Lisa Trivedi, the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of History, is a co-editor, with St. Lawrence University Professor Emerita Erin McCarthy, of the scholarly book series ASIANetwork Books with Lever Press/UMichigan. Trivedi recently oversaw the publication of two monographs in Asian Studies, both of which are available free to readers.
Ordering Tang China: Cultural Memory, Emperor Taizong, and the Essentials (2024), by Kelly Ngo, presents the first book-length study in English of the Essentials for Bringing about Order from Assembled Texts (Qunshu zhiyao), a rulership anthology that became renowned for its model of governance in ancient and early modern East Asia.
Trivedi describes the Essentials as “one of the earliest Chinese anthologies designed to educate rulers in cultivating an ethical character and governing the state. Commissioned for the Tang emperor Taizong in the 620s, the Essentials articulates a distinctive political philosophy through a collection of excerpts from earlier canonical, historical, and masters writings, and their commentaries.”
Katherine Ngo’s Unlocking the Treasury: Elementary Education for Boys in Qing China (2025) seeks to address the existing gap in Western scholarship regarding pre-modern Chinese primary education, its theories, and textbooks.
“With a focus on the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) textbook, Treasury of Elementary Learning (Youxue qionglin), this volume is the first major study of the Treasury in English and reveals a rich tradition of education through close and critical readings of the text,” Trivedi said.
Additional books are expected to be published this summer, including one co-authored by Associate Professor of History Mackenzie Cooley.
Lever Press is an academic publisher founded by liberal arts colleges, including Hamilton. It is a digital first press which is Open Access, with no fees for authors or readers.
