Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun ..read more

Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the rich and ribald world of kibyōshi, a short-lived (1778-1807) subgenre of books combining text and illustration on the same page, much like comic books and manga today. This book presents a selection of five kibyōshi in which monsters play central roles. Each of these short books is reproduced in its entirety, accompanied by Kabat’s translations and commentary. Kabat’s selection of tales communicates the entertainment valu ..read more

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorised and demonised, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and c ..read more

Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority?  In Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia Univer ..read more

The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been the silent centre of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on ..read more

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.  Life Under ..read more

“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part of the human community.” In her new book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 2019), Sandra Fahy gives a thorough and compelling analysis of testimonies and reports on North Korea. Fahy explores the United Nation’s report as well as North Korea’s response to the report. The book also tackles issues of famine and hunger, informat ..read more

In 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifully written in for over three decades. There are reports of armed clashes in Kyoto. It’s said that the emperor has ordered the expulsion of the foreigners, and it’s also said that a large band of vagabond soldiers has gathered in Senju in Edo. It’s said that in Edo people are wearing their [winter] kimono linings, and in Nikko it has been snowing. I don’t know if it’s true. But really, every day we hear nothing but disturbing rumors. The Meiji Rest ..read more

An Interview with Todd McGowan about his recent Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book advocates for the relevance of Hegel’s dialectical method to questions of contemporary theory and politics. It seeks to disabuse readers of common misapprehensions concerning Hegel’s philosophy, such as the familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis schema to which the dialectic has so often been reduced, and to show that the concept of contradiction understood in Hegelian fashion is intrinsically subversive of authority. By championing contradict ..read more

What makes a person want to become a terrorist? Who becomes involved in terrorism, and why? In what ways does participating in violent extremism change someone? And how can people become deradicalized? John Horgan―one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of terrorism―takes readers on a globe-spanning journey into the terrorist mindset. Drawing on groundbreaking personal interviews as well as decades of research from psychologists and others, he traces the pathways that lead people into violent extremism and explores what happens to them as their involvement deepens. Horgan provides ..read more