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 qui...

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.

My interview with the New Books Network took place in 2015, soon after China's Transition to Modernity was published. I just listened to it again and thought I should share it here.

Minghui Hu and Johan Elverskog, eds. Cosmopolitanism in China 1600-1950 . Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2016. Cambria Sinophone World Series. ISBN 9781604979008. 332 pp. By Irmy Schweiger (Stockholm University) Cosmopolitanism in China 1600-1950 has its seeds in a conference held in 2012 at UC Santa Cruz that brought together scholars from the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica, Taiwan and scholars from universities in North America, mainly from the fields of history and religion. A selection of the fruits of the conference has now been polished and packaged in this handsome volume consisting of altogether eight research articles, organized chronologically and by topics, accompanied by a short introduction by the editors plus a useful index. The volume maintains two main points. The first is that cosmopolitanism in China is not a new phenomenon developed in the late nineteenth century when foreign ideas and theories were the focus of Chinese intellectuals’ ...

It was my first time in Israel. I met some new friends like Asaf Goldschmidt, Gadi Algazi, Mark Gamsa, Ron Sela and saw many old friends and colleagues. The organizer Ori Sela impressed all of us with his attention to details and logistics, gourmet food, boutique hotel, beautiful campus and, most importantly, intellectual stimulation and archaeological tours! Ori also demonstrated his superhuman ability to participate in two intense conferences consecutively over the span of five days. The first one is called Rethinking Time in Modern China: An Sinological Intervention and the second one Asian Spaces: Border-crossing Dialogues . Moreover, Ori took us to two archaeological sites: Beit She'an and Tel Megiddo . Below is a picture of me and my PhD advisor Benjamin Elman in Beit She'an. Facing the Roman baths in Beit She'an.