Workroom

I suspect that one of the peculiarities of academia in Catalonia and Spain (but perhaps this happens also in other parts of the world) is that virtually every institution or funding agency requires applicants to submit their CV using its own highly specific template.

This means that whenever you apply for a grant or take part in an institutional procedure (e.g. internal promotions, external research quality evaluations or accreditations), you cannot simply use your own CV—or even adapt it freely under a set of headings. Instead, each time you have to copy exactly the same information into a different rigid, institution-specific template.

These templates tend to share a few characteristics. They usually include huge headings with logos and, most of all, they rely very heavily on all sorts of cryptic tables–instead of plain text. As a result, the formatting is surprisingly easy to break once you start filling them in, and the whole document becomes a mess.

Another common feature is that institutions replace these templates every few years—usually with the (false) promise that the new version will finally be the definitive one that will remain stable in the future. Since many of these applications and evaluations regularly repeat every few years, scholars find their old versions useless and, instead of quickly updating them with the new information, they have to start from scratch.

And so this is what I have been doing this week! I spent two very long afternoons transferring all the data from my old CV for one Catalan accreditation agency (which was a rara avis because had actually been using the same template for many years!) into its new template.

The problem is not that the task is difficult—it isn’t at all. Nor is the problem simply that it is tedious–every profession involves repetitive admin tasks from time to time. For me, the real problem is that it is entirely unnecessary.

To make matters worse, the longer your career, the more time this takes, simply because your CV gets longer. The template I completed this week ran to 50+ pages—not because I have an extraordinary publication record, but because the logos, tables and formatting consume so much space.

I have no idea who designs these templates, but they all seem to have one thing in common, regardless of the institution or funding agency: they look as though they were created by someone who has never had to complete an academic CV. I’m sure there must be a reason for this that completely escapes me—and I would genuinely like to understand it. As someone who regularly evaluates grant and job applications, I can say that my task has never been easier, or more difficult, because a CV followed a standardized template rather than a well-organized personal format. But there must be other considerations that explain why these templates persist.

Of course, software exists that is supposed to help scholars solve this problem. In principle, it is possible to export information automatically from institutional repositories into these templates. In practice, however, the output is often riddled with formatting errors, missing or duplicated entries, typos, and mismatches caused by the complexity of the templates themselves. As a result, many academics end up filling them in manually anyway.

The whole issue has become such a familiar source of frustration that it has even inspired some genuinely funny and ingenious videos—such as this parody based on the famous scene from Der Untergang, which has become a source of comic relief for a few colleagues and me.

Reading: W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anna Soler Horta, 2018 (2001).

Surrounded all around by processes of touristification and Disneyfication.

On the domestic front, we are still recovering from the Pope’s visit and getting ready for the Tour de France’s Grand Départ—the icing on the cake of our city’s ongoing transformation into a cross between Venice and Las Vegas.

On the work front, I am still thinking about Professor Gladys Nieto’s superb presentation last week on extractivism and touristification of the Chinese New Year celebration in Usera. And this morning I read Andrew Higgins’ China’s Most Famous Modern Writer: From Fiery Rebel to Cute Communist Mascot, and how the CCP “has turned Lu Xun, a Mao-era hero who excoriated the establishment, into a bland, Disney-style character.”

Back home after the symposium Whose East, Which West? Networks, Archives, and Diasporas in China and the Ibero-American World. Many thanks to Allen Young, Anna Kendrick, and the rest of the organizers for inviting me to deliver one of the keynote lectures and for giving me the opportunity to share both my earlier and more recent work. It was a pleasure to be part of such a stimulating exchange of ideas. 

Thanks to the generous comments of a reviewer, I’m taking the opportunity to read Sontag’s work more broadly.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

In Plato’s Cave was originally written in the 1970s…

Clara Kathleen Rogers, Violin Sonata in d Op. 25: II. Andante con espressione.

Paula M. Krebs, A Column for Life Members (and Anyone Who Wants to Help Shape the Future of the Profession):

Life members can invest in the future of our disciplines in many ways. You can volunteer to mentor a graduate student or early-career faculty member. You can buy one a coffee at the convention and ask about their work. You can reach out to a student from another campus whose work you’ve heard about or read and invite them to share more of their work with you.

In fact, we should do this much more often–without waiting until retirement or life membership…

Reading: Gerbrand Bakker, A dalt tot està tranquil, trans. Maria Rosich, 2012 (2006).

Rebecca Winthrop, What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity:

Increasingly, many people I talk to — from students to teachers to peers — tell me that they think it’s OK to use A.I. chatbots for brainstorming as long as they do the “real work” of writing.

But this misunderstands something critical: Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking.

Still more institutional events about refounding the university in the age of AI. Everybody is indeed very concerned.

But no one seems willing to question the root assumption underlying the problem. The EEES helped build a university system oriented toward training students to become better workers, and degree programs were redesigned around professional skills. Now that the job market no longer needs so many of those workers, we are in deep trouble.

Had we built the university system on a different set of values, we would be in a very different situation.

