New Books in East Asian Studies

By: Marshall Poe
  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
    New Books Network
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Episodes
  • Petya Andreeva, "Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
    Jan 25 2025
    Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) focuses on this animal-style imagery, examining the dissemination of this image system. Filled with fascinating images carefully chosen from an enormous geographical scope, Petya Andreeva's vivid book explores how communities used animal-style design to create and define status, to bond alliances together, and to showcase steppe know-how and worldliness in sedentary communities. Fantastic Fauna should appeal to those in Eurasian history, East Asian history, art and archeology, and those interested in thinking about steppe art. Interested listeners should also check out Petya's chapter on the Golden Hoard (available here), part of an Open-Access UNESCO volume on the Silk Roads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Brian Hioe, "Taipei at Daybreak" (Repeater, 2025)
    Jan 23 2025
    Brian Hioe is a Taipei-based writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ who is best known for his journalism regarding Taiwan’s social and political landscape. Much of his work appears in New Bloom Magazine, an online magazine that he helped establish in 2014 to cover activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific at large. In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Brian about his debut fictional novel, Taipei at Daybreak (Repeater Books, 2025). Taipei at Daybreak is a work of autofiction that draws heavy inspiration from Brian’s experiences with activist movements including not just Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, but also Occupy Wall Street in the US and post-Fukushima disaster anti-nuclear protests in Japan. Atop this undercurrent of activism, the novel dives into its protagonist's inner turmoil and coming-of-age, giving readers a highly personal insight into the nature of 2010s-era social movements. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
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    37 mins
  • Jing Xu, "'Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Jan 22 2025
    How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? Answer these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children. Jing Xu skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs’ extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic interpretation, natural language processing, and machine-learning techniques. Through a lens of social cognition, Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge UP, 2024) unravels the complexities of children’s moral growth, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics. Writing through and about fieldnotes, the author connects the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously. This book is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students of anthropology and educational studies. Throughout the interview, the term “Chinese” is used in the broad sense of cultural heritage. Jing Xu is a research scientist at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Tsinghua University, China, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, and received postdoctoral training in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. She pursues interdisciplinary research, bringing together anthropological and psychological perspectives to study how humans become moral persons. She is the author of two monographs: The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford U Press, 2017) and “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge U Press, 2024). Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
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    1 hr and 42 mins

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