Workroom

Reading: Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021).

Many years ago, after our conference panel ended, a colleague and friend immediately returned to the room’s computer to ensure that his slides had been completely erased. He took such pains to make sure of this that I suggested it might be a bit paranoid. He replied with the old saying that just because you’re paranoid does not mean they aren’t after you…

I thought of this recently when several terms and concepts that we are using in our current project appeared verbatim in the call for papers of a symposium organized by another scholar—whom we had invited to one of our early meetings. When we contacted this person to note the coincidence, we were told that if we wished to participate in the symposium, we would be very welcome—and that we could, in fact, help cover the organizational costs.

Max Richter, November.

Paul A. Cohen passed away a couple of months ago. I learned of his death through Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s obituary, which led me to read A Path Twice Traveled.

I finished the book impressed by several aspects of scholarly life reflected in Cohen’s trajectory: the importance of mentorship; a constant attention to rigor and elegance, especially in confronting the weaknesses of one’s own work; and the pace of correspondence (and scholarship more broadly) in the era before email.

I’m an avid reader of Acknowledgments sections. I read them all, back to back, in every work I pick up. No exceptions. This is also one of the sections I put the most care into when writing my own things.

So this is one of the most fascinating things I’ve come across recently: The Unexpected Poetry of PhD Acknowledgements, written by Tabitha Carvan and produced and published by the ANU College of Science and Medicine.

It is no surprise that I discovered it through the Bluesky page of a good colleague and friend who is also a devoted reader of Acknowledgments and a poet.

In the morning, I attend a workshop on a CoARA Action Plan. My university is a proud member of the CoARA coalition—a project aimed at reforming how research, researchers, and research organizations are evaluated, and at moving beyond our current reliance on publication-based metrics and rankings.

In the afternoon, I discover that my university has just as proudly announced the names of five colleagues who have been included in the latest ranking of the world’s most cited scientists, compiled by Stanford University and Elsevier.

I remember this as one of those recommendation letters that get complicated and stressful: I had to write it on very short notice, I submitted it in a digital format that was not allowed, an additional paper copy was then required when the deadline was super tight… We all struggled a bit, but the letter ultimately arrived on time, allowing the student to begin her internship—and, in many ways, her professional career.

Through a mutual contact, I recently learned (more than ten years later!) that she was so grateful at the time that she even posted this note of thanks on Instagram with a photo of my little “Good luck!” post-it.

Reading: Lea Ypi, Free (2021).

Great start to our doctoral seminar for first-year PhD students. We discussed Richard Smith’s “Peer Review: A Flawed Process at the Heart of Science and Journals.”

I was struck by how quickly the conversation turned to the operational dimensions of the problem, while rarely engaging with its human aspects–or even with the author’s underlying cynicism. Given that, several enthusiastic proposals quickly emerged about using AI to conduct peer review more objectively and efficiently.

I was tempted to propose an experiment for the coming weeks: to split the class into two groups—one in which students would discuss the assigned texts only on the basis of AI-generated comments in sessions led by a chatbot, and another in which students would engage only through human interaction in sessions led by myself. Then, to observe what happens. And, at the end of the semester, ask the students which approach they prefer.

In the morning, I watch this interesting interview with Terry Eagleton conducted by my colleague Nicolás Barbieri. Eagleton begins noting that Barcelona seems to be the city everyone wants to visit.

In the afternoon, I receive an acceptance email from an international scholar we had invited to give a talk to our research group. The first thing she mentions is that she had always wanted to visit Barcelona. Too sad to realize, once again, that our strongest academic asset is tourism.

Still on this topic: The Daily, Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow–a conversation with NYT’s technology reporter Natasha Singer:

I’m working on a book right now about the decade-long push for computer science and now AI in schools, and one of the things I’ve learned from doing historical research is that this is a pattern of the tech industry, of pushing school reforms. And it’s always the latest hyped thing that’s urgent for schools to teach, and schools respond.

And we want schools to respond because we want kids to be able to use the technology of the day, and we want kids to be able to learn the subjects that are the most important of the day, and that help them navigate their worlds and get jobs. But at the same time, tech companies have outsized influence in schools, and we have bowed to tech industry education agendas in school without a lot of public discussion or independent scrutiny. And if you think about other industries, we don’t let big pharma companies like Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson tell high schools what to teach in biology.

Florian Kristl, Muntenia.

Recent flood of requests for faculty to “get involved” in institutional initiatives–most of which seem designed mainly to justify the existence of the administrative machinery that invented them.

