All Episodes

Gavin Healy, "A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Voices from North Korea: Refugees Tell Their Stories

Emily Matson, "China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

Jieun Baek, "Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness" (Yale UP, 2026)

Whistling Arrows and Heavenly Horses: The Han-Xiongnu War

Steven Herman: Behind the White House Curtain

Catherine S. Chan, "Savage: The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Yuri Pines, "China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Chenchen Zhang, "Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Old Lhasa: A Biography of a Sacred City

Po-Yi Hung, "Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality" (U Washington Press, 2026)

WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration with Bruce Rutledge

Echoes of Incense on the Shikoku Pilgrimage with Don Weiss

Xiaofan Amy Li, "The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Paul French, "The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City" (St. Martin's Press, 2026)

Sima Qian–China’s Grand Historian

Hiroshima's Last Witnesses and Japan's Nuclear Future

Jonathan Cheng, "Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult" (Knopf, 2026)

Nozomi Naoi, "The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life" (MIT Press, 2026)

City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong with Simon Elegant

Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History Through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE–1936 CE)" (Cambria, 2025)

Isabel Heger-Laube, "China’s Landless Peasants and the Role of State-led Rural Urbanization: Narratives, Meaning Making, and the Puzzle of Social Stability" (Würzberg UP, 2025)

Joe Ngai and Nick Leung, "The Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era" (Scribner, 2026)

The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism in Asia and Beyond

Stephen G. Covell, "The Teaching and Teachings of Temple Buddhism in Contemporary Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Xian Aubin Wang, "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Fabio Lanza, "Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Benjamin J. Nourse, "The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism"(Lexington Books, 2025)

Xiaobing Li, "China’s Mahan: Admiral Liu Huaqing and the Rise of the Modern Chinese Navy (Naval Institute Press, 2026)

Infrastructure, Nickel, and the Politics of Polyalignment in Indonesia

Olivier Krischer and Shuxia Chen, "Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s-1980s" (Australian Centre on China in the World, 2025)

Don Baker, "Korean New Religions" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen, "Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

Colin Flahive, "The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China" (Earnshaw Books, 2026)

Lewis Ryder, "Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Chunmei Du, "Everyday Occupation: American Soldiers and Chinese Civilians in the Aftermath of World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Hannah Shepherd, "The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region" (U California Press, 2025)

Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Alicia Volk, "In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mengqi Wang, "Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Evan N. Dawley, "Taiwan: A People′s History" (Reaktion Books, 2026)

Gregg A. Brazinsky, "Cold War Comrades: An Emotional History of the Sino-North Korean Alliance" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Fyodor Tertititsky, "Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea" (Hurst, 2026)

Patrick Noonan, "Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan" (Columbia UP, 2025)

J. Michael Cole, "The Taiwan Tinderbox: The Island-Nation at the Centre of the New Cold War" (Polity, 2025)

David Krolikoski, "Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea" (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)

Andrea Horbinski, "Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989" (U California Press, 2025)

Through the Lens of Taiwan: Film, History, and Identity

Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)

Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)

John Kieschnick, "Buddhist Historiography in China" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mark L. Clifford, "The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic" (Free Press, 2024)

Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Isabella M. Weber, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate" (Routledge, 2021)

Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Frank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018)

Sarah Teasley, "Designing Modern Japan" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao" (Pantheon, 2017)

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022)

Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)

Eike Exner, "Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

Margherita Zanasi, "Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Austin Dean, "China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Jie Li, "Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era" (Duke UP, 2020)

Christopher Lovins, "King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Charles B. Jones, "Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)

Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Gwyn McClelland, "Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives" (Routledge, 2019)

M. Sheehy and K-D Mathes, "The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet" (SUNY Press, 2019)