Building a City of Knowledge: NTU Press at the 2018 HK Book Fair2018-11-26

 

We can’t buy happiness, but we can buy books – and it’s pretty much the same thing! The 2018 Hong Kong Book Fair, one of the highlights for the international Chinese-language publishing community, was held during July 18-24 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. NTU Press lit up the event with a bright display of its latest and most popular publications at its booth on the 3rd floor, which attracted throngs of readers.

 

As 2018 happens to be NTU’s 90th anniversary, NTU Press inspired the readers with “Building a City of Knowledge” as its motif to highlight the academic breadth and depth that NTU Press has offered to readers for decades, and how the university has acted as an agent of change for progressive social development in the knowledge age, when knowledge and innovation are becoming the capstones to a better future.

 

During the fair, NTU Press literally “activated” its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision for local readers. In the academic discipline of Taiwan studies, NTU Press presented Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 by Prof. Emma Jinhua Teng of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Governance of the Indigenous Peoples in 20th-Century Taiwan: From the Empire of Japan to the KMT Regime by Associate Prof. Tadasu Matsuoka from Japan’s Dokkyo University; and Sounds from 1922: Tanabe Hisao’s Fieldwork in Colonial Taiwan and Amoy by Prof. Ying-Fen Wang of NTU’s Graduate Institute of Musicology. These three books encourage readers to wander through the historical and social landscapes of Taiwan from literary, administrative, and musicological points of view.

 

The NTU & HYI Academic Book Series continues to deliver high-quality investigative findings for overseas studies. It regaled the readers at the fair with two new publications: Politics of Legitimacy: The State-Society Relations in Contemporary China by Prof. Dingxin Zhao of the University of Chicago and Transforming “Sacred Religion” into Daoism: Festival, Belief, and Culture in the Chinese Society of Malaysia by Prof. Fong-Mao Lee of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica.

 

Fans of popular science could also find a treat in The Universe That Rings: On Einstein’s General Relativity and Gravitational Waves by Dr. Mark Lee, a Chinese-American space mission scientist at NASA. The book guides readers on a fascinating journey through the mysteries of relativity in layperson-friendly language and reveals how the theory of relativity has changed humanity.

(Resource: NTU HIGHLIGHTS Oct. 2018)