New Books Network

The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong’s historic Japanese community received the attention it deserves through Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024). In this compelling book, Dr Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen guide readers into the Meiji era, reconstructing history through the lives of ordinary people whose stories have long been overlooked. During our interview, Yoshio explained her desire to place this research within a broader East-West framework, a cross-cultural perspective reflected in her own collaboration and long-term friendship with Georgina.

Perhaps the book’s most moving aspect is the authors’ compassion for Kiya Saki, a karayuki-san (sex worker) from Nagasaki who migrated to Hong Kong and later died by suicide. Yoshiko and Georgina spoke movingly about discovering her story. Like Saki, both have experienced life far from home and understand the challenges of building a life as a sojourner. Her tragic fate inspired them to investigate the lives of early Japanese residents through the meticulous study of 470 graves in Happy Valley.

Beyond individual tragedies, the book reveals a diaspora divided by deep social tensions. While the Meiji state sought to project the image of a modern, civilised nation, the Japanese community in Hong Kong was effectively a ‘community of two halves’. Elite business figures, including Mitsubishi managers, existed alongside marginalised karayuki-san and boarding-house operators.

Yet from this division emerged a remarkable story of solidarity. Through institutions, wealthier members of the community funded healthcare, financial assistance, and dignified burials for those in need. Driven by the necessity of mutual support in a foreign colonial port, they transformed a fragmented group of migrants into a resilient and organised community.

This dynamic resonates with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which views the cemetery as a counter-site where distinctions of class, gender, and status dissolve. The Meiji graves vividly illustrate this reality. In death, social divisions that shaped everyday life become impossible to conceal: the graves of marginalised karayuki-san lie alongside those of the community’s elite. Together, they offer a unique window into a history shaped by colonialism, human trafficking, global trade, and Japan’s transformation into a world power.

Richly narrated and grounded in extensive archival research, Meiji Graves in Happy Valley fills an important gap in the histories of both Hong Kong and Japan. By recovering the experiences of ordinary migrants, merchants, workers and sojourners, it reveals the human stories behind larger processes of migration, empire, and modernisation, offering a fresh perspective on the intertwined histories of Hong Kong and Japan.

Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. Born in England, she grew up in Switzerland and has called Hong Kong home since 1990.

Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator.

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The modern relationship between the Vatican and the State of Israel is rooted in a long history of hostility between Judaism and Roman Catholicism. Through the centuries, popes and theologians marginalized the Jewish people, assigning them collective guilt for the death of Jesus Christ and claiming that the sacred territory of Palestine was the true patrimony of the Roman Catholic Church. With the advent of political Zionism in the nineteenth century, Catholic fears of a Jewish-dominated Palestine were renewed.

Contesting Zion: The Vatican, American Catholics, and the Partition of Palestine (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the Vatican and the Zionist movement from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the first decade of Israeli statehood. Adrian Ciani considers the transnational nature of Catholic responses to Zionism and the creation of Israel, with a focus on the Catholic Church in the United States. From the 1920s through the 1950s, American Catholic leaders became crucial intermediaries between Washington and the Vatican. Speaking as both loyal American citizens and devout Catholics, they were uniquely positioned to articulate the Vatican’s policy objectives to the American government, including on the future of Palestine. American Catholics were also instrumental in advocating the church’s Palestine policy at the United Nations, playing a central role in the Holy See’s attempts to shape the twentieth-century international order.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober.

Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Civic Bargain (2023), co-written with Brook Manville, he was previously a Madison’s Notes guest in Season 3.

Drawing on his 2015 book, we discuss the history of ancient Greece and the political legacy of its classical period. Our conversation ranges from the Bronze Age Collapse and the age of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to the rise of the Greek city-state and decline of democratic Athens.

We discuss contingencies of the Peloponnesian war, the cases for and against Alcibiades, whether the polity flourished under Macedonian and Roman empires, the relationship of philosophy to civics, was Socrates guilty and how much did Plato invent about him, in what way the god Hermes symbolized Greek trade in the Mediterranean, if James Madison truly understood ancient history, and lastly Ober’s work with the growing civics programs in American higher education.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Frank Stahnisch, Professor of the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary in Canada, about his new book Great Minds in Despair – The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989 (2025, McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Great Minds in Despair examines the long-term effects of the forced migration of neuroscientists from the German lands in the 20th century on scientific and medical cultures in North America, and on the researchers themselves. The book traces the lives and careers of approximately 400 German-speaking doctors, scientists, and researchers over two generations. It is a fascinating read that anyone interested in migration, science history, Nazi Germany, transatlantic relations, Jewish Studies, and much more should read.

