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Back East

How Westerners Invented a Region

By Flannery Burke

Western imaginations of "Back East" rewrote America's cultural identity, shaping myths and realities alike

Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East flips the script of American...

The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyun

Literary Expression and the Natural World

By Ping Wang

The father of Chinese landscape poetry in time and place

During the dark centuries between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE and the golden age of reunified China under the Tang and Song...

Satirical Tibet

The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo

By Timothy Thurston. Foreword by Stevan Harrell

What does comedy look like when the wrong punchline can land you in jail?

Humor has long been a vital, if underrecognized, component of Tibetan life. In recent years, alongside well-publicized struggles for religious freedom and...

Science Fiction against the Margins

Cinematic Futures, Global Imaginaries

By Chon A. Noriega, Maya Montañez Smukler, Nicole Ucedo

Explores independently produced media that uses science fiction to address societal and political issues

Today the genre of science fiction is widely associated with big-budget American films featuring space invaders and lab-made monsters. Outside of mainstream...

Maidens or Monsters?

Tales of Amazons, Goddesses, Queens and Temptresses in Medieval Manuscripts

By Chantry Westwell

An illustrated collection of exceptional female figures in myth and legend

In the Middle Ages, some of the most popular and well-loved stories were about female saints, classical heroines, and the female protagonists of romance cycles....

Old Stacks, New Leaves

The Arts of the Book in South Asia

By Sonal Khullar

A deep dive into the visual forms, material contexts, social lives, and global circulations of books

In the twenty-first century, debates on the future of books and print culture have intensified with the rise of digital...

The Objectionable Li Zhi

Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China

By Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, Haun Saussy

Astute inquiries into the world of China’s most unconventional early modern intellectual

Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and...

The Edge of Knowing

Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature

By Roy Bing Chan

Reveals the historical impact of dream rhetoric on Chinese modernity and nation-building

Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period...

A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era

The Book of the Covenant of Pinhas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy

By David B. Ruderman

The history of a single book sheds light on the beginnings of modern Jewish thought

In 1797, in what is now the Czech Republic, Pinḥas Hurwitz published Book of the Covenant. Nominally an extended commentary on...

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

By Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection

Interrogates how artists have created new ways to imagine the past of American slavery

From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre...

Chinese Funerary Biographies

An Anthology of Remembered Lives

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao, Cong Ellen Zhang

Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’...

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity

By Rivi Handler-Spitz

Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend national boundaries,...

Bhakti and Power

Debating India's Religion of the Heart

By John Stratton Hawley, Christian Lee Novetzke, Swapna Sharma

Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has meanings that shift dramatically according to context and sentiment. Sometimes translated as “personal devotion,” bhakti nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is...

Heroines of the Qing

Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories

By Binbin Yang

Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary...

Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools

The History of Travel Literature in Imperial China

By James M. Hargett

First-hand accounts of travel provide windows into places unknown to the reader, or new ways of seeing familiar places. In Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools, the first book-length treatment in English of Chinese travel literature...

Novel Medicine

Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China

By Andrew Schonebaum

By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. Critical readings of fictional and medical...

Transforming Monkey

Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic

By Hongmei Sun

Able to shape-shift and ride the clouds, wielding a magic cudgel and playing tricks, Sun Wukong (aka Monkey or the Monkey King) first attained superstar status as the protagonist of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to...

Writing the South Seas

Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature

By Brian C. Bernards

Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their "New World" and mingling...

Forming the Early Chinese Court

Rituals, Spaces, Roles

By Luke Habberstad

Forming the Early Chinese Court builds on new directions in comparative studies of royal courts in the ancient world to present a pioneering study of early Chinese court culture. Rejecting divides between literary, political, and...

Many Faces of Mulian

The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China

By Rostislav Berezkin

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language,...