New book co-edited by Barbara Mittler

In this new collection of essays, an international team of scholars examines the relationship between the Chinese women's periodical press and global modernity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays in the richly illustrated volume probe the ramifications for women of two monumental developments in this period: the intensification of China's encounters with foreign powers and a media transformation comparable in its impact to the current internet age.

The book offers a distinctive methodology for studying the periodical press, which is supported by the development of a bilingual database of early Chinese periodicals. Throughout the study, essays on China are punctuated by transdisciplinary reflections from scholars working on periodicals outside of the Chinese context, encouraging readers to rethink common stereotypes about lived womanhood in modern China, and to reconsider the nature of Chinese modernity in a global context.

"Women and the Periodical Press in China's Long Twentieth Century. A Space of their Own?" was edited jointly by Barbara Mittler, Michael Hockx (University of Notre Dame) and Joan Judge (York University) and published with Cambridge University Press in May 2018.

Barbara Mittler is co-director of the Cluster "Asia and Europe" and the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS), and a professor in Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University. She is also deputy director of CATS, the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies Heidelberg.