Reference

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In the early twentieth century, as variety shows flooded Canadian stages, new forms of blackface, inspired by modern forms of amusements, changed the theatre. In this era marked by progressive social reforms, the stage embodied the modern ethos of imitation, mimicry, and change.

Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919 (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2026) covers a moment when Canadians did not produce professional theatre, but they built amusement parks, wrote songs, and produced records. As the stage (drama), and its variants (burlesque, light opera) adapted elements from the new stages (amusement parks, social dance, and film), the modern culture popularized forms of blackface that impacted white, Anglo-Protestant, and English-speaking audiences, and drew theatrical criticism.

This book explores a twenty-year period in Canada’s history when there was no media regulation, and no mandate to promote Canadian culture. Through an examination of theatrical reviews, images, and textual records, Staging Blackface in Canada locates how the Canadian stage became a playground for ethnic jokes, racial caricature, and women’s emancipation. It also locates some of the first Black musicals and operas to appear on Canadian stages.

This episode also mentions a previous Additions to the Archive episode with assistant curator of New York City’s Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey, and her exhibition “Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage & Screen.”

You can find Cheryl at her website, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn And check out her previous appearances on the Additions to the Archive podcast and Substack.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Join YIVO for a conversation about the resurgence of interest in Jewish identity and history in Lithuania today. Jonathan Brent will moderate a conversation among Miglė Anušauskaitė, a Lithuanian cartoonist and archivist working on the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, Anna Avidan, Managing Director of LitvakWorld, Kęstas Pikūnas, publisher of Passport, and former Lithuanian Minister of Culture, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. Together they will explore topics such as the historical and social realities of Jewish-Lithuanian relations, and the challenges of building a multi-cultural, democratic society in Lithuania today.

This panel originally took place on December 7, 2021

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New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight delivers a tour de force of character-driven suspense with her latest novel, Someone Else's Husband (Knopf, 2026), the story of two women whose secrets and desires entrap them in a deadly love triangle. You had to rely on the power of love. That he loved you enough not to do the thing that would break your heart. It was paper-thin ice on which to stake your survival. Gretchen Falk, a Park Avenue sophisticate born into great wealth and blessed with a storybook marriage, knows she lives a charmed life, and she’s not about to risk losing any part of it. That’s why she tried to convince Richard, her devoted husband and the father to their three children, not to join his old college friends on an expedition almost eight thousand miles away, to the imposing peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Little did she know that the beautiful artist climbing alongside him might prove the far greater danger. Frankie Callahan’s dream of artistic success is within reach, with her career-making exhibition at a celebrated New York gallery only weeks away. If all goes well, the show will leave her financially independent, free of the tainted money that ties her to a past—and a man—she’s desperate to escape. To mark this new beginning, she is going to climb Kilimanjaro. But when she learns she’s the sole female accompanying a group of male friends, Frankie realizes that nothing about the trip will be as she expected. She certainly hasn’t counted on meeting anyone like the very charismatic, very rich, very married Richard Falk. By the time they descend—with one fewer in their group than when they began—they have lost more than they ever could have imagined. Now, less than two weeks after their return to New York, Frankie’s East Village loft is a blood-soaked crime scene, and Richard has been charged with her murder. It falls to Gretchen to figure how the life she so carefully constructed could have imploded so completely. There are only two things she knows for sure: she’s the only woman Richard has ever loved, and he would never hurt anyone. Someone Else’s Husband is the sweeping and suspenseful story of two women on a collision course with love—and with each other—in which no one is right and everyone is very, very wrong.

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Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

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What does doctoral supervision actually look like in contemporary academia?

In this NBN episode, Fredrik Saxegaard discusses the open-access book Doctoral Supervision Across Boundaries: Interdisciplinarity as Process and Practice (Scandinavian UP, 2026), co-edited with Mia Lövheim, and Geir Afdal.

The conversation challenges the traditional image of supervision as a private relationship between a supervisor and a PhD candidate. Instead, the book argues that supervision today is distributed across networks, institutions, peers, reviewers, research schools, and academic cultures.

We discuss:

Drawing on experiences from the Scandinavian RVS research school, the book offers a critical rethinking of supervision as a relational, collective, and institutionally embedded practice.

This episode will be particularly relevant to supervisors, doctoral candidates, academic developers, and anyone interested in the future of higher education.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton UP, 2025), Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.
Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.
A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.

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