A few years ago, a colleague shared that legendary clip of Steve Ballmer wildly chanting for developers, along with a brilliant comparison: university administrations have their own version–chanting for faculty.

We promised that whenever the institutional saturation reached critical levels, we’d watch it to decompress. Played it a couple of times this week.

Reading: Yang Shuang-zi, Taiwan Travelogue, trans. Lin King (2024). Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Yangyang Cheng, To Outlive Tyranny:

Some of my colleagues are already adopting safety techniques used in China for their work in the United States: avoid sensitive topics or keywords, scrub social media, carry clean electronics when crossing the border, and tell students to submit paper copies of their essays to evade digital surveillance.

Catching up on emails after a few days of paralysis. Inbox 20 is the new inbox zero.

Trying to go back to normality. Seeking comfort in the structure of daily routines and family obligations. The kids are back to school, so that means back to old concerns too:  Evan Gorelick, A.I. in the classroom:

Tech companies are using an old marketing strategy: Promise that the latest tech will solve classroom problems. In the early 2000s, they told parents and educators that laptops would revolutionize classroom learning. Districts spent millions.

Two decades later, tech companies are still peddling the same fear of missing out: They suggest students need cutting-edge tools for tomorrow’s economy, and schools that don’t provide them are setting their students up for failure.

Sigur Rós, Fljótavík.

Reading: Mercè Rodoreda, Jardí vora el mar (1967).

In the morning, I read this interesting piece about the reception of Pau Casals in Japan and the Sinophone world.

In the afternoon, by coincidence, we visit the beach in front of the Pau Casals Museum.

Intensive final touches on that major grant proposal after a rather extensive break. Franz Schubert, 4 Impromptus, D. 899 (Op. 90): No. 2 in E-Flat Major. Allegro.

Days of constant gardening–while reading The Constant Gardener…

Reading: John Le Carré, The Constant Gardener (2001).

Meghan O’Rourke, I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students:

My unease about ChatGPT’s impact on writing turns out to be not just a Luddite worry of poet-professors. Early research suggests reasons for concern. A recent M.I.T. Media Lab study monitored 54 participants writing essays, with and without A.I., in order to assess what it called “the cognitive cost of using an L.L.M. in the educational context of writing an essay.” The authors used EEG testing to measure brain activity and understand “neural activations” that took place while using L.L.M.s. The participants relying on ChatGPT to write demonstrated weaker brain connectivity, poorer memory recall of the essay they had just written, and less ownership over their writing, than the people who did not use L.L.M.s. The study calls this “cognitive debt” and concludes that the “results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of L.L.M. reliance.”

Some critics of the study have questioned whether EEG can meaningfully measure engagement, but the conclusions echoed my own experience. When ChatGPT drafted or edited an email for me, I felt less connected to the outcome. Once, having asked A.I. to draft a complicated note based on bullet points I gave it, I sent an email that I realized, retrospectively, did not articulate what I myself felt. It was as if a ghost with silky syntax had colonized my brain, controlling my fingers as they typed. That was almost a relief when the task was a fraught work email — but it would be counterproductive, and depressing, for any creative project of my own.

Just listened to this chapter on writing warm-ups at The Academic Imperfectionist. It all makes a lot of sense. In my case, I’ve adapted a suggestion by Eric Hayot in The Elements of Academic Style:

A writing habit will benefit from being located inside a series of actions and spaces, both physical and temporal, that function as its enabling context. Together these can create a pattern of physical and mental activity that enables you to get work done. For instance, I only write in my office. I begin serious writing days by establishing a sensory space governed by white “noise”: I put on headphones (always listening to something I know well, usually Radiohead, seven or eight albums in a row on repeat) (…)

I also start by putting on headphones but listen to the same song on repeat. It helps me focus and settle into writing mode.

I’d passed by this place hundreds of times, but only today did I find out it used to be Will Faber’s house—just recently restored.

Struggling to complete an SFD (Shitty First Draft), even though I’ve been working on this proposal for over a year. Thinking about Joyce Carol Oates and her comparison of writing the first draft of a book to pushing a peanut across a very dirty kitchen floor with your nose.

Reading: Joël Dicker, L’Énigme de la chambre 622 (2020).

Still caught up in the gardening vs engineering metaphor. I asked ChatGPT what happens when you apply computational thinking to managing human collectives:

Great question—and a complex one. When computational thinking is applied to managing human collectives like academic departments or institutions, it brings both powerful tools and important limitations.

