About Us

The Asia Center Publications Program is one of the world’s most widely respected publishers of scholarly books about Asia, currently publishing about 15 new titles per year on East and Southeast Asia. 

One distinctive aspect of the Asia Center's Publication Program is its longevity—the Harvard East Asian Monograph series began in the mid-1950s, when its books were imprinted under the name of the East Asian Research Center, Harvard University. The first book published in the series was The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China by Liang Fang-chung, published in 1956. 

In the late 1970s, the program became known as the Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, and published books under that imprint. The first edition of Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling Chinese History (now in its sixth edition) was printed in 1973. 

Books in the Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph series began to be published by the Council on East Asian Studies in the 1990s; by the time the Publications Program became part of the Asia Center in 1998, a total of approximately 210 titles had been published in the two main monograph series. 

In 2011, the Asia Center Publications Program assumed responsibility for the Harvard Contemporary China series, active since 1985, from Harvard University Press. 

In addition to academic monographs on the histories, literatures, religions, politics, arts, and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the Asia Center Publications Program has published textbooks for learning Literary Chinese by Paul Rouzer and Michael Fuller, as well as a textbook for learners of classical Chinese poetry by Michael Fuller. 

With a mission to expand its reach beyond East Asia, the Asia Center began publishing on Southeast Asia in 2019 with the release of Claudine Ang's Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains. Next, Vietnam: Navigating a Rapidly Changing Economy, Society, and Political Order, edited by Börje Ljunggren and Dwight H. Perkins, was published in 2023, followed by John D. Phan's Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language in 2025. 

Today, as an independent press the Asia Center Publications Program continues to publish high-caliber and award-winning academic monographs in three main series: the Harvard East Asian Monograph series, the Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph series, and the Harvard Contemporary China series.  The Asia Center gratefully acknowledges the support of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Korea Institute, and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

Asia Center books are authored by scholars from around the globe and distributed worldwide by Harvard University Press.