News

• Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang published Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law (Columbia University Press). The book deals with the sociopolitical context of literary production in contemporary Taiwan.
• Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld co-edited A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective (Oxford University Press, New Delhi). The ten essays in this volume, assembled for Professor C. M. Naim, a pioneer of Urdu studies in the United States, exemplify the changing place of Urdu in the world today. The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development is a Hindi study by Somnath Gupt, translated, edited, and annotated by Kathryn Hansen (Seagull Books, Calcutta). Gupt's book is the best single reference for the early period of Parsi theatre history.
• Edeltraud Harzer's book The Yuktidãpikà: A Reconstruction of Sàïkhya Methods of Knowing (Shaker Verlag, Aachen, Germany) is in the series of Geisteskultur Indiens. Texte und Studien 8. Although the focus is on the Sankhya, the book documents a lively exchange of ideas between the Hindu and the Buddhist as well as other thinkers.
• Akbar Hyder has two books coming out this year: Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (Oxford University Press, New York) and Let's Study Urdu: An Introduction to Urdu Script and Grammar (Yale University Press, New Haven).
• Patricia Maclachlan co-edited a book with Sheldon Garon, entitled The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006). This collection of essays by historians and social scientists explores how different cultures have reacted to and, in some cases, resisted, acquisitive approaches to consumption. Patricia Maclachlan contributes a chapter on consumer attitudes toward genetically-modified foods in Japan, Britain, and the United States.
• Mark Metzler recently published Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan ( University of California Press, Berkeley). Lever of Empire explores global monetary dynamics via the story of the self-destruction of Japan's pro-Western liberal order in 1931.
• Patrick Olivelle edited Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE ( Oxford University Press, New York). This included the proceedings of an international conference funded by the College of Liberal Arts and held in 2004. Patrick Olivelle also recently published Language, Texts, and Society: Explorations in Ancient Indian Culture and Religion (University of Florence Press).
• Nancy Stalker has three recent publications, Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburô and the Rise of a New Religion in Imperial Japan (University of Hawaii Press), "Suicide, Boycotts and Embracing Tagore: The Japanese Popular Response to the 1924 US Immigration Exclusion Law," Japanese Studies 26 no. 2, and "Art and the New Religions: From Deguchi Onisaburô to the Miho Museum," Japanese Religions, vol 28, no. 2
• Rupert Snell published Hindi Conversation (Hodder Education, London / Contemporary Books, Chicago). This CD- based course in spoken Hindi complements his four other Hindi titles in the "Teach Yourself" series.
• Cynthia Talbot published India before Europe (Cambridge University Press).
• John Traphagan edited Wearing Cultural Syles in Japan: Concepts of Tradition and Modernity in Practice (State University of New York Press).