Q: What first attracted you to the modern China field, and what makes you passionate about it?
A: I spent my junior year in college studying Mandarin in Taiwan, and it was during that year that I became very interested in modern Chinese history. Taiwan’s disputed status—"renegade province" versus temporary capital of the Republic of China—was fascinating to me, and I decided I wanted to learn more about how that political situation had arisen. I also very much enjoyed living in Taipei, a city where something is always happening, and that got me interested in Chinese urban history, which eventually became my research specialty. China’s rich urban history deserves to be better known throughout the world.
Q: How has your first year as Twentieth-Century China editor been so far? Are there things you’ve been challenged or surprised by, or things you’ve particularly enjoyed about your role?
A: So far, my work at TCC has gone very well, thanks largely to the help that the previous editor, James Carter, and the managing editor, Maura Cunningham, have given me. The Maney staff has been wonderful, as well. It certainly is a challenge to try to extend my knowledge of the large community of scholars of twentieth-century China, in order to find qualified reviewers and encourage more submissions. Our excellent editorial board helps with that. The scholarly community in our field has grown tremendously since I started graduate school in the mid-1980s. One of the greatest pleasures is seeing all the excellent work going on in post-1949 history. When I was an undergraduate political science major, that was my primary interest. It’s great to see historians bringing their disciplinary skills to bear on the history of the People’s Republic of China.
Q: What are some of your goals for Twentieth-Century China? Are there areas you’d like to see the journal develop or expand?
A: My main goal as editor is to maintain the high quality of the journal, which is the best in our field. We receive submissions from all over the world, and it is a pleasure working with emerging scholars, as well as established historians. Under James Carter, TCC featured some very valuable special issues, such as Vol. 37, Issue 1, on the history of music in twentieth-century China, guest edited by Joshua Howard (full access available at Maney’s website). I would like to see more of such carefully crafted special issues. I have also been thinking about how the journal might help introduce more Asian-language scholarship to our primarily Anglophone readership. Individual articles do this, of course, when their authors cite relevant Asian-language scholarly literature. It should be possible, though, to devise additional ways to bridge scholarly communities whose work appears in different languages.
Q: Do you have any words of wisdom for young scholars starting out in the field who would like to have their work published?
A: The most basic way to learn how to publish is to read the journals where you’d like your work to appear! Of course, the articles we publish almost all change a good deal between submission and publication, as authors respond to reviewers’ comments and work with the editors. But gaining a familiarity with the range of work we publish, as well as our standards for scholarly writing, certainly will give potential contributors a leg up in the process of getting published. One other piece of advice, which a senior colleague gave me when I was just starting my career: Be persistent! Don’t despair if you receive what seems like rather harsh comments on your manuscript—do your best to read them in a detached way and benefit from whatever seems helpful in them. And find mentors who are supportive.
Q: What are some of the books on your summer reading list, either modern-China related or otherwise?
A: In the China field, I recently read Prosperity’s Predicament (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) by Isabel Brown Crook and the late Christina Gilmartin, who was a member of TCC’s editorial board. The book is an ethnographic account of a small town in Sichuan in 1940, based on field notes that Crook collected with her colleague Yu Xiji at that time. These notes remained in storage for decades until Crook decided to draw on them to write a history of the town, which she calls Prosperity. She recruited Gilmartin as co-author, and together they produced a very vivid account of a community suffering through the years of war with Japan. Another book on my list is Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilization (Knopf, 2013), a history of people’s relationship with the maritime world. Next time I teach world civilizations, I am hoping to make use of the maritime perspective that Paine offers in his impressive survey. I also love reading fiction. A member of my book club is a big fan of the German writer Heinrich Von Kleist, and so we read and discussed his story Michael Koolhaas, about a horse-dealer who seeks justice after being mistreated by a local lord and ends up waging war on Saxony. I suggested that, by way of follow-up, the group might want to read the great Ming novel Outlaws of the Marsh next….
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Acting out Reform: Theater and Village in the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement
The ABCs of Monogamy in Republican China: Adultery, Bigamy, and Conjugal Fidelity
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