Computational thinking can help structure and clarify complex institutional work, especially when used for logistical or procedural challenges. But it must be paired with emotional intelligence, ethical awareness, and cultural sensitivity to be effective in managing human systems.

Working on a major grant proposal. Writing applications for major European grants has become a whole industry. Scholars and institutions are willing to pay big money to agencies and assessors and consultants and Tom Cruise in Magnolia—all in the hope of increasing their chances. Impossible to have the complete figures, of course, but my guess is that this drive makes public investment in research quite deficitary—efforts to compete end up costing more money than the budget allocated to successful proposals. I will go it alone, low cost.

Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Frösöblomster, Orchestral Suite No. 1: I. Summer Song

Took part, with my colleague Carles Brasó, in the symposium The Politics of Knowledge Production about China at SOAS, organized by The China Quarterly. I really appreciated the diversity of the group—in terms of discipline and, above all, geographical and institutional affiliation. Pretty sure this was thanks to the blind review process for proposals—more events should take this approach. The format was also great, with a focus on group discussion rather than just presentations. Plenty of food for thought!

Once again, I encountered one of those quirks that typically characterize our local academic ecosystem: right after being referred to the Seattle Central Library (designed by Rem Koolhaas in a paradigm-shifting distribution that prioritizes functions over disciplines and topics, etc.) as an inspirational model for research development, we were immediately asked to fill out an Excel spreadsheet.

Reading: Nobara Hayakawa, La voz de las piedras. Un álbum familiar (2024).

Energized by Eli Friedman’s visit to ALTER. I admire the depth of his work and the breadth of his contributions. Over a couple of days, we exchanged views on our ongoing projects, and he gave a great talk on how China’s rise has affected workers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I always find it fascinating—and a real privilege—to witness the making of a book manuscript up close.

Today, at a solemn event, a colleague shared a wise phrase: leading academics—or any human collective—is not a matter of engineering, but of gardening. It’s about sowing, watering, fertilizing, pulling weeds… and then waiting to see what happens.

Michael Berry, AI Nightmares: Rise of the Dead Souls:

Gradually, I also realized that the appearance of AI was inverting the relationship of labor when it comes to education. Students were taking all of 15 seconds to type in a prompt and hand in a robot-generated assignment while my TAs and I were carefully reading through them, offering comments and suggestions in good faith. And then, when we suspected foul play, we had to switch gears, put on our “detective” hats and spend even more time trying to find evidence of academic dishonesty.

(…) Once upon a time, I thought the promise of AI might be to improve our lives, to harness new computing power to make us smarter and more efficient. Of course, AI is evolving quicker than any of us can comprehend, but at least as of this moment, it feels like AI is taking us backward. Students cannot resist the temptation of AI. It is too accessible, too easy. More and more of our students are not reading, and they are not writing. Instead, they submit AI-written essays that are often predictable, repetitive, and laden with “hallucinations” and fake sources; and we, as educators, are in turn increasingly relegated to the role of AI police. (…) Students are increasingly unwilling (or unable?) to invest the time needed to read long, complex narratives and compose their own essays that reflect, question, and explore the impact new ideas are having upon them. And as we outsource our thinking to the machines, we inevitably find ourselves all the more impoverished.

Kashmir Hill, The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It:

Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs.

Just discovered the Dunning–Kruger effect. A cognitive bias identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger back in 1999, it explains how people who don’t know much about something often think they know a lot, while the people who do know a lot tend to assume they don’t know enough.

Naturally, I’ve experienced this—on both ends of the spectrum—many times. I even mentioned this here one year ago. Just didn’t realize there was a scientific name for it…

Reading: Angela Duckworth, Grit (2017)

Johann Sebastian Bach, Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major: III. Allegro Assai

Perry Link, Life On a Blacklist:

The avoidance of straight talk with the public is, in my view, a violation of the tenure system. A tenured professorship is a wonderful job: a person gets respect, social status, and a guaranteed upper-middle-class lifestyle all the way to the grave. Why does society give us such a good deal? Because we are nice people? Because we have already worked hard and so deserve guaranteed groceries for life? No. Society gives us the good deal so that we can tell the truth as we see it, without fear or favor. Tenure protects us so that we can do that. What we owe society in return is candor. If we hem and haw, pull punches, and are otherwise “prudent” about telling the truth, we renege on the tenure deal.

Very difficult days on too many fronts. Huge backlog at work. Physical and mental exhaustion. As I explained to the kids, it feels like I get eight Lego pieces every day, but I can only build with five. So then the next day, I have eleven, but I can only build with five. So then the day after that I have fourteen… and so on.

