Kjell Ericson

New open access article! In "The Contradictions of Dam Building in the People's Republic of China," the authors examine tensions between the PRC's limited capacities and promethean visions of taming China's rivers in the mid-20th century. Read it here: www.doi.org/10.3828/whpe... #envhist 🗃️

Dams and the Deep Earth: The 1967 Koyna Earthquake and Human Agency in the Anthropocene* Abstract. On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectr

From the current issue: “Dams and the Deep Earth: The 1967 Koyna Earthquake and Human Agency in the Anthropocene”

by Elizabeth Chatterjee and Sachaet Pandey-Geeta Mantraraj (University of Chicago)

doi.org/10.1093/past...

How did Korean firms like Hanjin carry containerization from Vietnam’s Cam Ranh & Qui Nhon to Busan, transforming ports & unsettling U.S. contractors like Lusteveco? 🚢

John DiMoia @ Harvard #STinAsia, Tue Oct 14, 10:30 ET

Zoom registration: seow.scholars.harvard.edu/STinAsia

#histstm #histtech 🧪

The poster for the event. RSVP at https://ncta.princeton.edu/registration/

A sea monster from Ferdinand Verbiest’s Chinese world map Kunyu quantu (1648). Photograph taken from a reproduction held at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, Boston College.

A diagram showing sunrise and sunset from Adam Schall von Bell’s Chinese treatise Yuanjing shuo (Explanation of the telescope; 1626). Photograph taken from an undated Japanese manuscript copy held at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, Boston College.

A drawing of a European telescope from Adam Schall von Bell’s Chinese treatise Yuanjing shuo (Explanation of the telescope; 1626). Photograph taken from an undated Japanese manuscript copy held at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, Boston College.

Our librarian Mårten Söderblom Saarela will give three online talks for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, on November 8, 2025, 9:00am-1:30pm Eastern time. The theme of the talks is "The Jesuit Mission to China." For details and registration, see ncta.princeton.edu.

In food history, we notice how super-refined foods--gelatin, vienna sausage, white bread--lose class and become horrifying once they become industrialized. Suddenly, fingermarks in bread dough demonstrate skill, not clumsiness.

Post-chatGPT, I'm feeling this about writing. Smoothness feels gross.

Seminar Series Term One Our Seminar Series is back for 2025/2026. Seminars will be held at 8pm (GMT). Please sign up using the links below. Joining information will be sent shortly before the event. 15 October 20…

Announcing the new Animal History Group seminar series for the 2025-26 academic year! - All seminars held online at 8pm UK time. 🎉 The details are here: animalhistorygroup.org/seminar-seri...
And here is a list for your calendar! 🧵💚

“August Journalism” Studies: Lessons in World War II Reporting from Japan’s Season of Remembrance - Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus […]

A new essay from me synthesizing the rich body of media criticism in Japanese focused on the practice of "August journalism" (八月ジャーナリズム): the tendency for rehearsed, compressed, and hollowed-out coverage of war memory each August.

apjjf.org/2025/9/fedman

Using Trash to Track Other Trash | Hakai Magazine An Australian organization is taking “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” to heart with its ghost net clean-up program.

Congratulations to @clarewatson.bsky.social, whose Hakai Magazine story on an inventive scheme to cleaning up ghost fishing gear is going to be included in this year's anthology of Best Australian Science Writing:

hakaimagazine.com/news/using-t...

www.linkedin.com/posts/clare-...

In this case specifically, I'd also rather not be eating raw oysters in Louisiana...in August.

Sad intersections with my current research.

The US and Canada began shared shellfish sanitation regulations in 1948, with one US observer noting in the 50s that "cooperative efforts with Canada have been built on a long history of parallel development in the two countries."

Perhaps no longer.

JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM COMPUTER POWER AND HUMAN REASON FROM JUDGMENT TO CALCULATION

I finally read computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 classic “Computer Power and Human Reason.”

This book deserves a massive revival in our current age of grotesque and largely thoughtless AI creep into everything:

Assistant Professor – Global History of Technology - Department of History University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY.

We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration.

I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

Hear me out: Blue books and in class exams are back, but let's be real: penmanship is so passé.

