Works by Faculty

 “Zhao’s study presents a model of intellectual history. Smartly written, it excels in connecting the analysis of specific texts and concepts with broader trends in the social-political realm. His work helps demythologize Chinese thought and makes it legible to scholars around the world.” — Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

About the Author

Zhao Lu is Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU. He is the coauthor (with C. A. Cook) of Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching.

This book is the culmination of Chen's collection, selection, and editing of video materials over a decade. It reflects a combination of her teaching experiences at three universities and continual deliberation and revision. 

Due to the many changes over the past two decades, the bilingual courses Chen now teaches at Cornell University and NYU Shanghai differ greatly from the Business Chinese courses she taught at the beginning of my teaching career. Although language instruction is still important, the business component -- often informed by knowledge of history and culture -- has become central to the course.

About the Author

Chen Zhihong is a Research Professor at NYU Shanghai. She is currently holding professorships at both NYU Shanghai and Cornell University. She joined Cornell in 2005 and NYU Shanghai in 2014. She also was Senior Research Fellow at London School of Economics and taught at University of Virginia in 2001-2005. She was trained in three countries and in three different fields: She received her BA in German language and literature from Beijing Foreign Language College, and her first MA in International Studies from Beijing Normal University. She then received her second MA and a Doctor of Philosophy in International History and Sinology from Cologne University in Germany.

This volume published by the Truth & Wisdom press is the Chinese translation of the 2014 title, The Language of Game Theory: Putting Epistemics into the Mathematics of Games, by Adam Brandenburger, Director of the Program on Creativity and Innovation at NYU Shanghai. In eight papers written by Brandenburger and his colleagues over the course of 25 years, this work reconstructs game theory to focus on the centrality of how players reason about a game.

This restructured program, now called epistemic game theory, extends the classical definition of a game model to include a description of how the players reason about one another (including their reasoning about other players' reasoning). With this richer mathematical framework, it is possible to determine how players’ reasoning influences the way in which a game is played. Epistemic game theory includes traditional equilibrium-based theory as a special case, but makes it possible to understand a broad range of non-equilibrium behavior.

"Adam Brandenburger's work on the knowledge requirements implicit in game theory has become classic. These are of profound importance in understanding the relevance of game theory and, indeed, economic theory in general to the real economy. It is very good to have them collected, with an introduction that brings out the underlying themes."  

—Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University, USA, 1972 Nobel laureate in Economics

‘This extraordinary collection is a game-changer. Featuring the cutting-edge work of over forty scholars from across the globe, The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties is breathtaking in its range, incisive in analyses, and revolutionary in method and evidence. Here, fifty years after that iconic "1968," Western Europe and North America are finally de-centered, if not provincialized, and we have the basis for a complete remapping, a thorough reinterpretation of the "Sixties."’

—Jean Allman, J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities; Director, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

‘This is a landmark achievement. It represents the most comprehensive effort to date to map out the myriad constitutive elements of the "Global Sixties" as a field of knowledge and inquiry. Richly illustrated and meticulously curated, this collection purposefully "provincializes" the United States and Western Europe while shifting the loci of interpretation to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. It will become both a benchmark reference text for instructors and a gateway to future historical research.’

—Eric Zolov, Associate Professor of History; Director, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Stony Brook University

‘This important and wide-ranging volume de-centers West-focused histories of the 1960s. It opens up fresh and vital ground for research and teaching on Third, Second, and First World transnationalism(s), and the many complex connections, tensions, and histories involved.’

—John Chalcraft, Professor of Middle East History and Politics, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science

‘This book globalizes the study of the 1960s better than any other publication. The authors stretch the standard narrative to include regions and actors long neglected. This new geography of the 1960s changes how we understand the broader transformations surrounding protest, war, race, feminism, and other themes. The global 1960s described by the authors is more inclusive and relevant for our current day. This book will influence all future research and teaching about the postwar world.’

—Jeremi Suri, Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs; Professor of Public Affairs and History, The University of Texas at Austin

As the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 approaches, this book reassesses the global causes, themes, forms, and legacies of that tumultuous period. While existing scholarship continues to largely concentrate on the US and Western Europe, this volume will focus on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. International scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds explore the global sixties through the prism of topics that range from the economy, decolonization, and higher education, to forms of protest, transnational relations, and the politics of memory.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover?
 
In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.
 
Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in. 

