Category: Posts

  This Fall I will again be having students do a group research project. They will split into groups and read some articles and present on them and then wr...

So, the Huainanzi project in my early China class went ok, and would have worked better if I had been better at explaining what I wanted from the final paper. I...

There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. This is my upper-division class for the semester, where I want to push students i...

Since I have been posting maps, I thought I would put this up. This is from Shigeru Kobayashi 小林茂, Gaihōzu : Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu 外邦図 : 帝国日本のアジア地図 (Tōk...

Once upon a time I was big into Chinese currency. Not so much as a speculator, but as one of the people who bought old banknotes from people who were selling th...

Looking to spend some money? There are a lot of good essays in the Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China. The editing is not that good, but there are some r...

Part of my summer reading has been Liao Yiwu‘s Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Liao got in trouble afte...

I’ve been on something of a tear through my to-read pile in search of… well, I’m not entirely sure some days. A lot of what’s in that st...

I’ve been avoiding getting into the debate about Marie Kondo’s konmari brand of modernist orientalism, mostly because I’m not that interested,...

A passage I wrote for one of my online course discussion boards: One of my pet peeves about textbook, history, and journalistic writing is the use of the “...

In a thoughtful discussion of teaching at USIH, I commented In addition to all the other qualifications and tensions around teaching, there are gaps between dis...

So, as is our tradition, a bit about what I will be doing in my classes in the Fall. As is also tradition, I am doing this way too late to incorporate any of yo...