This book documents an Islamic–Confucian school of scholarship that flourished—mostly in the Yangzi Delta—in the 17th and 18th centuries. Drawing on previously unstudied sources, it reconstructs the network of Muslim scholars responsible for the creation and circulation of a large corpus of Chinese Islamic written material—the so-called Han Kitab.

In Dead Letters, Halle O’Neal explores how mourners in medieval Japan, haunted by love and loss, reused the epistles of the dead for copying sacred Buddhist scripture to create “letter sutras.” She pays careful attention to gender, embodiment, and invisibility to analyze these ephemera that offered both an outlet for grief and prayer for salvation.

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones emerged out of multilateral power relations. Demarcating Japan shows the crucial role of nonstate actors in formulating a territory.

In Exile and Invention in the Prose Writings of Su Shi, Ronald Egan pays special attention to a neglected aspect of Su Shi’s literary work, prose forms that had traditionally been considered less prestigious: the informal letter; the short colophon on topics such as poetry, the visual arts, and day trips; and other miscellaneous notes.

In Experimentalist Constitutions, the first book that systematically compares subnational experimentalism in different countries, Wang argues that "laboratories of democracy" are not exclusive to the American system; instead, similar concepts apply in China and India, with different center-local structures and levels of political competition.

Flourishing Feasts is the first book to explore the socioreligious history of the Zhaijiao, “vegetarian sects,” that originated in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties and are still active in Taiwan today. Through historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, Broy shows their engagement in political, economic, legal, and cultural affairs.

Health and the Art of Living offers reflections on health and illness in early medieval Chinese literature (ca. 200–ca. 600) through a range of literary sources—essays, prefaces, correspondence, religious scriptures, and poetry; including works by Liu Xie and Xie Lingyun.

The second edition of An Introduction to Literary Chinese incorporates recent developments in linguistics and has been expanded to include a lesson on Buddhist texts. Ranging from basic syntax to advanced pre-modern writings, the thirty-six lessons in this textbook provide students practice in reading a variety of increasingly complex works.