This pathbreaking study provides the first comprehensive examination of India-China interactions in the broader contexts of Asian and world history. By focusing on material exchanges, transmissions of knowledge and technologies, networks of exchange during the colonial period, and little-known facets of interactions between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China, Tansen Sen argues convincingly that the analysis of India-China connections must extend beyond the traditional frameworks of nation-states or bilateralism. Instead, he demonstrates that a wide canvas of space, people, objects, and timeframe is needed to fully comprehend the interactions between India and China in the past and during the contemporary period. Considering as well the contributions of people and groups from beyond India and China, Sen also explores the interactions between Indians and Chinese outside the Asian continent. The author’s formidable array of sources, pulled from archives and libraries around the world, range from Chinese travel accounts to Indian intelligence reports. Examining the connected histories of the two regions, Sen fills a striking gap in the study of India and China in a global setting. (Description courtesy of publisher)

This book is a result of the Workshop on Conceptualizing and Reexamining India-China Connections at Fudan University’s International Center for the Studies of Chinese Civilization. In November 2013, over 20 scholars from China and abroad attended the workshop and reflected on previous research of China-India relations and discussed future prospects of topics including history, languages, literature, images, international relations spanning from ancient to modern times.

Tansen Sen is the editor of the book and author of one of the chapters.

The goal of "Problemas da Educacao" is to design better economic policies regarding the national education system in Brazil. The policy proposals follow from a comprehensive analysis of the most recent scientific evidence regarding education and social outcomes. Throughout the book, many myths about the education system in Brazil, such as that it was better in the past, are put to rest. The policy proposals emerge from a coherent vision about the path that the education system should follow, with suggestions to enhance short, medium and long-term outcomes for the Brazilian society.

This book is based on over a decade of conversations and encounters with one family - around one woman suffering from several chronic diseases in the United States. The book shows how chronic illness is folded into the world of the family, how illness reconfigures relationships of care, and how it directs the work of medicine in unexpected ways. “Chroniques de la maladie chronique” is an ethnographic portrait written on and through the body over time.

Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Häxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female “hysterics” and the mentally ill. 

In Realizing the Witch, Baxstrom and Meyers show how Häxan opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. Häxan is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of “documentary” and “fiction.” Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen’s attempt to tame the irrationality of “the witch” risked validating the very “nonsense” that such an effort sought to master and dispel. Häxan is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless “know” to be there.

The myth that Chinese civilization is monolithic, unchanging and perenially cut off from the rest of the world has long obscured China's diverse and dynamic history. Drawing on research, NYU Shanghai Provost and professor of history Joanna Waley-Cohen, provides an accessible account of China's fertile relations with other Asian cultures and the West from the days of the Silk Road to the present. Waley-Cohen argues that well before the arrival of Europeans in East Asia, China was integrated into a wide-ranging network of commercial, intellectual, religious and cultural contacts. Among the most influential features of this traffic was the spread of Buddhism from India to China. Later, Catholic missionaries would interpret the Chinese resistance to their religion as evidence of an arrogant complacency, just as Western emissaries would interpret China's objections to trade on Western terms. Waley-Cohen argues that throughout history, in trade, religion, ideology or technology, China has interacted with the rest of the world, so long as the rules of engagement were not externally imposed. She shows the reader a cosmopolitan China, a civilization actively engaged with other cultures and societies.

(Description courtesy of publisher.)

Was the primary focus of the Qing dynasty really civil rather than military matters? In this ground-breaking book, Joanna Waley-Cohen overturns conventional wisdom to put warfare at the heart of seventeenth and eighteenth century China. She argues that the civil and the military were understood as mutually complementary forces. Emperors underpinned military expansion with a wide-ranging cultural campaign intended to bring military success, and the martial values associated with it, into the mainstream of cultural life. The Culture of War in China is a striking revisionist history that brings new insight into the roots of Chinese nationalism and the modern militarised state.

Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger posed a profound question: 'What is life, and how did it emerge from non-life?' This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists ever since. 
Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology? What could have led the first replicating molecules up such a path? Now, developments in the emerging field of 'systems chemistry' are unlocking the problem. Addy Pross shows how the different kind of stability that operates among replicating molecules results in a tendency for chemical systems to become more complex and acquire the properties of life. Strikingly, he demonstrates that Darwinian evolution is the biological expression of a deeper, well-defined chemical concept: the whole story from replicating molecules to complex life is one continuous process governed by an underlying physical principle. The gulf between biology and the physical sciences is finally becoming bridged.

In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history.

In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.

In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia to life-saving Web sites like Ushahidi.com, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what's possible when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.