Eugenia Lean (Columbia University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to … [Read more...]
Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand
Duncan McCargo (Cornell University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. Watch our interview with Professor McCargo here. Fighting for Virtue investigates how Thailand's judges were tasked by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) in 2006 with helping to solve the country's intractable political problems—and what happened next. … [Read more...]
Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border
Sören Urbansky (Princeton University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely … [Read more...]
The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media
Nathan Shockey (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he … [Read more...]
Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China
Mary Brazelton (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to … [Read more...]
