(I’m still working on a post to follow up on the last one I wrote. It turned out to be harder to write than I anticipated, though. And this felt like something I had to write before I lost my train of thought.) I remember telling my undergraduate adviser at Johns Hopkins that I wanted […]
Continue reading →For graduate students, returning checked out library books is a ritual central to the process of moving out of town. Measured by the fact that I used my backpack and a couple of canvass bags – and not suitcases – to complete this ritual last week, I feel I paced myself pretty well. I still […]
Continue reading →Maintaining a degree of detachment from one’s object of study is an essential part of being an academic. For historians, that means that while our personal experiences and beliefs undoubtedly shape how and why we go about our research, the things that we study and the materials we use to study them are necessarily external […]
Continue reading →It’s not all that easy to describe what I do as a historian. Partly, that’s a function of the farsightedness that tends to afflict anyone who is so familiar with what they do that they have a hard time grasping how to explain the essential elements of it to someone “on the outside.” But it’s […]
Continue reading →Over the summer, I have quite a bit more “unstructured” time than I did during the quarter. To help schedule my time, I decided I should make a checklist of things I need to get done over the next couple of months before leaving for China. (I’ve started using Evernote to organize my checklists. Comment if you have another […]
Continue reading →PhD students and historians aren’t shut off from contemporary events. As much as we might seem (and sometimes want to be) consumed with and lost in our own particular slices of academic knowledge, like everyone else we are constantly engaging in what’s happening in the world around us. That includes issues and “debates” (or what […]
Continue reading →On Monday I will be submitting my application for the American Historical Association’s summer blogger competition. They’re looking for graduate students to blog about the sources they use for research, and I happen to already read sources and blog about them, so it seems like a great potential opportunity. At the very least, writing the […]
Continue reading →I thought that it was about time to explain a little bit more about my research interests and the dissertation I’m supposed to be writing. To help me put the ‘d’ back in ABD, so to speak, I’ll refer to a document I’ve been reading recently that encapsulates a number of the issues my dissertation […]
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