Yesterday marked the end of our seminar with incoming doctoral students—one of the most gratifying experiences (if not the most) I’ve been involved in in the past few months.

As we wrapped up, I shared five key attitudes the students consistently demonstrated throughout the seminar—habits I strongly encourage them to carry forward into their academic and professional lives:

1. Keep engaging in conversations with people outside your field.
2. Keep building community with your peers and colleagues.
3. Keep showing kindness and generosity to presenters—even (and especially!) when you disagree with them.
4. Keep nurturing deep engagement in your own projects.
5. Keep asking at least one question at every talk you attend.

Very honored to have been invited to participate in the MLA Roundtable Double Session, The Future of East Asian Comparative Literature, organized by Christopher Lupke and Satoru Hashimoto. Here is their call for proposals:

Both area studies and comparative literary studies have changed much in the past 20 years. We are inviting submissions for a guaranteed double session in MLA 2026 that explores the future of East Asian comparative literature. Our aim is to explore the ways in which East Asianists think transnationally and across languages to produce new scholarship on the region and inter-regionally from fresh perspectives. This includes textual dynamics involving under-represented languages around major East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as trans-Asian or other transregional relationships. (…) We seek proposals that address this issue broadly and with the future direction and development of comparative East Asian cultural studies in mind. Possible topics include but are not restricted to the following: what does the future look like for those of us who compare two or more linguistic heritages? Have we moved beyond the East-West paradigm or is there still room for further theorization of it? How do we foster a sustainable model for the multilingual training of East Asian Comparatists? How do we rethink CJK-centric comparisons? How could methods and ideas of comparison change according to different kinds of languages, periods, and textual genres involved?

I look forward to sharing insights from our current collaborative project and to engaging in the discussions in Toronto this January!

Reading: Peter Hessler, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education (2024).

Link and Wu and Liu and Havel still resonate–now in a different context:

As Vaclav Havel had noticed in Czechoslovakia, there are fissures in any society, no matter how totalitarian, and inside them a citizen can be civil. Treating each other with dignity, people together can push upward and outward to expand the scope of a citizens’ culture that contrasts with the harsh official culture, and can reach to people “inside the system”— why not? If the authorities lash back, citizens should not fight but retreat, wait a while, then reoccupy the lost ground, perhaps going a bit further. This strategy can win in the long run because the garden-variety moral values of the populace are on its side, not the side of the regime.

If fissures exist in any society, do scholarly institutions have fissures too? And are dignity and civility the right choice?

Working on a presentation for our research group’s reading club. I’m leading a session on I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi. Trying to turn my mountain of notes into something that actually makes sense for a presentation.   

Delighted to include Mercedes Valmisa’s Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action in the last session of this year’s Classics of Asian Thought course. I also encouraged students to read her piece “We Are Interwoven Beings” as inspiration for their final assignment, which focuses on the dissemination of Sinological scholarship.

Reading: Magda Szabó, La porta, trans. Imola Nikolett Szabó and Jordi Giné de Lasa (2024 [1987]).

No doubt, the best part of serving as director of the PhD program is the privilege of leading the Doctoral Seminar with our incoming PhD students. In each session, we discuss a reading that one of them has selected as particularly inspiring.

Bold texts abound, and the energy students and texts bring is invigorating. These past two weeks, for instance, we have read and discussed “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography” by S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, and Ways of Being by James Bridle. These bold efforts to forge new epistemologies seem to signal a deep unease with our current ways of thinking. And perhaps the failure of previous bold attempts at epistemological shifts too. So it makes a lot of sense that new generations of scholars pick them up.

Yet today during the seminar, I found myself remembering the sentence attributed to a Uruguayan military officer: “We were at the edge of the cliff, and then we took a bold step forward.” I guess that was my awkward way of asking myself: Will these new epistemologies foster a more pluralistic and empathic world, or merely a more pluralistic yet atomized and fragmented one?

David Marchese, Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World:

I actually dislike the word “burnout.” It creates this image that the person in question did their job, the job was really hard and after a while they couldn’t stand how hard it was and they stopped doing it. Which I don’t think is correct. A lot of the health care workers I spoke to said that it wasn’t that they couldn’t handle doing their job. It was that they couldn’t handle not being able to do their job. They saw all of the institutional and systemic factors that prevented them from providing the care that they wanted to provide. For them, it was more about this idea of moral injury, this massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you. At some point that becomes intolerable. I think that’s much closer to my experience of pandemic journalism too.

