October 2018

Carlos Eire wins Jaroslav Pelikan Prize for his book Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650

Carlos Eire has won the biannual Yale University Press Jaroslav Pelikan Prize for his book Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650.

The prize is awarded by Yale University Press to a distinguished book on religion published by the Press in the previous two years. It honors the late Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale and former Dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  

Joanne Freeman interviews Mary Lui for BackStory podcast: "To Be a Citizen? The History of Becoming American"

Imagine living in a country without the ability to become a citizen. Meanwhile, you endure discrimination and outright hostility on a daily basis because of your ethnicity. This was the struggle of Chinese people living in the U.S. for decades. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred immigration for Chinese laborers and declared the Chinese ineligible for citizenship.

Joanne Freeman talks with historian Mary Lui about the ripples of the Chinese Exclusion Act and how some court cases challenged the limitations of citizenship.

The Right to be a Prostitute: Rohit De talks to the BBC about his forthcoming book

“On 1 May 1958, a young woman was an unusual cynosure of all eyes in a courtroom in the north Indian city of Allahabad.

Husna Bai, a 24-year-old woman, told Judge Jagdish Sahai that she was a prostitute. Invoking the constitution, she had filed a petition challenging the validity of a new law to ban trafficking in human bodies.

By striking at her means of livelihood, Bai argued, the new law had “frustrated the purpose of the welfare state established by the Constitution in the country”.

Denise Ho talks about her book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China

Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University.  She is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976).  She is also interested in urban history, the study of information and propaganda, and material culture. Ho teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary China, the history of Shanghai, the uses of the past in modern China, and the historiography of the Republican era and the PRC.