While the completion of his PhD thesis continues to elude him, my friend Jai has found some time to write about the current crisis at Columbia University’s MEALAC department (Middle East and South Asia) in the Columbia Spectator. Here is an article at The Nation to get you caught up on the crisis if you [...]
Partly thanks to class assignments, I have recently started looking at some of the gender focused history of East Asia. I’m still only scratching the surface but I’ll share a few of my initial responses so far. Last week for my Chosôn history class we watched Im Kwon-taek’s movie Sibaji, or The Surrogate Mother (Warning: [...]
You know that “Thousand Character Classic” you see in books about Japanese history (that is where I have seen it most, I guess it comes up in Korean and Chinese history as well). It was used as a basic text to teach children how to write Chinese characters. I finally looked it up today to [...]
I assumed that there hasn’t been much written on early postwar political retribution in Denmark, even in Danish scholarly literature. I found some mention in secondary Danish materials, but usually in the last chapter of books talking about the occupation of Denmark during WWII. That was before I discovered the over 800 page book by [...]
There is an excellent review by the rebel pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty in the LRB about Scott Soames two volume history of analytic philosophy (Soames’ response is here). Having come out of (and largely turned my back on) this tradition, I found it especially interesting. I got the link from one of the best academic [...]
I think I snapped up one of the last in-stock Amazon copies of the wonderful Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese by Fang-yü Wang. We are using it in my class on 20th Century Chinese History Research Methods. It is essentially a class to help history students deal with Chinese documents and [...]