Frédéric Chopin, Piano Concerto no 2, op 21, 2. Larghetto

Awkward situation this week. I receive an email from a student expressing interest in our PhD program. It turns out that he already holds a PhD. He is seeking admission to, right after being admitted, submit a second dissertation in the thesis by compendium format—essentially assembling previously published (or soon-to-be-published) articles.

The appropriate response is obvious. So I opt for a brief reply: thank you for your interest, it is actually not possible, best of luck. But then he writes back–and quite persistently. I then have to elaborate: the thesis by compendium is not intended as a mechanism to validate previous publications but rather as the culmination of a structured doctoral training process, it is to be undertaken under the supervision of an advisor, often within the framework of a research group’s collective project, and developed over the course of the doctoral program, and so on and so forth. He then responds with a terse, “OK, thank you.”

Wondering where he might eventually succeed in getting what he seeks.

In David Shambaugh’s review of The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger (Harvard UP, 2024), I found this interesting bit on archival research:

His extensive trawling on the Chinese internet reveals just how much can now be accessed outside of China, and why scholars need not necessarily travel to China to research it. In many ways, the situation of China studies today — under the strict controls and censorship imposed by Xi — is similar to that of the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was closed to foreign researchers altogether. At least today, as Suettinger’s study demonstrates, researchers can mine the Chinese internet and social media, as well as its electronic databases. Much printed material is available in libraries and private collections outside of China. Suettinger only went on one research trip to China, where he visited Hu’s tomb at Fuhua mountain in Jiangxi province.

Reading: John Garnaut, The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo (2012).

Manuel Ansede, Un turbio entramado compra revistas científicas desde un caserón inglés para ganar millones publicando estudios insustanciales:

El análisis de las prácticas de Oxbridge Publishing House es revelador. La Revista de Psicología del Deporte, antes relacionada con la Universidad de las Islas Baleares, ha pasado de cobrar 300 euros por estudio a exigir 6.000. El 74% de sus trabajos eran españoles, pero ese porcentaje nacional ha caído en picado hasta el 13%. Los autores chinos monopolizan ahora la publicación. La revista Fonseca, Journal of Communication, antes vinculada a la Universidad de Salamanca, no cobraba por publicar, pero ahora pide unos 2.500 euros por cada estudio a sus autores. Lo mismo ocurre con la revista educativa Artseduca, antes editada por la Universidad Jaume I de Castellón. El conglomerado en torno a Oxbridge ya ha publicado casi 1.500 estudios en sus revistas españolas, según el análisis de Martín y Delgado publicado este miércoles. Son, presuntamente, ingresos millonarios. Los investigadores de Granada denuncian que se están adquiriendo revistas respetadas para “convertirlas en granjas de cobrar cargos por procesamiento de artículos”.

Then, these researchers ask very pertinent questions about these “APC-charging farms”:

¿Están haciendo algo las instituciones (normalmente universidades públicas) para evitar que las revistas auspiciadas, financiadas o apoyadas por ellas acaben en manos de dudosos grupos empresariales extranjeros? ¿Se están beneficiando nuestras universidades de los cientos de miles de petrolibras que están derramando los inversores extranjeros en las revistas españolas?

Thrilled that our proposal was accepted for the symposium The Politics of Knowledge Production about China, organized by The China Quarterly. The call for proposals was:

Since the launch in 1960, The China Quarterly has been one of the leading journals where scholars from a wide range of disciplines publish their research on China. Building on the wealth of knowledge accumulated in the past decades and the hindsight gained through observing the evolution of our field, we are now at a critical juncture that calls for reflection on the relationship between China studies and knowledge production. This task is increasingly urgent, given the epistemological shift within the academy and a geopolitical climate that conditions social science and humanities research on multiple levels.

How can China scholars around the world maintain their academic independence in such a charged geopolitical environment? How can China studies better engage with recent debates on decolonising knowledge production, especially in regard to positionality and epistemology?

How should we evaluate the negotiation between disciplinary scholarship – such as political science, sociology and anthropology – and China studies in the past decades, and how do we envision the intellectual agenda moving forward? What are the new challenges faced by China studies at theoretical, epistemological and methodological levels? Amidst the vociferous discursive field where academics, media, think tanks and politicians are all trying to claim credentials on China expertise, how can scholars of China studies better navigate the current ecology of knowledge production?

