One of the main points of this blog is to highlight the diversity of work that all-but-dissertation (ABD) students engage in. I like this focus because it’s not the most obvious thing about getting a PhD. That honor probably belongs to “it takes a really long time.” But the two are necessarily related: if all […]
Continue reading →Last year, I wrote about how April was a crazy month for me. This year it was February. The way deadlines coincided and piled up over a couple-week period was a good reminder of how grad school brings things at you from all different directions. It also led me to think about the value and […]
Continue reading →Sometimes I get so wrapped up in writing about all of the other things that go on in the life of an ABD student that I forget how long it’s been since I talk about the dissertation itself. I hope I don’t give the impression that I’m not making much progress on that front. In […]
Continue reading →About a year ago, I got to hear a talk by a China-watcher I really respect. During the presentation (or actually the Q&A, I think), he stated his personal position that he would not publish something in China that would have to be censored. This gave me something to think about – both because it […]
Continue reading →Graduate students get a bad rap, I think, for being overly focused on obscure topics with little apparent relevance to anything that “really” matters. I don’t think that’s fair since many of us are at least aware of how out-of-touch we seem to be. If nothing else, the solitude of archival research allows plenty of time […]
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 →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 →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 […]
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