June 17, 2021

Challenged Friendships in Challenging Times

From the introduction to U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century

By Abraham Denmark

As the twenty-first century seems to be dominated by great power competition between China and the United States, everyone wonders whether war will come and how to avoid it. In U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century: Empowering Allies and Partners,...

June 17, 2021

Camp Century in a Changing Arctic

By Kristian H. Nielsen and Henry Nielsen

When Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken paid an official visit to the Kingdom of Denmark on May 16–20, 2021, he engaged with ministers from the Danish, Faroese, and Greenlandic governments. We know that they discussed bilateral ties and joint...

June 17, 2021

Which Way for the Biden/Blinken World Liberal Order?

By Leon Fink

In the spring 2017, Antony Blinken, then a resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, taught a seminar on America’s role in the world. Against a background of growing doubt among many Americans about the advantages of...

June 17, 2021

Browse Our SHAFR 2021 Virtual Exhibit Booth with Stephen Wesley

Hello there, I’m Stephen Wesley, the American history editor at Columbia University Press. Since the coronavirus pandemic has canceled most of the spring conferences—the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations annual program included—we are mounting virtual book exhibits on...

June 1, 2021

Transtopia: A Keyword for Our Century

By Howard Chiang

My first attempt to bring together Chinese studies and transgender studies dates to a conference I organized in 2009. That conference resulted in an edited volume called Transgender China (2012). Not long after the book appeared, I discovered that my...

May 27, 2021

Asian and American/Asian or American: Predicament and Possibilities of Being an Asian American

By Vishakha N. Desai

The first time I personally identified with the term Asian American was in 1993, when I had the opportunity to organize the first major exhibition of Asian American art exploring the issues of multicultural identities at the Asia Society, Asia/America:...

May 20, 2021

Announcing the Columbia University Press Fall 2021 Catalog

 Dear Readers, As we cautiously look forward to emerging from the pandemic, the books announced in this season’s catalog help us take stock of what we have learned and provide guidance on what might be next. The Wuhan Lockdown...

May 13, 2021

Q&A: Minae Mizumura on An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura is one of Japan’s most respected novelists. Published in 1995, her An I-Novel— a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s—radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. In this Q&A, Mizumura...

May 12, 2021

Eight or Nine Things to Know About Universities and Their Media

By Reinhold Martin

Ever since Pliny the Elder included a table of contents in his thirty-seven-volume Natural History as a shortcut for Vespasian Caesar, to whom that work was dedicated, the device has proved invaluable to readers with even less time on their...

May 9, 2021

Now More Than Ever, We Must Listen to Mothers’ Plight

By Shani Orgad

A variety of data shows that COVID-19 has had a catastrophic effect on women’s employment, and that it has been particularly punitive for mothers’ paid labor. Millions of mothers, in the United States and elsewhere, have been forced to cut...