I propose a disruptive, portable, innovation in classroom tech.

A non-accessible smoking pod area in the Kintetsu Ise-Shima Liner train.

Off to Mie for a quick research trip.

Nothing like the Kintetsu Ise-Shima Liner's modular (and, fortunately, no longer accessible) smoking pod.

UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center Provides Funded Fellowships in the Arts and Humanities The humanities library and museum will award up to 50 fellowships to support scholars, artists, and writers conducting on-site archival research.

Many thanks to our friends @hyperallergic.com for spreading the word about @ransomcenter.bsky.social's 2026-27 #fellowships!

Learn more by visiting the Center's website: www.hrc.utexas.edu/fellowships/

#Humanities #Photography #Literature #ArtHistory #RareBooks #Theatre #FilmHistory 🗃️📜📚

京都市で「記録的短時間大雨情報」相次ぐ 低地浸水など警戒を｜NHK 関西のニュース 【NHK】近畿地方には局地的に発達した雨雲がかかっていて、京都市では、２５日夕方猛烈な雨が降って、「記録的短時間大雨情報」が相次いで発表されました。…

Wow, today's downpour ended up being the heaviest rains in downtown Kyoto since 1906.

www3.nhk.or.jp/kansai-news/...

Hourly rainfall prediction for Kyoto of 86, 72, 30, and 30 millimeters.

Estimates continue to rise...

Current hourly rainfall forecast for Kyoto of 57, 50, and 34 millimeters.

I've certainly never seen this level of predicted hourly rainfall before...

Can't say that it feels like 57mm per hour yet, but wow ☔

Feeling rather lucky to have made it home on my bike just before the start of this huge thunderstorm in Kyoto ⛈️

In which a NYT writer, allegedly in possession of an abundance of something, imagines that *all* human knowledge ever produced has somehow been digitized...this person has never seen an archive.

Nouvelle couverture des Annales

Le nouveau numéro des Annales est sorti sur @universitypress.cambridge.org
Au programme, un numéro double consacré aux #animaux (pour la première fois dans l'histoire presque centenaire des #Annales).

Bonne lecture et à bientôt pour une présentation détaillée !

▶️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Back in Kyoto with lingering jet lag. The main upside is the ease with which I can go jogging at 5am, in the "crisp" 27C hours before the scorching miasma kicks in.

URL and ALT text to follow.

excited to share the call for the workshop

EXTRACTIVE NATURES / NATURES OF EXTRACTION

happening at @uobrisceh.bsky.social on 6-7 Nov 2025,

made possible by the @britishacademy.bsky.social

deadline: 10 September!

full call below ⤵

#envhist #envhum

We founded the U of Arizona Center for East Asian Studies three years ago with a US Dept of Education grant. Last Friday marked the end of year 3 of 4. Though the grant was for four years, we have not received word about year 4 funding. Without this support, we have no choice but to close down.

It used to be completely the opposite, science as the gateway to morality. Such historical swings between thinking that science or humanities are the foundation of ethical life show that neither is inherently

JJS Summer 2025 cover image

Explore JJS's Summer 2025 issue: online.ucpress.edu/jjs?searchre.... Discover new book reviews and articles by Reut Harari, Edwin Michielsen, Andre Haag, Melek Ortabasi, Brian Hurley, and Satoru Hashimoto’s timely Perspectives article “Repairing a Form of Life: Ritual in Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain.”

Work in Progress: The Voting Rights Act Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, in which I share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights ...

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act's passage in Congress.

Here's what happened next:

I hadn't seen a 20th century usage of yasai 野菜--the everyday term for "vegetable"--to refer, as its written form implies, to "wild" vegetables.

Just came across an intriguing aside in a 1952 document on how some vegetables have gone from "wild" to "cultivated": 昔は野菜で今日は栽培に移されているものも数種ある.

Curious...

Please register for the HSS meeting @NOLA & come meet Ashton Wesner 🐟Sam Muka 🪸 Rebecca Woods 🐒 Aleksandar Shopov 🐫 and + discuss their research on animal mobilities and why such histories of science matter. Thanks to Sonia Wigh, co-organizer of this roundtable with the Osiris editors! #histsci