Works by Faculty

The rapid development of quantum technologies has driven a revolution in related research areas such as quantum computation and communication, and quantum materials. The first prototypes of functional quantum devices are beginning to appear, frequently created using ensembles of atoms, which allow the observation of sensitive, quantum effects, and have important applications in quantum simulation and matter wave interferometry. This modern text offers a self-contained introduction to the fundamentals of quantum atom optics and atomic many-body matter wave systems. Assuming a familiarity with undergraduate quantum mechanics, this book will be accessible for graduate students and early career researchers moving into this important new field. A detailed description of the underlying theory of quantum atom optics is given, before development of the key, quantum, technological applications, such as atom interferometry, quantum simulation, quantum metrology, and quantum computing.

About the Author:

Tim Byrnes is an Assistant Professor of Physics at NYU Shanghai. He is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan. He holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Professor Byrnes' research interests are in quantum information technologies, condensed matter physics, and AMO (atomic, molecular, optical) physics. Specifically, he is interested in various applications of Bose-Einstein condensates to quantum information. He is also interested in the interface of physics and biology and emergent phenomena.

Ebubechukwu O. Ilo-Okeke is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai.

Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia, and the Cold War explores the dystopian and destructive dimensions of the Space Age and challenges conventional narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry. Concentrating on weapons, warfare and violence, this provocative volume examines real and imagined endeavors of arming the skies and conquering the heavens. The third and final volume in the groundbreaking European Astroculture trilogy, Militarizing Outer Space zooms in on the interplay between security, technopolitics and knowledge from the 1920s through the 1980s. Often hailed as the site of heavenly utopias and otherworldly salvation, outer space transformed from a promised sanctuary to a present threat, where the battles of the future were to be waged. Astroculture proved instrumental in fathoming forms and functions of warfare’s futures past, both on earth and in space. The allure of dominating outer space, the book shows, was neither limited to the early twenty-first century nor to current American space force rhetorics.

About the Author:

Alexander Geppert is Associate Professor of History and European Studies at New York University. He holds a joint appointment at NYU Shanghai and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies in New York City. Born and raised in Germany, he has four history degrees, including a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. From 2010 to 2016 he directed the Emmy Noether research group ‘The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century’ at Freie Universität Berlin.

In his latest book, Chancellor Tong Shijun argues that “learning to become (one’s true self)” is the fundamental purpose of education. In a series of speeches and essays, he reflects on the philosophy and governance structure of Chinese universities, analyzes the educational development of China and its major challenges, and considers the spiritual traditions of Chinese academia and lessons gained over the years. “When I first started writing this book, I intended to use my expertise in philosophy to gain a better understanding of universities and education,” Tong says. “When the book was finished, I realized that my experience as a professor and university leader had also shaped my philosophy study in an interesting way.”

About the Author: 

Tong Shijun became the second Chancellor of NYU Shanghai on June 1, 2020. A scholar of Western and Chinese philosophy, he served as an administrator and professor of philosophy at East China Normal University for more than 20 years. 

Perception refers to the process of people organizing, identifying, and interpreting sensory information to understand the presented information or environment, such as distinguishing between different odors or discriminating between different shades of colors. Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called “perceptual learning” and has become an active area of research of both theoretical and practical significance. Dosher and Lu’s book provides a comprehensive and integrated treatment of the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain, for active perceptual learning researchers, and to describe and develop the basic techniques and principles for readers who want to successfully incorporate perceptual learning into applied developments. 

“Barbara and I started doing research in perceptual learning in 1997. The field has transformed since then, and this book tells the story of what we came to know about both the phenomena and the theories,” Lu says. “The publication of this book is a major milestone in our more than 20 years of collaboration. It is also the beginning of many new, exciting joint research projects. I really appreciate Barbara’s friendship and the opportunity to work with her. ”

About the Author:

Zhong-Lin Lu is NYU Shanghai’s Chief Scientist and Associate Provost for Sciences. He also leads the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai. As Chief Scientist, he sets NYU Shanghai’s strategic vision for fostering scientific research and transforming into a world-class research university. 

Environmental activists the world over are increasingly looking to China as a model of effective state-led environmentalism, concentrating decisive political, economic, and epistemic power to meet critical environmental goals. But through top-down initiatives, regulations, and campaigns to mitigate pollution and environmental degradation, the Chinese authorities also promote control over the behavior of individuals and enterprises, pacification of borderlands, and expansion of Chinese power and influence across the developing world, and even into outer space. Given the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions of species from extinction, we need to consider whether coercive green policymaking can show us the way. China Goes Green explores both its promises and risks. 

“This project is a combination of our years of research and reading into China's environmental protection policies, both independently at the beginning, and then collaboratively in more recent periods,” said Li, who co-authored China Goes Green with Judith Shapiro of American University. 

“Our sources are environmental officials, journalists, scientists and even individual garbage collectors in the city of Shanghai. Getting to know these people has made me so much more sensitive to why environmental problems are so complex,” Li said. “There is no silver bullet. What solutions China has found are the result of very hard work by tens of thousands of real women and men in this country.”

