What is Nancy S. Steinhardt reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, author of China's Early Mosques.

Her entry begins:

I read primarily academic books or books related to my academic interests. I read heavily in the area of Chinese art and architecture, and in Central Asian and East Asian art and architecture. Lately I have been reading biographies. I am currently reading Eduard Kogel's The Grand Documentation: Ernst Boerschmann and Chinese Religious Architecture (1906-1931), the biography a German architect who spent the early decades of the 20th century in China and drew and photographed numerous Chinese buildings that either no longer survive or no longer survive as...[read on]

About China's Early Mosques, from the publisher:

What happens when a monotheistic, foreign religion needs a space in which to worship in China, a civilisation with a building tradition that has been largely unchanged for several millennia? The story of this extraordinary convergence begins in the 7th century and continues under the Chinese rule of Song and Ming, and the non-Chinese rule of the Mongols and Manchus, each with a different political and religious agenda. The author shows that mosques, and ultimately Islam, have survived in China because the Chinese architectural system, though often unchanging, is adaptable: it can accommodate the religious requirements of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Islam.

Learn more about China's Early Mosques at the Edinburgh University Press website.

Nancy S. Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania where she has taught since 1982. She received her PhD at Harvard in 1981 where she was a Junior Fellow from 1978-81. Steinhardt taught at Bryn Mawr from 1981-1982. She has broad research interests in the art and architecture of China and China's border regions, particularly problems that result from the interaction between Chinese art and that of peoples to the North, Northeast, and Northwest.

Steinhardt is author or co-author of Chinese Traditional Architecture (1984), Chinese Imperial City Planning (1990), Liao Architecture (1997), Chinese Architecture (2003), Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture (2005), Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (2011), Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600 (2014), and more than 70 scholarly articles.

The Page 99 Test: China's Early Mosques.

Writers Read: Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt.

--Marshal Zeringue