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Mumbai on Two Wheels

Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility

By Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria

Cyclists from India reimagine transportation infrastructure for all

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic...

Queer World Making

Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art

By Andrew Gayed

An abundantly illustrated look at how queerness is performed within artistic practice

Premodern archives from the Middle East show rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality....

Inside the World of Climate Change Skeptics

By Kristin Haltinner. Dilshani Sarathchandra

An extraordinary look into doubt, denial, and distrust

As wildfires rip across the western United States and sea levels rise along coastal cities from Louisiana to Alaska, some people nevertheless reject the mainstream scientific consensus on...

Chinese Autobiographical Writing

An Anthology of Personal Accounts

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, Ping Yao

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in...

Fixing the Image

Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh

By Jenna Grant

Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information...

Temples in the Cliffside

Buddhist Art in Sichuan

By Sonya S. Lee

Winner of the 2023 IPPY – Gold – Religion Nonfiction category, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Award

Centuries of monumental sculpture, embedded in the landscape

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is...

Ancient Egypt and Early China

State, Society, and Culture

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

The first comparative study of these two early empires

Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548–1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) shared intriguing...

Opening Kailasanatha

The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

By Padma Kaimal

The footsteps and sensory experience of devotees linger in an Indian temple

Stone figures hardened by ascetic discipline and heroic effort face north in deep shadow. There they meet the gazes of the same gods and...

Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

Ancient Ink

The Archaeology of Tattooing

By Lars Krutak, Aaron Deter-Wolf

The human desire to adorn the body is universal and timeless. While specific forms of body decoration and the motivations for them vary by region, culture, and era, all human societies have engaged in practices...

Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

By Lei Xue

Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming) is perhaps the most eccentric piece in China’s calligraphic canon. Apparently marking the burial of a crane, the large inscription, datable to 514 CE, was once carved...

Bronze and Stone

The Cult of Antiquity in Song Dynasty China

By Yunchiahn C. Sena

Despite China’s long tradition of venerating the past as the ultimate source of cultural authority, the discourse of antiquity prior to the Song period (960–1279) demonstrated little concern for ancient objects. With a focus on...

Nikolai's Fortune

By Solveig Torvik

As a child, Solveig Torvik heard stories of a lost, mysterious great-grandfather who left Finland for America to make his fortune - leaving Torvik’s great-grandmother and his unborn daughter behind. As a reporter, Torvik determined...

Art and Intimacy

How the Arts Began

By Ellen Dissanayake

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for...

Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community

By Carol Zane Jolles and Elinor Mikaghaq Oozeva

For more than fifteen hundred years Yupik and proto-Yupik Eskimo peoples have lived at the site of the Alaskan village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Their history is a record of family and kin,...

Classical Seattle

Maestros, Impresarios, Virtuosi, and Other Music Makers

By Melinda Bargreen

The past 50 years have seen a tremendous arts boom in Seattle, which has given the city not only internationally recognized classical music institutions but also great performance halls to showcase their work and that...

Subversive Seduction

Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel

By Travis Landry

Male-male rivalry and female passive choice, the two principal tenets of Darwinian sexual selection, raise important ethical questions in The Descent of Man--and in the decades since--about the subjugation of women. If female choice is...

Captured in the Middle

Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing

By Sidner Larson

Sidner Larson’s Captured in the Middle embodies the very nature of Indian storytelling, which is circular, drawing upon the personal experiences of the narrator at every turn. Larson teaches about contemporary American Indian literature by...

Kirtland Cutter

Architect in the Land of Promise

By Henry C. Matthews

In the early years of the twentieth century, Spokane was singled out for praise in the West for the quality of its architecture and the impressive way it had rebuilt after the devastating fire of...

Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane

The World of the Schitsu'umsh

By Rodney Frey and Ernie Stensgar

Anthropologist Rodney Frey culminates a decade of work with the Schitsu’umsh (the Coeur d’Alene Indians of Idaho) in this portrait of the unique bonds between a people and the landscape of their traditional homeland. The...