Excited for the conversations coming up in June!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622: II. Adagio

The volume Lu Xun and World Literature, edited by Xiaolu Ma and Carlos Rojas, has just been published by Hong Kong University Press. It includes my chapter, “Belated Reception and Residual Influence: Lu Xun and Spain.” Very honored to be part of this project and to be in the company of such a stellar group of scholars!

Reading: Jenny Erpenbeck, Les formes del verb anar, trans. Marta Pera Cucurell (2018).

Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, WWV 103:

Jonathan Malesic, There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore:

It’s tempting to lament the death of a reliable pathway to learning and even pleasure. But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort.

(…) It’s up to students to decide whether they’ll resist intellectual inertia. All I can do is demonstrate that it is worth it to read, to pause, to think, to revise, to reread, to discuss, to revise again. I can, in the time students are with me, offer them chances to defy their incentives and see what happens.

There is an assumption that research in the humanities must be modeled after research in the sciences. For instance, that research groups should be as large as possible, with scholars working in the typical engineering fashion—breaking problems into small tasks, distributing them among different people, and then assembling the results into a collective paper signed by dozens of authors.

However, significant research in the humanities does not function this way. A humanities scholar must engage with a problem across all its different scales, from the micro to the macro, in a comprehensive and integrative manner. Conducting humanities research as if we were engineers in a lab may deceive some institutions and funding agencies, but it will inevitably produce insipid results and—perhaps even more tragically—alienate scholars from their profession.

I have reflected on the works that have most deeply influenced my own research—whether for their ambition, originality, or methodology. My own “fieldwork” exercise led to the following conclusions: none of these impactful works emerged from a lab-like project, nor were they deeply shaped by such an approach. Instead, they are all single-authored monographs.

This does not mean that the authors of these works did not engage in collective or collaborative efforts—they certainly did. But their collaboration took a different form: exchanging ideas, engaging in discussions, and refining their arguments rather than fragmenting their research into alienating micro-tasks. Moreover, most of them did not rely on large, exorbitantly funded research projects. Instead, they benefited from research leaves that allowed them the time and space to think, read, write, and engage in meaningful scholarly exchanges.

Architecture of Density #39 Hong Kong by Michael Wolf:

Reading: Li Er, Coloratura, trans. Jeremy Tiang (2002).

In the morning, I attended a very interesting department seminar on the new paradigm in academic fraud. Instead of (or in addition to) falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism, this new paradigm involves more sophisticated ethical gray areas, such as self-citation, double affiliations, citation cartels, and so on.

In the afternoon, a colleague (who does not work in Chinese studies) asked me for advice. She had received an email from a Chinese scholar proposing a deal: in exchange for supporting his candidacy for one of the European academies that require the endorsement of an internal member (which she qualifies to provide), she would be invited by his institution to spend a few weeks in China—doing research or whatever.

Florence Price, Ethiopia’s Shadow in America: II. His Resignation and Faith.

Writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe interviewed by my colleague Ignasi Gozalo. In about 10 minutes, he offers a masterful ristretto with some of the skills or qualities that any scholar should have. For example, a sense of empathy–moving away from moral vanity as a starting point; a sense of scale–connecting specific topics with broader issues; a sense of literariness–using narrative as a way to fight for attention. Or the ambition for complexity–allocating the time/extension that complicated problems deserve:

I like complicated subjects, I usually have a lot to say. So something like Tik Tok is very hard for me. I have children (…) and for them if you can do it in a minute you are going on too long. And that’s a scary thought for me because the truth is that life is complicated and sometimes it takes some time to explain a complex issue. 

In this interview, Professor Carles Boix offers the best synthesis of the typical European paternalistic view of (or blindness to) what is going on across the Atlantic. To the question “What do we read wrong about Trump, from Europe?,” he answers:

You don’t look at yourselves enough. The very same forces that are behind Trump exist in Europe. And, truth be told, I would say they are even worse. Because Europe hasn’t grown as much. And because Europeans are much more ethnic in their conception of nationhood than Americans.

Delighted to have been part of the doctoral thesis committee that today evaluated Inventando Filipinas: Discurso colonial en la literatura española de finales del siglo XIX (1876-1894) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Even more delighted to have acted, a few years ago now, as academic matchmaker between Cristina Guillén, the thesis author, and my colleague Rocío Ortuño, one of the thesis co-directors, during one of our ALTER seminars.

Reading: Jeremy Tiang, State of Emergency (2017).

Ann Patchett, The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret:

Because I do regret email. Even though I’ve turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions. I regret all the times I look, only to find there’s nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I’ve never met, explaining why I can’t speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel. I regret how every person who hits “reply all” to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up.

