuous Surfaces: An Interview
Carla Nappi 