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 →Having been in China conducting archival research for a few months now, I’ve settled into a little bit of a routine. Since this blog is supposed to give an idea of what life as a graduate student is like, I thought it might be appropriate to write a post describing what I actually do on […]
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 →(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 →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 →Today I experienced something that isn’t party of my usual life in the U.S. As I was walking through my housing complex, a little girl very obviously pointed at me and smiled as her embarrassed grandmother tried to get her to stop. I’ve been in China now for about a month. Even though I’ve […]
Continue reading →A couple of weeks ago, my institution, the University of Chicago, made a bit of news for a letter that Jay Ellison, the Dean of Students in the College, sent to incoming freshman. This letter informed students of UofC’s commitment to both “freedom of inquiry and expression” and civility. The more controversial part of the […]
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 […]
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