November 15, 2022

Q&A: Reed Brody on To Catch a Dictator

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale while enjoying full American and Western support. After his overthrow, his victims and...

November 9, 2022

Announcing Our 2022-2023 Religion Catalog

Letter from the Religion Editor: Friends, colleagues, authors, scholars of religion, and beyond: Greetings, with a special hello to those attending AAR/SBL in person! It’s nice to see you here. It’s that time of the year when we introduce our...

November 4, 2022

Announcing our 2022-2023 Social Work Catalog

Letter from the editor: I am pleased to share the 2022-2023 Columbia University Press social work catalog. At what we hope is the tail end of a long pandemic, this fall semester marks a return to some kind of normality. It...

October 28, 2022

Look Away: Instinct as Deterministic Force in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Thomas M. Puhr

Note: This piece contains spoilers. In a series of one-sheets released for Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), the horror film’s characters stare skyward, expressions of wide-eyed fear dominating their faces. They almost appear hypnotized. What, we wonder, is eliciting this response?...

October 24, 2022

How Should We Approach Black Literature and Art Now?

John Brooks

In the United States, there’s a tendency to assume that Black literature and art are valuable primarily because they’re pedagogical, as if Black creative expression exists first and foremost to educate racist whites. This approach may be well meaning, but...

October 18, 2022

Bernard Shaw, the Tiananmen Crackdown, and the CNN Effect

Mike Chinoy

Bernard Shaw, who for twenty years was CNN’s top anchor, died on September 8, his death largely overshadowed by the passing of Queen Elizabeth the same day. Shaw is best remembered for his live reporting of the start of the...

October 10, 2022

Announcing Our 2022-2023 Philosophy Catalog

Letter from the Philosophy Editor: It is with great pleasure that I present the Columbia University Press philosophy catalog for 2022. These titles, which span subjects from critical theory to political philosophy to philosophy of religion, aesthetics, environmental and animal...

September 29, 2022

The Multifaceted Advice of the Zhuangzi

Richard John Lynn

This translation is “new” in that it differs significantly from previous translations since it is based on one particular traditional Chinese commentary, the earliest complete philosophical commentary by Guo Xiang 郭象 (265–312). The translation technique is also “new” in that...

September 27, 2022

Interpreting the Nuances of Historical Texts

David Brophy

In the wake of the Qianlong emperor’s invasion of Xinjiang in the mid-eighteenth century, Qing-appointed Muslim governors preserved certain trappings of Islamic rule while serving alongside a rotation of Manchu and Mongolian ambans. In the 1780s, one of the local...

September 22, 2022

Becoming Vermin

Perhat Tursun as a Franz Kafka Character

Darren Byler

The imprisoned Uyghur author and poet Perhat Tursun hates it when people call him “the Uyghur Franz Kafka.” He thinks Uyghur writers should be recognized as world-class intellectuals on their own terms, not as derivative world literature representatives of a...

September 20, 2022

“Researching” for Translation

Anders Hansson and Bonnie McDougall

A few months ago, Bonnie received a request from the research administration at her university to submit information on any recent publications. She duly let them know about our translation of A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made...

September 15, 2022

The Power of Female Same-Sex Love

Stephen Roddy and Ying Wang

In premodern China, descriptions of homoeroticism can be found in multiple examples of histories, poetry, fiction, and drama, but nearly all of these treat exclusively male-male relations. On female same-sex desire, the written record is almost completely silent. The few...