I have a new post on Manchu medical recipes up today at The Recipes Project! This is the first of a multi-part series exploring time and space in recipe literature and in translation. You can find it here. The entire Translating Recipes series (so far) is here. Continue reading Translating Recipes 7: Recipes in Time and Space Part 1
Steve Platt’s recent book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the Taiping Civil War, the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom situates the story of modern China within a broader, global history of civil war in the US and beyond, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: An Interview
“Fluid Translation,” the newest installment in the Translating Recipes series at The Recipes Project, will be available today (for Pt. 1, here) and tomorrow (for Pt. 2). The posts work as a series of pairs, with the first offering offering an explanation and conceptual grounding of the translation experiment featured in the second: Translating Qing Recipes 1: Narrating Qing Bodies Translating Qing Recipes 2: A Drama of Butter and … Continue reading Translating Qing Recipes: Fluid Translation
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
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
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
Carla Nappi 