Key Books in Asian Studies
Watch this short video to see the books that will be showcased at the AAS 2026 conference.
Parallel Journeys
Eurasian History Through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE–1936 CE)
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low
This 520-page anthology offers a comparative history of Eurasia through several firsthand travel accounts spanning 2,400 years. Thematic pairings—Marco Polo and Zhao Rugua, Matteo Ricci and Xie Qinggao, Lord Macartney and Guo Songtao—highlight how cross-cultural encounters shaped identity, empire, and global consciousness. Featuring newly translated classical Chinese texts, critical introductions, maps, and full-color illustrations, Parallel Journeys provides a unique framework for teaching and researching global history, Asian studies, world literature, and cultural exchange.
https://www.cambriapress.com/ParallelJourneys
The Wu Ming-Yi Companion
Literature, Environment, and Translation through Compound Eyes
Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu
Wu Ming-Yi, the youngest ever recipient of Taiwan’s prestigious National Award for Arts for literature, is a defining voice in global ecological literature. This first comprehensive volume in English dedicated to his oeuvre features essays examining his fiction and nature writing through environmental, Indigenous, and Sinophone perspectives. It also includes a personal essay and in-depth interview with Wu, alongside images he selected. A vital resource for understanding Taiwan’s literary imagination and its place in world literature.
https://www.cambriapress.com/WuMing-Yi
Ecological and Environmental Turns
(Re)mapping China’s Sociocultural Landscape through Ecocinema
Shuqin Cui
This innovative study of Chinese ecocinema analyzes 14 influential films including documentaries, animations, and blockbusters that challenge human-centered worldviews and highlight urgent ecological themes. Bridging film analysis, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities, it offers accessible frameworks for teaching across disciplines. Featuring 44 images and chapters on activism, industrialization, and pandemic narratives, this is an essential resource not only for Asian studies but for courses engaging film, climate, ecology, and the global conversations shaping ecocriticism and sustainability discourse.
https://www.cambriapress.com/EcologicalEnvironmentalTurns
A Handbook of Sinitic Languages, Dialects, and Non-standard Mandarin
Cornelius C. Kubler and Clement Chu Sing Lau
An essential teaching and learning resource, this handbook offers comparative analyses of ten major Sinitic languages and non-standard Mandarin through 66 expressions and 16 annotated speech samples, accompanied by an hour of audio recordings (open access on the book’s webpage). Covering Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue, Min, and Mandarin varieties shaped by Wu, Southern Min, and Cantonese, this resource supports courses in Chinese linguistics, pedagogy, and advanced language study.
https://www.cambriapress.com/SiniticHandbook
Reading Art in Literature
The Marvelous Case of The Story of the Stone
Dore J. Levy
A powerful case study in how fiction transforms art objects into narrative meaning, this original literary—not art-historical—analysis reveals how The Story of the Stone transforms paintings, heirlooms, and gardens into symbols of memory, emotion, and illusion. Featuring full-color illustrations, it advances new approaches to interpreting visual culture in fiction and sheds new light on material culture, allegory, and aesthetics. This interdisciplinary study will enrich scholarship in world literature, symbolism, and visual culture well beyond Chinese literary studies.
https://www.cambriapress.com/ReadingArtinLiterature
Revolutionary Taiwan
Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order
Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison
Named a Taipei Times Notable Book of 2025, Revolutionary Taiwan makes a bold case for understanding Taiwan’s democratization as a genuine revolution—one that created a de facto nation still denied recognition. In an era of global tension, it challenges narrow narratives that reduce Taiwan to a flashpoint or historical footnote. Centering Taiwanese voices with clarity and force, this timely book reframes sovereignty and self-determination for anyone seeking to understand democracy in the twenty-first century.
https://www.cambriapress.com/RevolutionaryTaiwan
Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks
Yang Mu and His Postcolonial Poetry
Wen-chi Li
This groundbreaking study examines the poetry of Yang Mu, a pivotal Taiwanese writer who used Chinese literary forms to challenge Sinocentric narratives during Taiwan’s White Terror and democratization. Drawing on postcolonial theory and close reading, it explores his poetic use of ambivalence, mimicry, and minor narrative to resist cultural hegemony and reclaim historical memory. A major contribution to Taiwan studies, Sinophone literature, and postcolonial criticism, this book offers rich insights into poetry, identity, and politics in East Asia.
https://www.cambriapress.com/TaiwaneseFace
Beyond Sinocentrism
Ethnocultural Others in Early Modern China
Huili Zheng
Challenging the portrayal of imperial China as isolated and inward-looking, this study reveals how early modern fiction engaged with ethnocultural others through pride, anxiety, curiosity, and critique. Through works such as Yesou puyan, Jinghua yuan, Taiwan Waiji, and Haishang chentianying, it uncovers a dynamic interplay of Sinocentric confidence and openness to global knowledge. Offering a vital corrective to Sinocentric and Eurocentric paradigms, it rethinks identity, empire, and cultural order amid expanding literary and geopolitical horizons.
https://www.cambriapress.com/BeyondSinocentrism
Art by Literati
Calligraphic Carving in Middle Qing China
Hye-shim Yi
Awarded the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and featuring color illustrations, this book reveals how literati in late 18th–19th century China carved calligraphy into teapots, inkstones, and other objects—blurring boundaries between elite art and artisan craft. Analyzing Chen Hongshou, Yixing teapots, and collaborative inscription practices, it reinterprets calligraphy as embodied, material, and social. A major contribution to art history, calligraphy studies, and Chinese cultural history, this is essential reading for scholars of literati culture and artisanal aesthetics.
https://www.cambriapress.com/ArtbyLiterati
From Rural China to the Ivy League
Reminiscences of Transformations in Modern Chinese History
Yü Ying-shih
Translated by Michael S. Duke and Josephine Chiu-Duke
Winner of the Kluge Prize, Tang Prize in Sinology, and Hong Kong Book Prize, Yü Ying-shih authored more than 70 books and hundreds of articles. In this powerful memoir, he traces his journey from rural Anhui to Harvard, reflecting on China’s cultural, political, and intellectual upheavals. This deeply personal account offers rare insight into one of the most influential historians of our time, whose life was shaped by a commitment to scholarship and humanism.
https://www.cambriapress.com/YuYing-shih