Works by Faculty

Chen Jian, Distinguished Global Network Professor of History, authors a new book, Zhou Enlai: A Life. This is the first comprehensive biography of Zhou in English written with the support of multi-lingual, multi-archival, and multi-source research. It portrays Zhou as a devoted Communist revolutionary, an influential politician and statesman, an accomplished diplomatic giant and, in the final analysis, a human being. It also brings to light Zhou’s visions and aspirations, political acumen, and enormous administrative and executive capacity. More broadly, the Zhou story told by Chen epitomizes China’s tortuous path toward modernity, while helping the reader understand how China becomes the nation it is today.

About the author

Chen Jian is the Director of the NYU Shanghai-ECNU Center on Global History, Economy, and Culture, a Distinguished Global Network Professor of History at NYU Shanghai, and a Global Network Professor in the Department of History at NYU. He is also Zijiang Distinguished Visiting Professor at East China Normal University. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, he was the Michael J. Zak Professor of History for US-China Relations at Cornell University, Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics, and visiting research professor at the University of Hong Kong (2009-2013). He holds a PhD from Southern Illinois University and an MA from Fudan University and East China Normal University in Shanghai.

In her latest book, Professor Greenspan reimagines the relationship between China and ubiquitous wireless technology by synthesizing contemporary media theory with modern Chinese thought on three critical historical figures including Tan Sitong, Xiong Shili, and Mou Zongsan. The book takes a fresh look at the key issues around technological evolution in a shifting geopolitical landscape, offers an alternative to certain myopias of Western media theory, and presents a deep, historical engagement with issues and debates surrounding Chinese cyberculture.

About the author

Anna Greenspan is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Global Media at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU. She is also a Co-Director of NYU Shanghai's Center of AI and Culture. Her research focuses on urban futures and emerging media. Anna holds a PhD in Continental Philosophy from Warwick University, UK.

ISBN: ISBN-10: 1399519735; ISBN-13: 978-1399519731

Co-edited by Associate Professor of Contemporary Global Media Anna Greenspan and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) Bogna Konior, who lead NYU Shanghai’s Center for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Culture, along with former Visiting Professor Benjamin Bratton, this new volume tracks the history of Chinese AI and reexamines China’s engagement with AI by moving beyond the clichés that dominate contemporary debate. Contributing experts from across various fields draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policy-making, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics, and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism. It provides a fresh perspective on what AI is today in China, and what it might become.

About the authors

Anna Greenspan is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Global Media at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU. She is also a Co-Director of NYU Shanghai's Center of AI and Culture. Her research focuses on urban futures and emerging media. Anna holds a PhD in Continental Philosophy from Warwick University, UK.

Bogna Konior is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) at NYU Shanghai. She is also a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid.

In this first English translation of Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan’s 1830s saga at sea (as known as Hainan Zazhu in Chinese), Cai documents his encounters with the daily life, culture, religious practices, and government affairs of the early Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam. Assistant Professor of Global China Studies Zhao Lu and historian Kathlene Baldanza have made Cai’s adventures accessible to English-speakers for the first time, while providing a comprehensive introduction which explains the social, political, and economic context of his travels, along with extensive annotation and a glossary of terms.

About the author

Zhao Lu is an Associate Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Before joining NYU Shanghai, he was a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2017–2018) and a research fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF), at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2013–2017). 

This new volume tackles current interpretative problems in the study of the opening of Japan to the Western world in the 19th century by looking beyond existing methods and theories to rethink the country and its global connections through new organizing frameworks. Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) Warren A. Stanislaus’ chapter, “Laughing at Civilisation: Charles Wirgman’s Japan Punch and the Reopening of Great Britain,” reveals the unlikely story of a popular treaty port humor magazine, which diverged from a civilizing mission to playfully reimagine the opening of Japan and satirize Western notions of progress.

About the author

Warren A. Stanislaus is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) at NYU Shanghai. He received his DPhil (PhD) in history from the University of Oxford (Pembroke College). Warren is interested in how global cultural flows across national borders shape emotions, identities and popular culture. In particular, employing transnational approaches to modern and contemporary society, his work explores forces of globalization from below. Focusing on media and the politics of popular culture, Warren specializes in research that examines Japan’s transnational connectivity with East Asia and the wider world.

The rapid development of quantum technologies has driven a revolution in related research areas such as quantum computation and communication, and quantum materials. The first prototypes of functional quantum devices are beginning to appear, frequently created using ensembles of atoms, which allow the observation of sensitive, quantum effects, and have important applications in quantum simulation and matter wave interferometry. This modern text offers a self-contained introduction to the fundamentals of quantum atom optics and atomic many-body matter wave systems. Assuming a familiarity with undergraduate quantum mechanics, this book will be accessible for graduate students and early career researchers moving into this important new field. A detailed description of the underlying theory of quantum atom optics is given, before development of the key, quantum, technological applications, such as atom interferometry, quantum simulation, quantum metrology, and quantum computing.