(…) I’m a fairly disciplined person. Most novelists are. I’ve turned my email off for certain hours of the day. I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.

If Marcelo Bielsa were an academic, what kind of academic would he be?

I always thought that my basketball wisdom would end up being useful for work as well: Yan Zhuang, Dejected Social Media Users Call ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy.

In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline.

Wonderful visit to the exhibition Xiulant el temps at the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món. The exhibition includes an intervention that has (temporally) modified one of the museum’s rooms. It has been curated by our ALTER colleague María Íñigo, who gave us a superb guided tour with plenty of critical thoughts about contemporary museology.

Crazy days. Still in full rebound effect after a couple of weeks mostly away from admin tasks… Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988: Var. 5, performed by Víkingur Ólafsson.

This summer, the Catalan skyrunner Kilian Jornet completed one of his greatest challenges: he connected the 82 4,000-meter peaks of the Alps in just 19 days. I wonder if anyone asked him if on his way from Mont Blanc to Gran Paradiso he made this or that detour, or if he visited this or that typical spot.

When I go to a conference or on a short, intensive research trip, I always get asked these kinds of questions. Academic tourism has done a great disservice to our profession. It is probably all well deserved: scholars have been very persistent about it. I remember my frustration when I served on committees that allocated department travel funds and found, year after year, applications to travel to cool and trendy places to present the same old (tweaked) paper… This has probably made me overconscious. And so when I go somewhere for work, I basically spend all my time working.

Reading: Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island (2016).

At Mollie Used Books NTU: Anacole Daalderop, Strings Across Moon. 

Gave a talk at National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature.  Very grateful to Prof. Chi Ta-wei for inviting me–and to all those who attended and shared questions and comments!

Humanity’s progress can probably also be defined by small, apparently insignificant details. For example, eduroam.

I never had the chance to take Comp Lit 285 with Professor Heim. I remember him as an imposing presence, but always giving me a friendly, civil nod when we passed each other in the hallway. And I also remember seeing him reading while walking around campus!

After reading The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation, I discovered his activist side. And I regret it even more not having taken his graduate workshop in literary translation.

I’m not quite sure his contribution to PEN (now the PEN/Heim Translation Fund) is sufficiently well known–even if, as Esther Allen explains in her chapter, he precisely wanted to keep it unknown…

He got straight to the point. He was concerned about the paucity of literary translation into English and admired the various initiatives PEN’s Translation Committee had taken to address that situation. Accordingly, he and his wife Priscilla had decided to donate $500,000 to establish a fund at PEN to support literary translation into English. He said this in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, with a hint of embarrassment. My mind went blank. The PEN staffers weren’t entirely sure they’d understood. He had to repeat himself.

There was, he quickly added, one stipulation: the donation was to be absolutely anonymous. He didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, ever, about having given away this money. No one was to know he and Priscilla were the donors. We all must be wondering, he continued evenly, taking in the expressions on our faces with some sympathy, how a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and his wife were able to make such a donation. He explained: the money came from a death benefit the U.S. government had paid his mother when his father—a Hungarian-born composer who enlisted in the U.S. military during World War II—died following an accident at a military base. Heim was a toddler at the time and had little memory of his father. The family had invested the money when it came in and left it to grow in the decades since. Mike had recently turned sixty, and he and Priscilla had decided this was what they wanted to do with it.

That was how I learned that Michael Henry Heim was an activist.

September and back in Barcelona–these days our very own overcrowded blend between Venice, Las Vegas, and Tijuana.

I found this recent piece by Michael Kimmelman on cities hosting the Olympics quite helpful to understand the roots of what is going on now in Barcelona and why we are squirting tourists with water pistols.

In truth, Barcelona’s makeover started years before the city bid on the Games. During the late ’70s, after the death of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, civic leaders devised an urban-renewal scheme for a newly democratic, independent-minded capital of Catalonia. With a potential Olympic bid in mind, they began during the ’80s to remake Barcelona’s railway system, airport and seafront. These and other changes, accelerated by the deadline for the Games, turned the city into a wealthy European gem and tourist mecca.

But at a cost. Low-income housing gave way to luxury hotels and high-end development. It’s no coincidence that American-style suburbs began proliferating on the edges of Barcelona during the years following the Olympics, catering to families seeking more affordable homes and fleeing the mobs and mosh pits along the Ramblas and the seafront. Thousands of Barcelonians, fed up with a housing shortage, the rising cost of living and overcrowding, took to the streets this month, squirting tourists with water pistols and toting signs telling visitors: “You are not welcome.”