About the Author:

Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai, and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU.

Within Asia, the period from 1849 to 1960s had witnessed the rise and decline of the Pax Britannica, the growth of multiple and often competing anti-colonial movements, and the entrenchment of the nation-state system. Beyond Pan-Asianism follows the complex interactions between China, India, and their neighbouring societies against this background of imperialism and nationalist resistance.

The contributors to this volume, from India, the West, and the Chinese-speaking world, write about a tremendous breadth of figures, including novelists, soldiers, intelligence officers, archivists, among others, by deploying published and archival materials in multiple Asian and Western languages. This volume also attempts to answer the question of how China-Indian connectedness in the modern period should be narrated. Instead of providing one definite answer, it engages with prevailing and past frameworks--notable 'Pan-Asianism' and 'China/India as Method'--with an aim to provoke further discussions on how histories of China-India and, by extension, the non-Western world, can be conceptualized.     

About the Author

Tansen Sen is Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Professor, NYU. He specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism.

David Yu has been studying and investing in aircraft for more than 20 years. In his first book, Yu shares the results of long-term study of the underlying aspects of aircraft as an investable asset class and looks at the drivers of the aviation finance global markets, particularly the Chinese/Asian market. Especially geared for “institutional investors within the real asset space,” the book includes a detailed study of aircraft residual values and comparisons to other real asset classes and benchmarks.

“The origins of this book started over five years ago with the  goal of scientifically and rigorously establishing the underlying dynamics of the industry. We are now in the middle of one of the largest historical impact periods on the industry due to COVID-19. This on-going exogenous shock and time indoors inspired a new chapter on the subject which was not anticipated before,” Yu says.

About the Author:

David Yu is Assistant Professor of Practice in Finance. He focuses on investing and financing cross border and on real assets.

The last century of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644) saw many troubles and challenges from abroad. Pirates raided the coast, Europeans challenged the traditional world order of the tribute system, and the everlasting threat from the northern steppe people continued to raise concerns for the state’s survival. This climate of uncertainty resulted in many Ming literati discussing foreign countries. During the last decades of the Ming era, seven authors wrote monographs that can be considered a form of Chinese “world history.” The authors describe the geography, history, and political systems of foreign countries and regions, ranging from China’s close neighbors Japan and Mongolia to more distant lands such as Mogadishu and Europe. This book studies each of the seven authors’ knowledge and perceptions of the world and focuses especially on countries linked to China by a maritime border, namely Siam (Thailand), Malacca, and Portugal. The book combines a close textual and paratextual analysis with a biographical study to understand why the authors wrote the texts the way they did. This is the first comprehensive introduction to these texts to contribute to the understanding of late Ming historiography and late Ming scholars’ perceptions of foreign countries.

“As part of my research for this book, I visited several libraries in North America and Asia to study the original Ming prints and manuscripts. One manuscript in particular was fun to examine, the Siyi guangji 四夷廣記 by Shen Maoshang 慎懋賞 now in the National Central Library, Taipei. At some point in its history, this book had been taken apart and its pages been rebound. During this process, parts of the text were lost,” Papelitzky says. “As I visited the library, I tried to figure out the original order of the chapters in the Siyi guangji, looking at water stains and tiny holes in the paper that gave clues about which pages had originally been together. This might seem like a monotonous task but I really enjoyed working not only with the written text but also the material object.”

During the early twentieth century, neo-humanist reforms transformed the landscape of Spanish education. Building upon the new science of child study, known as paidology, teachers joined pedagogues around the world in reading works by Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and others. Celebrating open-air schools, sensorial education and active methods of learning, intellectuals including Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Carmen Conde sought to contrast a positivist pedagogy with a phenomenological approach to childhood. Education, they claimed, must adapt to the child’s developing body and mind.

Bringing together avant-garde art, poetry, teachers’ manuals, intelligence tests, and children’s creative production, Anna Kathryn Kendrick traces how reformers drew upon inter­national models to advance ‘catholic’ notions of holism and universality. This award-winning study demonstrates that the fight for an education in mind, body, and spirit had not only intellectual but also practical consequences which were to shape an entire generation before the Spanish Civil War.

About the Author:

Anna Kathryn Kendrick is Director of Global Awards and Scholarships and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai.

A textbook with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries.

This timely and refreshingly real–world focused textbook examines some of the world's most critical policy issues through a macroeconomics lens. After presenting analytical foundations, modeling tools, and theoretical perspectives, Economics of Global Business goes a step further than most other texts, with a practical look at the local and multinational tradeoffs facing economic policymakers in more than fifty countries. Topics range from income equality and the financial crisis to GDP, inflation and unemployment, and, notably, one of the first macroeconomic examinations of climate change. Written by a globetrotting economist who teaches and consults on three continents, Economics of Global Business aims not for definitive answers but rather to provide a better understanding of the context-dependent rationales, constraints, and consequences of economic policy decisions. 

