In the upcoming summer term 2025 AREA Ruhr continues its recently launched AREA Ruhr Book Talk Series. Experts from AREA Ruhr are looking forward to meeting up with authors of newly released academic books that deal with East Asia from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. At AREA Ruhr, we are curious about getting insights into recently published research results and discussing the “research journey” that authors have been engaged in.
All events are conducted online via Zoom and are open to be joined after registration. Following the exchange between the invited author and an AREA host, the audience is encouraged to join the discussion.
Book Talk Schedule Summer Term 2025
6 May 2025, 6 PM CET
“From Forest to Sawmill. Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State” by Shuxuan Zhou
Host: Nicolas Schillinger (UDE)
Further information & registration
About the author
Dr. Shuxuan Zhou is a policy analyst in the Seattle Office of Labor Standards and an affiliated faculty member with the University of Washington Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. She is also a nonfiction writer, aiming to bridge the Chinese- and English-speaking worlds.
About the Book
In socialist China, the state forestry and timber sectors employed men as official state workers, while women participated as family dependents and collective laborers. Starting in the 1950s, these groups transformed rural landscapes into urban-industrial zones. This makes forestry an exceptional case for examining how government policies shaped and reinforced interconnected dualisms—such as those between humans and nature, urban and rural areas, production and reproduction, and male and female labor. Drawing on oral histories from Fujian, Shuxuan Zhou places personal stories of work and resistance in forestry and wood processing within the broader framework of postrevolutionary socialist reforms and China’s rapid economic growth after the 1990s. Zhou demonstrates that, as state development initiatives exploited women’s labor, migrants, rural communities, and forests, workers carved out spaces to assert their own personal and political interests. By exploring how sawmill and forest farm workers adapted state projects and contested authority, this book fosters dialogue across gender studies, labor studies, and environmental studies.
Please register through the following link to receive access to the online Book Talk:
https://uni-due.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/i-U37LdBSTeQHK_PrK_6RA
25 June 2025, 10 AM CET
“Jenseits von Nation und Imperium. Interaktionen koreanischer Studierender und japanischer Protestanten (1880–1923)” by Dolf Alexander Neuhaus
Host: Anke Scherer (RUB)
Further information & registration
About the author
Dr. Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus is a senior research fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo, where he works in the research field “Japan in transregional perspective”. Before he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Japanese Studies at Free University and at the Korean Studies program at Goethe University Frankfurt. When pursuing his PhD, he received scholarships from the DAAD and TIFO and realized several research stays at the universities of Tokyo, Tsukuba and Yonsei (Seoul). His research interest covers modern Asian and global history.
About the Book
What role did Koreans in Japan play in the discourse on Japan’s colonial and East Asian policies when exchanging views with Japanese intellectuals of Protestant faith? Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Korean sources, Neuhaus examines how these actors negotiated Japanese colonial rule in Korea and the “Korean question” in relation to regional and global contexts and how their ideas influenced Korea’s reform and independence movement.
Please register through the following link to receive access to the online Book Talk:
https://uni-due.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/6KUlZDdeQ6ujTROB4bE5fA