Marshall Poe

New Books in East Asian Studies

Society EN ↓ 1661 episodes

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠ newbooksnetwork.com ⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠ https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ ⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Sup...

Author

Marshall Poe

Episodes

Kenneth Brashier, “Ancestral Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) 17.08.2012 1:15:42

If New Books in East Asian Studies were an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe and if one of the perks that came along with being an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe were to ensure that certain books got major awards, then we would exercise that perk... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnet...

Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011) 11.08.2012 1:10:13

Roel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It is a compelling and engaging read, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in early China, the history of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomi...

Roger Hart, “The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) 27.07.2012 1:08:25

Roger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Daniel Vukovich, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.” (Routledge, 2012) 17.07.2012 1:16:23

Using materials that range from poetry and fiction to historiography and film, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (Routledge, 2011) proposes a sharp critique of the way that China’s history from 1949-1979 has been understood and written in a wide variety of texts. Daniel Vukovich argues that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support o...

Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing” (Zone Press, 2012) 09.07.2012 1:07:51

What do walking backward, water calligraphy, and belting out popular songs in public have in common? All of them can be conceived as techniques for cultivating life, or yangsheng, and they are all featured in Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang‘s wonderful new book. Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Ethan Segal, “Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) 02.07.2012 1:03:42

What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers through a fascinating exploration of the politics, society, and culture of pre-1600 Japan. One of the wonderful things about... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show b...

Merry White, “Coffee Life in Japan” (University of California Press, 2012) 15.06.2012 51:17

Merry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author’s favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium...

Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011) 23.05.2012 1:16:10

When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified. One thing I learned from reading Gail Hershatter‘s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pre...

Xiaofei Tian, "Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China" (Harvard UP, 2011) 23.05.2012 1:08:01

Xiaofei Tian's Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their experiences of dislocation over land an...

E. Taylor Atkins, "Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945" (U California Press, 2010) 15.05.2012 56:42

Taylor Atkins' recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945(University of California Press, 2010) opens with a movie theater commercial in 2004 and closes with a metaphorical decapitation. In the intervening chapters Atkins develops a series of sophisticated and masterfully de...

Hank Glassman, “The Face of JizÅ: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) 10.05.2012 56:32

In this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizo : Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizo is a Buddhist Bodhisattva whose presence has become ubiquitous throughout Japan as the protector of travelers, women,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Rowan K. Flad, "Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China" (Cambridge UP, 2011) 27.04.2012 1:13:43

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad's Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China's Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case stud...

Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) 23.04.2012 1:00:56

There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Laurence Monnais, C. Michele Thompson, and Ayo Wahlberg, “Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) 26.03.2012 1:08:24

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coherent treatment of the history and practice of Vietnamese medicine, but it’s also a wonderfully interdisciplinary collection of approaches that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho...

Andrew Field, “Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954” (The Chinese University Press, 2010) 07.03.2012 1:28:34

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! ht...

Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010) 24.02.2012 1:29:12

Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011) 16.02.2012 1:28:33

Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr...

Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011) 01.02.2012 1:36:31

First things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our...

Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011) 24.01.2012 1:25:33

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium...

Dennis Frost, “Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan” (Harvard UP, 2011) 24.01.2012 1:07:43

In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, MÃ¡rta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe. But other stars are visible only in certain lands: Yuna Kim, Barbora Strycova, Sebastien Chabal, Andres Guardado, Israel Folau, Buster... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949” (University of California Press, 2011) 22.12.2011 1:23:03

We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast...

Mark Rowe, “Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) 15.12.2011 1:18:34

Mark Rowe‘s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premi...

Andrew F. Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture” (Harvard UP, 2011) 30.11.2011 1:07:10

Simply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones‘s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011). It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a truly brilliant study of the ways that a discourse of development was taken up from evolutionary works of Lamarck,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by be...

Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) 15.11.2011 1:14:42

Daqing Yang‘s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppo...

Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010) 01.11.2011 1:12:31

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Supp...