University of California Press Blog» Asian Studies

Merry White Honored for Contributions to Japanese Studies

ssilverman — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:47:30 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Government of Japan honored UC Press author Merry White today with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon decoration. The award recognizes Professor White’s significant contribution to the development of Japanese studies and the introduction of Japanese culture in the United States.

Merry White, better [more...]

Fabian Drixler on the Culture of Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Japan

ssilverman — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:23:29 +0000

Fabian Drixler’s Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950 tells the story of a society reversing deeply held worldviews. Drixler, a professor of Japanese history at Yale University, describes the book as “a cultural history of infanticide and a demographic history of fertility change wrapped into one.”

This fascinating interview on the historical practice of [more...]

Why I Wrote The Hakka Cookbook

ssilverman — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:56:20 +0000

This guest post comes to us from veteran food writer Linda Lau Anusasananan, a recipe editor for Sunset Magazine for 34 years and former president of the Association of Chinese Cooking Teachers and the San Francisco Chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier. Here she describes her family history and the inspiration for writing The Hakka Cookbook. [more...]

Peter Hessler Shares How He Got His Start in China

ssilverman — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:10:05 +0000

Imagine travelling through China in 1994 by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, with little knowledge of the country’s culture or language, and a plan to spend “as little time as possible there.” New Yorker writer Peter Hessler describes the bizarre details of the experience, from talking alarm clocks that only speak in Russian, to the [more...]

Deeper Context: Eating Bitterness

ssilverman — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:06:25 +0000

Have you noticed how far a newscast will go to slap a “local interest” angle on an otherwise perfectly newsworthy international story, as if we couldn’t possibly care about something happening on the other side of the globe without seeing another American somehow involved? Take China, for instance. Every year over 200 million peasants flock to [more...]

Deeper Context: English Heart, Hindi Heartland

ssilverman — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:17:31 +0000

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the [more...]

James Cahill Announces New Online Lecture Series on Chinese Art

ssilverman — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:39:49 +0000

James Cahill, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Art at UC Berkeley and author of Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China, has spent the last two years working on a comprehensive historical account of early Chinese landscape painting, a topic that has been somewhat neglected in the field of Art History. The [more...]

The Remains of an Ancient Armada

ssilverman — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:44:04 +0000

Khubilai Khan

Seven hundred years after sinking to the bottom in the seething waters of a legendary battle, shipwreck fragments, pieces of armor, weapons, bones, and other relics lie submerged off the coast of Japan. These are the remains of Khubilai Khan’s navy, sent to invade Japan, but lost in the swirl of an [more...]

State and Spirituality in China

ssilverman — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:05:44 +0000

The American Public Media program Speaking of Faith recently rebroadcast a 2008 interview with author Mayfair Yang, in which Yang and host Krista Tippett discuss intersections of religion and state in China, and how attitudes toward religion in China have been shaped in part by the West. In her edited volume Chinese Religiosities, Yang explores [more...]

Susan Greenhalgh Wins Levenson Book Prize

ssilverman — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 21:52:37 +0000

Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, about China’s one-child rule, by Susan Greenhalgh, has recently won the Association for Asian Studies’ Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the Best Book on China Post-1900.

The prize, which is accompanied by a gift of $1000 to the author, is given to books that “make the greatest [more...]