Tom Mazanec

Rhyming 水 and 子 feels really lame to me for some reason.

I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur because I have no interest in using these things or reading any scholarship that relies on them. Especially the AI-generated "analysis": it does cite my dissertation but doesn't really get the main point of it.

Dharmamitra · a toolkit for the languages of the Dharma A toolkit for the languages of the Dharma

New translation tool for the languages of Buddhism—Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese.
dharmamitra.org

Still makes mistakes (I just tested it on the 宋高僧傳 biography of the poet-monk Guanxiu 貫休 and noticed a few errors), but 1000x more accurate than anything I've seen before.

Why can't I enjoy smashing homers while also contemplating the fine details of epithets in Homer? Why not translate 300 Tang poems while also coaching 300 practices?
6/5

**It's funny because when I entered grad school I thought that, in order to be sufficiently wen 文 (literary/intellectual), you had to deny the wu 武 (military/physical). But now I don't care. It's all part of me, who I am.
5/5+

*Cleveland is sub-.500 again and has two pitchers suspended for gambling allegations. It has been a frustrating (if not unexpected for NE Ohioans) season so far. 4/5

For those who don't know this side of me, I was baseball-obsessed until about the age of 16, and was a pretty decent pitcher and middle infielder through high school. Eventually my interests turned elsewhere, but coaching my kids recently has re-ignited a certain spark in me for the game.** 3/5

But my real joy will be playing whiffleball with my kids in the driveway, and watching my son really take the game up as his own passion. 2/5

a baseball with wings and a letter g on a blue background ALT: a baseball with wings and a letter g on a blue background

I picked the wrong year to start really following baseball again.* I'll keep on watching the Guardians and look for nice individual performances to enjoy as they slide toward non-competitiveness. That part will be fun. 1/5

It’s finally happened: a reader’s report on an article manuscript faults me for not sufficiently engaging with the scholarship of Thomas Mazanec. Achievement unlocked!

One for the ages. The only anthology of High Tang poetry that was actually compiled during the High Tang, now translated into English by Paul Kroll.

Open access, like all of the Library of Chinese Humanities volumes!

I should say: congrats to @cmbnugent.bsky.social and colleagues for getting this one approved. It’s such an uphill battle in our current times

Position: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Chinese, Williams College, applications due 9/30/25. Language teaching + open specialization. apply.interfolio.com/169464

Glad to see at least one TT job out there for our students!

No, not at all. Each institution has its own challenges. Just venting a little about the ones specific to my school.

UCSB is not a SLAC; we're also not Cal State or a community college, and my position isn't a lecturer's one.

I wouldn't mind teaching 4 sem. courses if they were limited to 30 students/course. As it is, I often teach courses of 120+ students, sometimes with little/no TA help.

Apparently we used to be 2-2-1 until about 2005, when they deliberately reduced teaching loads in Humanities & Fine Arts to make us more productive in terms of research.

People also used to get course releases for being a program director or major journal editor. I do both now and get no release.

Of course, if you don’t view humanities research as actual research, who cares? It’s another way to extract more teaching and service from me. Then 1/3 of my job (the part that gets consideration during reviews) vanishes. But hey, I can throw out more essay questions / AI prompts to students

I currently teach 4 courses per year on the quarter system. If we switched to semesters, they would have to reduce my load if they wanted me to continue the same research output (and that’s not happening). Don’t expect a book from me for 10 more years in this case.

You'd be fine, at least in the US. At the MA level, what most institutions are looking for is language competence and some kind of research field that aligns with their faculty expertise.

My son was obsessed with trains, so we got basically every train book while in Taiwan (3yo at time): 勇敢小火車 was a favorite (children.moc.gov.tw/book/229096), as was 地下小鐵子 tr from Japanese (www.tienwei.com.tw/product/deta...). Choices are limited in US; better to browse bookstores in TW / HK / PRC.

We’ve mainly relied on Journey to the West 西遊記 adaptations, which keep the kids’ interest. Otherwise, there are lots of good translated books, often from Japanese, German, English, etc.

Why the Humanities Matter -- A Story About Borders A story and statement about the importance of the humanities in today's world by Alan Liu, an English professor who started out a chemistry major. Video created…

My personal 5-min. video: vimeo.com/84252711 on why humanities matter. I can’t improve on the message. But my passion now is the Center for Humanities Communication, which I cofounded to assist the humanities in methods, resources, tools for telling its _why_, center-humanities-communication.org

Slightly blurry selfie of me, a middle aged white woman wearing glasses, holding a copy of my book after just having unboxed it.

Back cover of my book, which includes the summary and two blurbs that are available in full here: https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/Teaching-and-Transformation-in-Popular-Confucian-Literature-of-the-Late-Qing3

Author copy fresh out of the box! I'm shaking!

@uofmpress.bsky.social made the publication process so smooth! And huge thanks for hosting an open access version, which will be available on my official publication date: August 5.

But if you'd rather buy a hard copy, use code UMWEB30 for 30% off!

This sale starts today

Poet-Monks by Thomas J. Mazanec | Paperback | Cornell University Press Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quant...

Cornell University Press is having a 50% off sale next week (6/23-27). So if you want a physical copy of my book, it would be a good time to get one (the paperback would be about $17). Use the code 095000 at checkout.
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Nooooooo!

My mom found ironing clothes to be cathartic, so I always had well-pressed clothes growing up. Other people are telling me to get a steamer.

Ugh, laundry! Can’t I just destroy my clothes at the end of each day?

I think this is the justification I needed to hear.