Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.
Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far
and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
"The Old Poets of China" by Mary Oliver

Check out these free PDFs on Asian history, culture, and politics from the University of California Press

Details

           The University of California Press is offering free access to many of its monographs under the Luminos Open Access publishing program. Below are several titles that focus on the politics, history, culture and religion of Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and West Asia.

           The monographs are downloaded as PDFs under Creative Commons license.

 Northeast Asia

Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification by Eddy U

Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea by Sungyun Lim

Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 by David G. Atwill

Taiwan and China: Fitful Embrace by Lowell Dittmer (ed.)

Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald

Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937–1945 by Nicole Elizabeth Barnes

West Asia

The Clarion of Syria: A Patriot’s Call against the Civil War of 1860 by Butrus Al-Bustani

Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology by Katharina Galor

Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile by Loren D. Lybarger

Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires by Lori Khatchadourian

The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca by Nile Green (ed.)

South Asia

The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan by Torunn Wimpelmann

Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia by Shankar Nair

Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

The Hegemony of Heritage: Ritual and the Record in Stone by Deborah L. Stein

Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination by Tony K. Stewart

Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka by Garrett Field

Southeast Asia

Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon by Erik Harms

A Vietnamese Moses: Philiphê Bình and the Geographies of Early Modern Catholicism by George E. Dutton

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The University of California Press, through its Luminos Open Access program, aims to “increase visibility and impact of scholarly work” by offering free and accessibly digital formats of monographs. View the complete list of free resources.

The UP Asian Center offers M.A. degrees in Asian Studies with four fields of specialization: Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia. The Center also has an M.A. program in Philippine Studies that allows students to major in Philippine society and culture, Philippine foreign relations, or Philippine development studies. The Center offers a Ph.D.  program in Philippine Studies in conjunction with the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy. For an overview of these graduate programs, click here. The Asian Center also publishes Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia, the latest issue of which can be downloaded at the journal's website. For other news and upcoming events at the Asian Center, click here.