Chris Hanscom’s new book explores literary modernism in the work of three writers who were central to literary production in 1930s Korea.In addition to offering a fascinating window into modern Korean literature, he also uses the example of Korean modernism to open up the way we think of comparative literature and literary history more broadly. You can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading The Real Modern: 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
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
Rob Mitchell and I recently spoke about his wonderful new book, an exceptionally inspiring study in the history and literature of science that traces experimental vitalism through a wide range of Romantic textual worlds from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. You can find our conversation about it here. Continue reading Experimental Life: 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
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
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Dave Spafford about his great new book on the production of space (all kinds of space!) in late medieval Japan. It was great fun, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading A Sense of Place: 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
Bill Clancey’s great new book explores the nature of exploration itself, in the context of a rich ethnographic study of the scientists and engineers of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. It was a pleasure to talk with him, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Working on Mars: An Interview
Carla Nappi 