Minghui's Blogs

Thanks to my friend and colleague Professor Ishii Tsuyoshi, I am leaving on Nov 29 for Tokyo to teach an intensive seminar on the Komaba campus. I will also give a talk on Dec 22, hosted by Professor Ito Takayuki. For details, please see the flyers in Japanese.

I have reviewed about ten books for different journals and read many book reviews in the past two decades. I am pretty certain that I have received a "glowing" review from Professor Dagmar Schäfer. What I am about to say is not really a disclaimer but an appreciation of how academic review system actually works in my case. I never met Professor Schäfer and have virtually no professional relationship with her.

Of course Professor Schäfer's reputation proceeds her. I have read and admired her award-winning book and assigned part of it to my undergraduate students before. I have also heard good things about her. For instance, my co-editor Johan Elverskog spoke highly of her work.

More importantly, China's Transition to Modernity had not been reviewed by a historian of science until hers appears on Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in June 2018. To be recognized and appreciated by an outstanding fellow historian whose expertise falls squarely in my field is quite gr…

Thanks to my friend Hsiao-ting, I am officially affiliated with the Hoover institution as a visiting scholar from August 15 to November 15. I am on sabbatical leave from July 2018 to July 2019 from UCSC. This appointment at the Hoover Institution will allow me to access the rich collection in the Hoover Library and Archives and further substantiate my manuscript. Below is the Hoover proposal of my new book project:

BECOMING A COMMUNIST: Qu Qiubai and the Formation of Chinese Communist Party, 1919–1935
A  proposal submitted to the Hoover Institute
By Minghui Hu, Associate Professor of History, University of California Santa Cruz


An Outline of My Academic Project:

In the formative stage of China’s revolution, Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), a pale and skinny man consumed by tuberculosis and exuding a scholarly vibe of old China, cloaked his identity under over one hundred noms de guerre as a leading member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the zenith of his career from 1927 to 1931, Qu act…

I just came across Jee Hyun Noe's positive review of my book. Much appreciated.
Noe, Jee Hyun. “Minghui Hu: China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen. Xi, 285 Pp. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015, $50. ISBN 978 0 295 99476 5.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79, no. 03 (October 2016): 695–97. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X16000884.

I just received a copy of research symposium titled The Philosophy of Mind, Body and Environment: Reexamination of Traditional East Asian Concepts and Attempts to Universalize them. It is edited by Ito Takayuki and published by International Research Center for Japanese Studies. My essay "The Scholar's Robe" is featured in the volume and translated into Japanese. Please click here to see the Japanese translation.