As of January 2020, Ernest Caldwell will transfer from the SOAS School of Law to the SOAS Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and hold the post of Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies. He will teach Classical Chinese as well as courses on premodern Chinese legal and strategic cultures. And he will get back to researching excavated legal and military manuscripts.

Yan Xu reports two recent publications: The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict during the World Wars, edited by Yan Xu and Jeffrey Copeland (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), and "Befriending Soldiers: The Emergency Service to Soldiers Program of the Chinese YMCA during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945," in The Soldier and State Building in Modern China, 1924-1945 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019). She received the 2019 Spelman College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship and will chair Spelman College's Department of History beginning this August.

Kenneth Swope presented a paper, "Horror Stories and Exaggerated Possibilities: Magalhaens and Buglio at the Court of Zhang Xianzhong," at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held in Denver, CO (March 2019). He is also scheduled to give two presentations ("Teaching the Great East Asian War" and "The Military Revolution in East Asia") at the NCTA Summer Institute on Early Modern Asia, University of Colorado, Boulder (July 2019). His edited volume, The Ming World, will be published by Routledge in August; it contains several chapters on Ming military topics, including two by Swope himself: "The Legend of Tang Saier" and "From Peasant Rebel to Ming Loyalist: The Career of Li Dingguo." Swope has been named Leo A. Shifrin Chair in Military and Naval History at the United States Naval Academy for 2019-20.

 David Graff presented a paper, "Revolt of the Spear Carriers: Military Rebellion in Late Tang China," at a symposium on "Rebellion in the Ancient World" sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Ancient Studies, Philadelphia, January 25-26, 2019.

Esther Hu reports that "The Photograph," the first chapterof the love story of four-star Nationalist general Hu Tsung-nan 胡宗南 (1896-1962) and Dr. Yeh Hsia-Ti 葉霞翟 (1914-1981) appeared in No. 91 (May 2019) of Renditions, the leading international journal of Chinese literature in English translation.

Yingcong Dai's new book, The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China, is to be published by the University of Washington Press in June, 2019.

Entitled 無聲的要角：蔣介石的侍從室與 戰時中國 [Silent but Significant: The Role of Chiang Kai-shek's Personal Secretariat in Wartime China] (Taipei: Commercial Press, 2017) received the 2018 Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica.

"Chinese Dreams of National Strength and Global Belonging: 'Iron and Blood' and the Forces of Evolution, 1895-1918," in Peter Monteath and Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (eds.), Colonialism, China and the Chinese: Amidst Empires (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). According to the publisher, the bookwill be published on August 7, 2019.

In February, June Teufel Dreyer talked to students at the Joint Special Forces University (MacDill AFB) about the Chinese military. On May 6, she spoke on Chinese basing activities at the Naval War College's China Maritime Security Institute's conference "Going Global: The People's Navy in a Time of Strategic Transformation." On June 25, she is scheduled to be in Washington to deliver opening remarks at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment's Workshop on China's Strategic Vulnerabilities

Kwong Chi Man's article, "Building a 'Total Mobilization State': Discussions on War and Society by the Intellectual Officers of the Fengtian Army" was published in American Journal of Chinese Studies 26.1 (2019), pp. 1-15.

Gordon Knight and Tom Williams are finishing up their book on Frederick Ward and Henry Burgevine as co-commanders of the Ever Victorious Army that defended Shanghai from the Taiping rebels during the early to mid-1860s.

• "China's Intervention and the End of the Communist Alliance in Vietnam," in Beyond the Quagmire: New Interpretations of the Vietnam War, edited by Geoffrey W. Jensen and Matthew M. Smith (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2019), pp. 209-242.
• "From Honeymoon to Divorce: Russian Advisors and the Chinese Air Force, 1949-1962," in Air Force Advising and Assistance: Developing Airpowers in Client States, edited by Edward B. Westermann and Donald Stoker (West Midlands, UK: Helion, 2018), pp. 118-138.
• "Sino-Japanese Maritime Conflicts and Security Concerns in the East China Sea," in Maritime Security in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific: Heritage and Contemporary Challenges, edited by Howard M. Hensel and Amit Gupta (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 243-260.
• "How to Train the Dragon: Soviet Advisors and Assistance to the Chinese Navy, 1949-1960," in Naval Advising and Assistance: History, Challenges, and Analysis, edited by Donald Stoker and Michael T. McMaster (West Midlands, UK: Helion, 2017), pp. 220-242.
• "Triangle of Allies: Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union," Oklahoma Humanities (Fall/Winter 2017), pp. 28-36. "China's Urbanization and CCP Transformation," in Urbanization and Party Survival in China: People vs. Power, edited by Xiaobing Li and Xiansheng Tian (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. ix-xxiv