Yesterday
Min Joo Lee, "Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race (Rutgers UP, 2025) by Dr. Min Joo Lee explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Dr. ... Show More
30m 44s
Jan 16
Di Wu et. al, eds., "China As Context: Anthropology, Post-globalisation and the Neglect of China" (Manchester UP, 2025)
A provocative collaborative project, China as Context challenges the marginalization of Chinese-grounded ideas in academia, arguing that neglecting China distorts our understanding of global complexities. Through diverse ethnographic perspectives, this volume repositions China, u ... Show More
1h 19m
Jan 14
Q. Edward Wang, "Staple to Superfood: A Global History of the Sweet Potato" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, this versatile root became a staple that fueled rapid population growth. Introduced to Japan to stave off famine, sweet potatoes later ... Show More
53m 58s
Oct 2023
Anna Ziajka Stanton, "The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability" (Fordham UP, 2023)
Critics have long viewed translating Arabic literature into English as an ethically fraught process of mediating between two wholly incommensurable languages, cultures, and literary traditions. Today, Arabic literature is no longer “embargoed” from Anglophone cultural spaces, as ... Show More
37m 38s
Jul 2021
Germán Campos Muñoz, "The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Germán Campos Muñoz, The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the long and complex history of the Greco-Roman tradition in South America, arguing that the Classics have played a crucial, though often overlooked, role in the self-definition in t ... Show More
1h 34m
Oct 2022
Sandeep Banerjee, "Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony" (Routledge, 2021)
Sandeep Banerjee's book Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2021) illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British In ... Show More
37m 20s
Nov 2021
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, "Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska is an assistant professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Ithaca College. Her research and teaching focuses on the novel form and the theories connected to it, combining a formalist investigation of textual mechanics with an interest in ... Show More
31m 39s
Jun 2020
Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book ... Show More
1h 3m
Feb 2024
Michael Johnston, "The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Michael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Wh ... Show More
43m 19s
Oct 2023
Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury, "Transnational French Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to ... Show More
1h 2m
Apr 2024
Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.
The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new idea ... Show More
50m 2s
Apr 2021
Arnika Fuhrmann, "Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong" (SUNY Press, 2020)
Angkarn Kallayanapong (1926-2012) was arguably Thailand’s most famous poet of the modern period. His career spanned the era from the 1940s to the 1980s when Thai society was fundamentally transformed by rapid economic development and the process of globalization. His poetry is a ... Show More
47m 12s
European Decadence, a controversial artistic movement that flourished mainly in late-nineteenth-century France and Britain, has inspired several generations of Chinese writers and literary scholars since it was introduced to China in the early 1920s. Translated into Chinese as tuifei, which has strong hedonistic and pessimistic connotations, the concept of D ... Show More