About the Author:

Tim Byrnes is an Assistant Professor of Physics at NYU Shanghai. He is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan. He holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Professor Byrnes' research interests are in quantum information technologies, condensed matter physics, and AMO (atomic, molecular, optical) physics. Specifically, he is interested in various applications of Bose-Einstein condensates to quantum information. He is also interested in the interface of physics and biology and emergent phenomena.

Ebubechukwu O. Ilo-Okeke is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai.

Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia, and the Cold War explores the dystopian and destructive dimensions of the Space Age and challenges conventional narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry. Concentrating on weapons, warfare and violence, this provocative volume examines real and imagined endeavors of arming the skies and conquering the heavens. The third and final volume in the groundbreaking European Astroculture trilogy, Militarizing Outer Space zooms in on the interplay between security, technopolitics and knowledge from the 1920s through the 1980s. Often hailed as the site of heavenly utopias and otherworldly salvation, outer space transformed from a promised sanctuary to a present threat, where the battles of the future were to be waged. Astroculture proved instrumental in fathoming forms and functions of warfare’s futures past, both on earth and in space. The allure of dominating outer space, the book shows, was neither limited to the early twenty-first century nor to current American space force rhetorics.

About the Author:

Alexander Geppert is Associate Professor of History and European Studies at New York University. He holds a joint appointment at NYU Shanghai and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies in New York City. Born and raised in Germany, he has four history degrees, including a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. From 2010 to 2016 he directed the Emmy Noether research group ‘The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century’ at Freie Universität Berlin.

In his latest book, Chancellor Tong Shijun argues that “learning to become (one’s true self)” is the fundamental purpose of education. In a series of speeches and essays, he reflects on the philosophy and governance structure of Chinese universities, analyzes the educational development of China and its major challenges, and considers the spiritual traditions of Chinese academia and lessons gained over the years. “When I first started writing this book, I intended to use my expertise in philosophy to gain a better understanding of universities and education,” Tong says. “When the book was finished, I realized that my experience as a professor and university leader had also shaped my philosophy study in an interesting way.”

About the Author: 

Tong Shijun became the second Chancellor of NYU Shanghai on June 1, 2020. A scholar of Western and Chinese philosophy, he served as an administrator and professor of philosophy at East China Normal University for more than 20 years. 

Perception refers to the process of people organizing, identifying, and interpreting sensory information to understand the presented information or environment, such as distinguishing between different odors or discriminating between different shades of colors. Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called “perceptual learning” and has become an active area of research of both theoretical and practical significance. Dosher and Lu’s book provides a comprehensive and integrated treatment of the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain, for active perceptual learning researchers, and to describe and develop the basic techniques and principles for readers who want to successfully incorporate perceptual learning into applied developments. 

“Barbara and I started doing research in perceptual learning in 1997. The field has transformed since then, and this book tells the story of what we came to know about both the phenomena and the theories,” Lu says. “The publication of this book is a major milestone in our more than 20 years of collaboration. It is also the beginning of many new, exciting joint research projects. I really appreciate Barbara’s friendship and the opportunity to work with her. ”

About the Author:

Zhong-Lin Lu is NYU Shanghai’s Chief Scientist and Associate Provost for Sciences. He also leads the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai. As Chief Scientist, he sets NYU Shanghai’s strategic vision for fostering scientific research and transforming into a world-class research university. 

Environmental activists the world over are increasingly looking to China as a model of effective state-led environmentalism, concentrating decisive political, economic, and epistemic power to meet critical environmental goals. But through top-down initiatives, regulations, and campaigns to mitigate pollution and environmental degradation, the Chinese authorities also promote control over the behavior of individuals and enterprises, pacification of borderlands, and expansion of Chinese power and influence across the developing world, and even into outer space. Given the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions of species from extinction, we need to consider whether coercive green policymaking can show us the way. China Goes Green explores both its promises and risks. 

“This project is a combination of our years of research and reading into China's environmental protection policies, both independently at the beginning, and then collaboratively in more recent periods,” said Li, who co-authored China Goes Green with Judith Shapiro of American University. 

“Our sources are environmental officials, journalists, scientists and even individual garbage collectors in the city of Shanghai. Getting to know these people has made me so much more sensitive to why environmental problems are so complex,” Li said. “There is no silver bullet. What solutions China has found are the result of very hard work by tens of thousands of real women and men in this country.”

About the Author:

Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai, and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU.

Within Asia, the period from 1849 to 1960s had witnessed the rise and decline of the Pax Britannica, the growth of multiple and often competing anti-colonial movements, and the entrenchment of the nation-state system. Beyond Pan-Asianism follows the complex interactions between China, India, and their neighbouring societies against this background of imperialism and nationalist resistance.

The contributors to this volume, from India, the West, and the Chinese-speaking world, write about a tremendous breadth of figures, including novelists, soldiers, intelligence officers, archivists, among others, by deploying published and archival materials in multiple Asian and Western languages. This volume also attempts to answer the question of how China-Indian connectedness in the modern period should be narrated. Instead of providing one definite answer, it engages with prevailing and past frameworks--notable 'Pan-Asianism' and 'China/India as Method'--with an aim to provoke further discussions on how histories of China-India and, by extension, the non-Western world, can be conceptualized.     

