In theory, reading everything that has ever been published about a given subject is a finite task, even if it is impossible in practice. I find this thought comforting at times. Until I remember that there is always new scholarship coming out. The state of constant research output in the academy puts paid to the […]
Continue reading →In my last post, I wrote about some of the “hardware” I use when conducting research in archives and libraries. In this post, I am going to shift gears in two ways. First, I’m going to discuss software. Second, I’m going to move out of the archives, so to speak, and talk more about what […]
Continue reading →For some time I’ve been thinking about writing a post that describes the “workflow” I’ve worked out as I move through gathering and reading sources, organizing notes, and writing. I realized, though, that presenting the way I do things as a coherent workflow would be difficult (a) because it’s complex, and maybe too much so for just […]
Continue reading →2016 was an eventful year for me and my wife, and 2017 promises to be no less so. Over the course of the next year I will be finishing up my archival research in Jinan, moving on to Beijing for a few months, and then heading back to Chicago (tentatively at the end of July). […]
Continue reading →About a month ago, I reviewed a conference I had just attended in Beijing. It was a great experience and made me consider the state of intellectual exchange between China and the U.S. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that American scholars general exert more influence in China than their Chinese peers […]
Continue reading →This past weekend I had the privilege to attend and present at a conference at Renmin University in Beijing. It was different in some ways from conferences/symposia I have attended in the U.S., and I think that these differences were largely positive. I thought I would write a “conference review” (if not an accepted genre I […]
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 →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 →Imagine a historian. What do his/her surroundings look like? Is he/she surrounded by coworkers in a bustling work environment? Or is he/she sitting alone at a desk, kept company by stacks of books? If your imagination conjured something closer to the latter image, you’re not alone. PhD students, and historians in particular, often work in […]
Continue reading →We just finished the first week after spring break here at the University of Chicago. This break was especially enjoyable/productive for me because I finished my winter quarter grading the weekend before AND somehow managed to make it through the rest of the week without getting any emails from students wanting to discuss their grades. […]
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