Another very good piece recently published on the topic is Lisa Abend’s ‘The Demand Is Unstoppable’: Can Barcelona Survive Mass Tourism?: 

“Now there are drunk tourists peeing on our neighbor’s doorstep.” For anyone hoping to understand the complicated contours of overtourism in Barcelona, the Carmel Bunkers is a good place to start. The frustrations experienced by those who live nearby apply to other hot spots: residents of the Gothic Quarter who feel displaced by the crowds; pollution along the waterfront where massive cruise ships dock; and everywhere, it seems, an apparent disregard for local culture.

Reading: Ge Yan, Elsewhere (2023).

Pio Abad, To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum. Absolutely fascinating project. Info here and great video here. My favorite artwork of the exhibition: “1897.76.36.18.6”–a set of black and white drawings showing bronzes (from the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897) next to contemporary everyday objects. For example:

Ann L. Cunliffe, “Wayfaring: A Scholarship of Possibilities or Let’s not get drunk on abstraction“:

Those of us doing non-mainstream work find ourselves in a paradoxical situation—on the one hand we are exhorted by journal editors to be “original”, “insightful”, “curious”, “theoretically radical”, and “fresh” (all adjectives taken from well-known journal mission statements) and told by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, 2015: 2) that “Excellent social science needs people with the skills, curiosity and creativity to be truly innovative…”. Yet in my experience we are facing the opposite—a narrowing of scholarship through increasing normalization.

In a way, Cunliffe’s claim resonates with a recent discussion about the contrast between the macro, bombastic, paradigm-shifting claims in introductions that are then followed by micro, rigid, formalistic developments in the chapters–a fracture probably due to the inflation rhetoric of book and grant proposals in a competitive system.

Oculus by Tim Cornbill:

Best article explaining what happens when scholars working in Chinese/Sinophone studies reveal their job at any kind of social gathering–and then everybody feels legitimate to say this and teach you that about your own stuff: Andrew Keh, No, You Can’t Beat an Olympic Table Tennis Player.

Coincidence: reading le Carré at home this week, plus visited the exhibition Write Cut Rewrite at the Weston Library–which includes samples of his manuscripts, cut and pasted (literally: chunks cut with scissors and then taped together somewhere else). And then today I discovered this mysterious pile next to the books I ordered at the Bodleian.

Intrigue: is the fellow who picks up stuff next to me working on le Carré, having a super summer, or is there something else? (Then I sensed that someone was following me. I quickly turned back. But there were only shadows.)

Reading: John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).

Lunched with a revered colleague. We discovered we often ask ourselves the same question: What should we do when a student inquires about embarking on a PhD and future academic career given the meager job market and future perspectives?

I first felt somehow relieved to know that we share the same ethical dilemma in these situations. But then I quickly realized that, if someone based at such a prestigious institution feels that way too, the situation is really really sad.

Can’t stop browsing: Adrian Tomine, New York Drawings.

Great news from home! Our ALTER proposal for a collective research project on Chinese and Sinophone transitions around the 1980s has been successful and will be funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. This is a highly competitive call, so we are all ecstatic. Super happy to share the project’s co-PI role with my colleague Carles Brasó. Can’t wait to begin working with the team–about fifteen scholars from different Catalan and Spanish universities. Great motivation for the days ahead at the library this summer.

Family visit to the exhibition Kafka: Making of an Icon at the Weston Library. An excellent opportunity to explain the meaning of the (unfortunately very frequent) adjective Kafkian to the kids…

Writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s profile by Steven Erlange.  On living in East Germany before 1989:

In fact, she said, there was a “kind of freedom” in East Germany, where the ideology of equality meant less stress, competition and greed, and where there was comparatively little to strive for in a society that had only a few options for consumer goods.

“There are some kinds of freedom that you wouldn’t expect to have surrounded by a wall, but it’s also a freedom not to be forced to expose yourself and shout out all the time about how important you are and what you have reached, to sell yourself,” she said.

Kevin R. McClure and Barrett J. Taylor, The Hollowing Out of Higher Education.

Doris Santoro, a philosopher of education at Bowdoin College, has researched demoralization among teachers for over a decade. She noted that teaching is morally rewarding when “educators feel they are doing what is right in terms of one’s students, the teaching profession, and themselves.” Demoralization happens when “the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards (…) are now inaccessible. In the same vein, public policy has rendered many public institutions shells of their former selves. It’s harder for academic workers to do right by our students and colleagues.