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About Ed Pulford

Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea, and his first book Mirrorlands explores Russia-China connections across time via a travelogue through the countries’ shared borderlands.

Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia.

Ed's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Ed:

East Asian Studies April 30, 2023

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine

The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State

Maura Dykstra

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Uncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura Dykstra’s Uncertainty in the Empire of …
East Asian Studies February 10, 2023

Knowing Manchuria

Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland

Ruth Rogaski

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Among all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone …
East Asian Studies December 2, 2022

Fragile Cargo

The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City

Adam Brookes

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The two parallel Palace Museums in Beijing and Taiwan, and their separate collections of thousands of precious artworks and artifacts from imperial times, reflects a key moment in the 1940s …
East Asian Studies July 26, 2022

Designing Reform

Architecture in the People's Republic of China, 1970-1992

Cole Roskam

Hosted by Ed Pulford
China’s urban landscapes are full of radically different architectural styles which memorialise different eras in the country’s political past, from the remains of imperial palaces or city walls, to Republican-era …
East Asian Studies May 6, 2022

Dancing on Bones

History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea

Katie Stallard

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Present-day relations between ‘the West’ and each of China, Russia and North Korea are often fractious to say the least, yet today’s global atmosphere of menace or crisis just as …
East Asian Studies April 13, 2022

Terror Capitalism

Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City

Darren Byler

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The continuing crisis in Xinjiang has, thanks to the work of many scholars and reporters, led to greatly increased awareness of the region's history and Uyghur population among publics outside China. But so far  less appreciated have been …
East Asian Studies November 24, 2021

Sound of the Border

Music and Identity of Korean Minority Nationality in China

Sunhee Koo

Hosted by Ed Pulford
When faced with some of the complex identity questions which often arise in borderlands, Koreans in China – known as Chosonjok in Korean, Chaoxianzu in Chinese – have long seemed …
East Asian Studies November 1, 2021

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea

Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday

Ksenia Chizhova

Hosted by Ed Pulford
In the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers …
East Asian Studies September 7, 2021

Imperial Romance

Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905-1945

Su Yun Kim

Hosted by Ed Pulford
As in colonial situations elsewhere, Korean experiences of Japanese empire featured many attempts by the imperial authorities to regulate intimate aspects of Korean life, including intermarriage between colonizer and colonized …
East Asian Studies August 9, 2021

Pure and True

The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

David R. Stroup

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Compared to their Uyghur and Kazakh co-religionists in Xinjiang, China’s largest single Muslim group – the Hui – has received less media and scholarly attention lately, perhaps understandably so since …
East Asian Studies July 16, 2021

Circuit Listening

Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

Andrew F. Jones

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Music from East Asia has recently been making its way round the world on waves created and mediated by new technologies and global interconnections. This may seem like something very …
East Asian Studies June 22, 2021

A Time of Lost Gods

Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao

Emily Ng

Hosted by Ed Pulford
If China’s Mao era is seen by many as a time of great upheaval and chaos, there are also people and places for whom things appear quite different. Writing from …
East Asian Studies May 7, 2021

Empire and Righteous Nation

600 Years of China-Korea Relations

Odd Arne Westad

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Being arguably each side’s most enduring international bond, the China-Korea relationship has long been of great practical and symbolic importance to both. Moreover, as Odd Arne Westad observes in his …
East Asian Studies January 21, 2021

Being in North Korea

Andray Abrahamian

Hosted by Ed Pulford
As well as presenting practical challenges, addressing the question ‘what is it like in North Korea?’ raises ethical concerns around who is entitled to interpret life in a place so …
East Asian Studies December 30, 2020

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire

Centering Islam in World War II

Kelly A. Hammond

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The 1930s-40s expansion of the Japanese empire was marked by significant interest among Japan-based scholars and policy-makers in China’s Muslim population and how best to write them into a new …
East Asian Studies November 20, 2020

Securing China's Northwest Frontier

Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang

David Tobin

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Greater interest in what is happening in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang in recent years has generated a proportional need for context, and especially insights into the politics and …
East Asian Studies September 23, 2020

Champions Day

The End of Old Shanghai

James Carter

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Shanghai’s status as a bustling, international place both now and in the past hardly needs much introduction, although the centrality of horse racing to the earlier incarnation of the city’s …
East Asian Studies September 8, 2020

Beyond the Steppe Frontier

A History of the Sino-Russian Border

Sören Urbansky

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often …
East Asian Studies July 20, 2020

Spies and Scholars

Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power

Gregory Afinogenov

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The ways in which states and empires spy on and study one another has changed a great deal over time in line with shifting political priorities, written traditions and technologies …
East Asian Studies July 7, 2020

Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960

Gina Anne Tam

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly …
East Asian Studies June 18, 2020

Land Wars

The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution

Brian DeMare

Hosted by Ed Pulford
Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the …
East Asian Studies May 14, 2020

Revolution Goes East

Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism

Tatiana Linkhoeva

Hosted by Ed Pulford
A century ago it wasn’t a virus whose spread was eliciting reactions around the world, but an idea. As Russia’s 1917 October Revolution distended itself across north Asia and reverberated …
East Asian Studies April 28, 2020

The Nature of Disaster in China

The 1931 Yangzi River Flood

Chris Courtney

Hosted by Ed Pulford
For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of …
East Asian Studies April 2, 2020

Negative Exposures

Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China

Margaret Hillenbrand

Hosted by Ed Pulford
The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained …