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My research focuses on premodern Japanese social and cultural history especially foodways, consumption, and the performing arts. I offer courses on Japanese and Tibetan history and food culture, and I have taught at the University of Kansas since…

Opium pipe and accessories

Masterpieces of Chinese Portrait Painting in the National Palace Museum

The author provides a thought provoking literary history of the normative ideal of polygamy from the late Ming to the late Qing, countering the ideal with the theme of sublime love between two people. McMahon argues that the fantasies of polygamy had…

In this first cross-cultural study of opium in China, McMahon explores early Western observations of opium smoking, early definitions of addiction, the formation of arguments for and against the legalization of opium, the portrayals of opium smoking…

Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, the book examines how polygamous privilege functions in these novels and provides one of the first…

In another illustration from the Illustrated Biographies of Exemplary Women, Emperor Ming (reigned 466-472) of the Liu Song dynasty once outraged his empress during a grand gathering in which he had everyone watch a group of palace women take their…

In a famous scene illustrated in the Ming dynasty Illustrated Biographies of Exemplary Women, the daughter of the Han dynasty usurper, Wang Mang, throws herself into the flames. Before he usurped the throne, Wang Mang married his daughter to the Han…

Keith McMahon studies Ming and Qing fiction, male and female character types, Chinese eroticism, the culture of opium smoking in 19th century China and Euro-America, psychoanalytic theory, and the history of imperial polygamy from the legendary past…

Refereed Publications

John James Kennedy, “Supply and Demand for Grassroots Political Reform in Rural China”, Journal of Chinese Political Science (accepted February 2009)

John James Kennedy, “Legitimacy with Chinese Characteristics: ‘Two…