Since first launching in 2015, Luminos has served as one of UC Press’s flagship open access programs. Having published more than seventy-five full length scholarly monographs—fully open and available to the public for free— in a variety of disciplines, Luminos embodies the University of California mission to provide high quality, innovative, peer reviewed research for widespread consumption and debate.
Given the recent need for increased remote work and academic participation, UC Press is delighted to highlight the breadth of Luminos’s scholarly disciplines.
Placing Empire
Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan
by Kate McDonald
“Essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the popular support underpinning Japan’s imperialist expansion in the early twentieth century . . . it will encourage all historians to think more carefully about the ways that their own narratives contribute to the spatial politics of the societies we study.”
—Journal of Japanese Studies
Creating the Intellectual
Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification
by Eddy U
“Using the theories and methods of the post-structuralist sociology of culture, supported by fascinating archival material from the 1950s and 1960s, this book reinterprets the role of ‘intellectuals’ within the Chinese Communist revolution. Creating the Intellectual gives historians a fresh way of looking at twentieth-century Chinese history and gives sociologists a new framework for the comparative study of culture.”
—Richard Madsen, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
Rules of the House
Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea
by Sungyun Lim
“A timely and fascinating study, demonstrating the complex interplay between gender politics and empire building through the examination of the legal construction of the ideal modern family that was deeply implicated with the invention or appropriation of tradition. A major contribution to gender history, empire studies, and legal studies.”
—Hyaeweol Choi, author of Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways
Forging the Ideal Educated Girl
The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia
by Shenila Khoja-Moolji
“Shenila Khoja-Moolji offers a stunning genealogy of the Pakistani Muslim girl and her connections to educational, social, and national development from the colonial to the neoliberal state. She begins with Malala Yousafzai and the Western-focused storyline of the urgency and revolutionary effects of girls’ education in Muslim communities. This book examines arguments for women’s education in different historical eras, reviews the possibilities and limits of the educated Muslim girl, and illustrates how we might consider girls empowerment through education more critically.”
—Nancy Lesko, Maxine Greene Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University
Islamic Shangri-La
Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960
by David G. Atwill
“Atwill’s ground-breaking book traces a forgotten Muslim thread through the knot of identity, subjecthood, and citizenship in twentieth-century Tibet, offering a fresh perspective on the region’s tumultuous modern history. It is a highly readable narrative of a Muslim community that has often been rendered invisible, and an important statement on the transition from empires to nation-states at the Inner Asian nexus of Tibet, China, India, and the Islamic world.”
—Rian Thum, author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History