The book covers long-run and short-run growth (with examples from the United States, China, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and Vietnam); financial crises and central banks; monetary and fiscal policies; government budgets; currency regimes; climate change and macroeconomics; income inequality; and globalization. All chapters rely on recent and historical examples of economic policy in action. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students.

"Economics of Global Business focuses on the pragmatic aspects of policy making. This is a bold and novel approach to economics, a refreshing take on what can be an arid subject. Readers will encounter many examples from all over the world, and the book incorporates all the main issues of our time, such as climate change, the great financial crisis, and income inequality."— Otaviano Canuto, Executive Director, World Bank Group

About the Author

Rodrigo Zeidan is an Associate Professor of Practice of Business and Finance at NYU Shanghai. He contributes to media platforms in Europe, Asia, and, the United States, including Bloomberg, TheConversation, and Americas Quarterly.

 “Zhao’s study presents a model of intellectual history. Smartly written, it excels in connecting the analysis of specific texts and concepts with broader trends in the social-political realm. His work helps demythologize Chinese thought and makes it legible to scholars around the world.” — Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

About the Author

Zhao Lu is Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU. He is the coauthor (with C. A. Cook) of Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching.

This book is the culmination of Chen's collection, selection, and editing of video materials over a decade. It reflects a combination of her teaching experiences at three universities and continual deliberation and revision. 

Due to the many changes over the past two decades, the bilingual courses Chen now teaches at Cornell University and NYU Shanghai differ greatly from the Business Chinese courses she taught at the beginning of my teaching career. Although language instruction is still important, the business component -- often informed by knowledge of history and culture -- has become central to the course.

About the Author

Chen Zhihong is a Research Professor at NYU Shanghai. She is currently holding professorships at both NYU Shanghai and Cornell University. She joined Cornell in 2005 and NYU Shanghai in 2014. She also was Senior Research Fellow at London School of Economics and taught at University of Virginia in 2001-2005. She was trained in three countries and in three different fields: She received her BA in German language and literature from Beijing Foreign Language College, and her first MA in International Studies from Beijing Normal University. She then received her second MA and a Doctor of Philosophy in International History and Sinology from Cologne University in Germany.

This volume published by the Truth & Wisdom press is the Chinese translation of the 2014 title, The Language of Game Theory: Putting Epistemics into the Mathematics of Games, by Adam Brandenburger, Director of the Program on Creativity and Innovation at NYU Shanghai. In eight papers written by Brandenburger and his colleagues over the course of 25 years, this work reconstructs game theory to focus on the centrality of how players reason about a game.

This restructured program, now called epistemic game theory, extends the classical definition of a game model to include a description of how the players reason about one another (including their reasoning about other players' reasoning). With this richer mathematical framework, it is possible to determine how players’ reasoning influences the way in which a game is played. Epistemic game theory includes traditional equilibrium-based theory as a special case, but makes it possible to understand a broad range of non-equilibrium behavior.

"Adam Brandenburger's work on the knowledge requirements implicit in game theory has become classic. These are of profound importance in understanding the relevance of game theory and, indeed, economic theory in general to the real economy. It is very good to have them collected, with an introduction that brings out the underlying themes."  

—Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University, USA, 1972 Nobel laureate in Economics

‘This extraordinary collection is a game-changer. Featuring the cutting-edge work of over forty scholars from across the globe, The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties is breathtaking in its range, incisive in analyses, and revolutionary in method and evidence. Here, fifty years after that iconic "1968," Western Europe and North America are finally de-centered, if not provincialized, and we have the basis for a complete remapping, a thorough reinterpretation of the "Sixties."’

—Jean Allman, J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities; Director, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

‘This is a landmark achievement. It represents the most comprehensive effort to date to map out the myriad constitutive elements of the "Global Sixties" as a field of knowledge and inquiry. Richly illustrated and meticulously curated, this collection purposefully "provincializes" the United States and Western Europe while shifting the loci of interpretation to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. It will become both a benchmark reference text for instructors and a gateway to future historical research.’

—Eric Zolov, Associate Professor of History; Director, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Stony Brook University

‘This important and wide-ranging volume de-centers West-focused histories of the 1960s. It opens up fresh and vital ground for research and teaching on Third, Second, and First World transnationalism(s), and the many complex connections, tensions, and histories involved.’

—John Chalcraft, Professor of Middle East History and Politics, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science

‘This book globalizes the study of the 1960s better than any other publication. The authors stretch the standard narrative to include regions and actors long neglected. This new geography of the 1960s changes how we understand the broader transformations surrounding protest, war, race, feminism, and other themes. The global 1960s described by the authors is more inclusive and relevant for our current day. This book will influence all future research and teaching about the postwar world.’

—Jeremi Suri, Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs; Professor of Public Affairs and History, The University of Texas at Austin

As the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 approaches, this book reassesses the global causes, themes, forms, and legacies of that tumultuous period. While existing scholarship continues to largely concentrate on the US and Western Europe, this volume will focus on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. International scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds explore the global sixties through the prism of topics that range from the economy, decolonization, and higher education, to forms of protest, transnational relations, and the politics of memory.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover?
 
In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.
 
Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.