Anyone else airport-reading their way to #aas2026?
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I'll take it over tornado/hail.
You’ve gotten a special call-out on the value of reading things by people who don’t teach in history departments and how “historiography” is built off networks of people who actually know and talk to each other!
Next year adding:
6. Sex, Opium, and Sorcery: A Lifetime at the End of China’s Last Golden Age, 1768–1838
Also on catalog:
7. Modern Japan
8. Premodern China
9. Modern China
Academic history colleagues, list all the different courses you teach.
Mine so far are:
1. History of East Asia
2. Premodern Japan
3. Civil War and Reconstruction in 19th Century China (for majors)
4. Empire and Nation in Modern China (grad)
5. Globalization and Modern East Asia (UG research)
The big question: What might Cohen's book have looked like if he could have drawn on scholarship like Meyer-Fong, @wooldridge.bsky.social, Jin Huan, @thianun.bsky.social, @sudasana.bsky.social, Goossaert, etc.? Can students develop research questions to bridge that historiographical gap?
Meanwhile, my historiography class on Civil War and Reconstruction in 19th Century China is getting a bit experimental. The students have caught up(ish) with recent historiographical trends (via Meyer-Fong What Remains). Now we're going back in time to Cohen's classic work on Christianity in China.
After discussion of Peter Thilly's book on the opium trade and Eric Schluessel's Land of Strangers, my Empire and Nation in Modern China class moving on to the 1911 Revolution with Zheng Xiaowei. From rites to rights.
We are advertising 4 jobs at York for historians (1 year medieval, 2 years modern Britain and public history, 3 years modern China, and open ended modern Middle Eastern) features.york.ac.uk/history-jobs/
I will not go down the Alysa Liu-Eileen Gu comparison rabbit hole. I will not go...
I do hope someone does, though, and does it in a way that gives full justice to both the complex historical and geopolitical contexts surrounding them and their own individuality.
Will revisionist historians later question narratives of our decline, instead finding signs of adaptability, resilience, and transformation? Will they be right? More pressingly, will it matter to us?
I'm fascinated by that space where things are clearly dumb, but maybe not as thoroughly dumb as they sometimes seem and will be seen as in retrospect.
When it's clear that things aren't right. But exactly how wrong they will go and how they will get there is shrouded by contingency.
Trump is 79. The Qianlong emperor was 81 when he held audience with George Macartney.
I don't think US empire has reached its nadir. But it feels like we're in a moment that produces events that historians will later interpret (perhaps problematically) as leading toward that nadir.
Me: [explains early 19th century Qing fiscal chicanery to wife]
Wife: But it worked out in the end?
Me: no.......
And this week we’re on to representation/information with Laura Hostetler and @emok.bsky.social
Temporary Assistant Professor in World History who specializes in eighteenth or early nineteenth century history at Cambridge: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista... plus Temporary Assistant Professor in Global Economic History (1600-1850): www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...
You can take the historian out of Hopkins but not the Hopkins out of the historian?
I don't quite agree with it, but I think it's useful to discuss with the students.
This week in my Empire and Nation in Modern China class, we're reading parts of Millward's Beyond the Pass, Zhang's Timber and Forestry in Qing China, Herman's "From Land Reclamation to Land Grab," and Jenco and Chappell's "Overlapping Histories, Co-produced Concepts." Should be fun!
@cnn.com website refers to the victim of the ICE shooting as a “suspect.” Suspect of what?
“What does ‘had no union with her’ mean?”
Not the sort of Christmas morning excitement I need!
The thrill of something you spent a lot of time working on being useful for another task. Merry Christmas to me!
My first public talk in 2026 will be at Northwestern on February 4, on Orwell & China planitpurple.northwestern.edu/event/637043
i.e. Some of the drilling on referencing sources and specific pieces of evidence over the course of the semester did sink in for at least some.
Final exam was a mix of low-stakes take-home short answers (requiring students to provide references to course materials) and an in-class essay. One positive takeaway is that quite a few students carried over citations from the take-home part into the essay even though I didn't require this.
Preferred utensil for eating cranberry sauce from the can?
Sure puts a new spin on Deus ex machina!