About the Author

Tansen Sen is Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Professor, NYU. He specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism.

David Yu has been studying and investing in aircraft for more than 20 years. In his first book, Yu shares the results of long-term study of the underlying aspects of aircraft as an investable asset class and looks at the drivers of the aviation finance global markets, particularly the Chinese/Asian market. Especially geared for “institutional investors within the real asset space,” the book includes a detailed study of aircraft residual values and comparisons to other real asset classes and benchmarks.

“The origins of this book started over five years ago with the  goal of scientifically and rigorously establishing the underlying dynamics of the industry. We are now in the middle of one of the largest historical impact periods on the industry due to COVID-19. This on-going exogenous shock and time indoors inspired a new chapter on the subject which was not anticipated before,” Yu says.

About the Author:

David Yu is Assistant Professor of Practice in Finance. He focuses on investing and financing cross border and on real assets.

The last century of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644) saw many troubles and challenges from abroad. Pirates raided the coast, Europeans challenged the traditional world order of the tribute system, and the everlasting threat from the northern steppe people continued to raise concerns for the state’s survival. This climate of uncertainty resulted in many Ming literati discussing foreign countries. During the last decades of the Ming era, seven authors wrote monographs that can be considered a form of Chinese “world history.” The authors describe the geography, history, and political systems of foreign countries and regions, ranging from China’s close neighbors Japan and Mongolia to more distant lands such as Mogadishu and Europe. This book studies each of the seven authors’ knowledge and perceptions of the world and focuses especially on countries linked to China by a maritime border, namely Siam (Thailand), Malacca, and Portugal. The book combines a close textual and paratextual analysis with a biographical study to understand why the authors wrote the texts the way they did. This is the first comprehensive introduction to these texts to contribute to the understanding of late Ming historiography and late Ming scholars’ perceptions of foreign countries.

“As part of my research for this book, I visited several libraries in North America and Asia to study the original Ming prints and manuscripts. One manuscript in particular was fun to examine, the Siyi guangji 四夷廣記 by Shen Maoshang 慎懋賞 now in the National Central Library, Taipei. At some point in its history, this book had been taken apart and its pages been rebound. During this process, parts of the text were lost,” Papelitzky says. “As I visited the library, I tried to figure out the original order of the chapters in the Siyi guangji, looking at water stains and tiny holes in the paper that gave clues about which pages had originally been together. This might seem like a monotonous task but I really enjoyed working not only with the written text but also the material object.”

During the early twentieth century, neo-humanist reforms transformed the landscape of Spanish education. Building upon the new science of child study, known as paidology, teachers joined pedagogues around the world in reading works by Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and others. Celebrating open-air schools, sensorial education and active methods of learning, intellectuals including Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Carmen Conde sought to contrast a positivist pedagogy with a phenomenological approach to childhood. Education, they claimed, must adapt to the child’s developing body and mind.

Bringing together avant-garde art, poetry, teachers’ manuals, intelligence tests, and children’s creative production, Anna Kathryn Kendrick traces how reformers drew upon inter­national models to advance ‘catholic’ notions of holism and universality. This award-winning study demonstrates that the fight for an education in mind, body, and spirit had not only intellectual but also practical consequences which were to shape an entire generation before the Spanish Civil War.

About the Author:

Anna Kathryn Kendrick is Director of Global Awards and Scholarships and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai.

A textbook with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries.

This timely and refreshingly real–world focused textbook examines some of the world's most critical policy issues through a macroeconomics lens. After presenting analytical foundations, modeling tools, and theoretical perspectives, Economics of Global Business goes a step further than most other texts, with a practical look at the local and multinational tradeoffs facing economic policymakers in more than fifty countries. Topics range from income equality and the financial crisis to GDP, inflation and unemployment, and, notably, one of the first macroeconomic examinations of climate change. Written by a globetrotting economist who teaches and consults on three continents, Economics of Global Business aims not for definitive answers but rather to provide a better understanding of the context-dependent rationales, constraints, and consequences of economic policy decisions. 

The book covers long-run and short-run growth (with examples from the United States, China, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and Vietnam); financial crises and central banks; monetary and fiscal policies; government budgets; currency regimes; climate change and macroeconomics; income inequality; and globalization. All chapters rely on recent and historical examples of economic policy in action. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students.

"Economics of Global Business focuses on the pragmatic aspects of policy making. This is a bold and novel approach to economics, a refreshing take on what can be an arid subject. Readers will encounter many examples from all over the world, and the book incorporates all the main issues of our time, such as climate change, the great financial crisis, and income inequality."— Otaviano Canuto, Executive Director, World Bank Group

About the Author

Rodrigo Zeidan is an Associate Professor of Practice of Business and Finance at NYU Shanghai. He contributes to media platforms in Europe, Asia, and, the United States, including Bloomberg, TheConversation, and Americas Quarterly.