The Taiwan Literature Hub wins the 2026 iF Design Award for Public Architecture for a design that “highlights respect for memory, a dialogue between old and new, and architecture as a storytelling medium”.

In the morning, I attend an institutional event aimed at refounding the university. We are encouraged to collectively imagine an AI-native university.

In the afternoon, I read about the risks of student deskilling in Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary:

The uncritical adoption of AI can lead to students not developing essential academic skills such as critical thinking and writing. If students are taught to learn through automation, without learning about how and why things work, they won’t be able to solve problems when something actually breaks.

(…) Within just a few years, AI has turbocharged the spread of bullshit and falsehoods. It is not able to produce actual, qualitative academic work, despite the claims of some in the AI industry. As researchers, as universities, we should be clearer about pushing back against these false claims by the AI industry.

A moving event to honor not only a colleague who is retiring but the retirement of the last of the humanists.

During the event, the same passage from the same book was mentioned twice by two different speakers. It was also the very passage I had underlined when I read the book in 2019:

preservo, més que cap altre privilegi, el dret de visitar les biblioteques assíduament, amb una disciplina fèrria que no coneix excuses. Hi vaig, m’enterro dins dels llibres, desaparec dins del text i el dia ja està salvat. Llegeixo, apunto, treballo, penso, em distrec, escolto el silenci, m’evadeixo de la realitat per veure-la des del prisma del llegat escrit.

Today I attended a workshop on emotional well-being in PhD studies led by my colleague Alba Pérez. Like many other things in life, research is largely a matter of feeling, and regular training in this area should be a must for any scholar.

Two tangential takeaways from the workshop. First, the doctorate is in many ways a relic of the Middle Ages, as very few professions are still organized around a mentor–apprentice relationship. Second, I learned a new word: anhedonia.

Reading: Laurent Binet, Civilizations (2019).

Working with my ALTER colleagues on the preparation of a symposium to be held next year.  We have just launched the call for papers: Multilingual Archives, New Perspectives: China and the Sinophone World at the End of the Cold War. Very excited about the topic itself–but even more so about its experimental nature.

Today, Sebastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha covered 26.2 miles in under two hours. Their achievement lies not in the time itself, but in the fact that they ran that distance through their own physical effort rather than with the help of a vehicle. There would be little particular merit in covering the same distance in the same time by driving or cycling. But they ran that distance by themselves.

I suspect the future of human translation may come to be valued in a similar way. Literary translators will be appreciated not for the final product, but for the intellectual, artistic, and creative effort involved in producing a text oneself, without excessive technological assistance–though determining what counts as “doping” in literary translation may well become the truly interesting debate. In this sense, the ACE Traductores initiative Sello de Traducción Humana seems to move in a very right direction.

I do not see this as an argument against machine translation. We still rely on vehicles to move faster from one place to another. And the potential of AI for scholarship in the humanities is enormous—as I am trying to show in my own research projects. Yet there remain human activities in which effort, craft, and the awareness that something was made by a person continue to matter.

Adorno, Minima Moralia, on accomplished texts being like spider webs. Aphorism 51, translated by Joan Ferrarons:

Els textos treballats com cal són com teranyines: densos, concèntrics, transparents, ben formats i resistents. Atreuen cap al seu interior tot el que hi corre o hi vola.

Visit to the exhibition Kazuo Shinohara: The House as a Work of Art. It is also our first time inside the Dipòsit del Rei Martí, which hosts the exhibition. We had passed by the place many times before, but had never actually visited it. The container proved just as interesting as the content.

Family visit to the Carthusian Monastery of Escaladei. My last visit was ages ago, when the place was still in ruins. The site has since been partially reconstructed. It is superb.

We spend quite some time in a reconstruction of one of the monks’ cells. The monks studied in isolation. No sign of today’s open-office layouts for faculty.

Reading: Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (2012)

Once upon a time, Pierre Menard prompted AI so carefully, for so long, and with such detail that the final essay ended up being written entirely by himself.

Quick trip down to the Universitat de València to give a guest talk for the course Transculturality and Diversity in East Asia, organized by my colleague Marcos Centeno.

I spoke about translation and the memories of China’s culture fever in the 1980s. It felt really good to be back in a familiar setting, speaking in a room full of students.

Kim Andre Arnesen, O Sacrum Convivium

Jürgen Habermas passed away yesterday. I read a few obituaries. I return to Philipp Felsch’s book, published in Spanish translation by Trotta last year. And, from there, to the original photograph by Gorka Lejarcegi. The Haus Habermas was designed by Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler in 1971–1972.

Time flies. Getting closer… Camille Saint-Saens, Rhapsodie d’Auvergne Op 73.

Last week, Jeanette Winterson was awarded an honorary doctorate by UOC. Today, the university published an interesting interview with her.

Technology is in the hands now of a very few men who are very limited. These men are limited. They don’t have culture. They don’t have philosophy. They don’t have history. They don’t have ideas. They only have technology and they’re running the show. That’s a problem for me because so few people are involved in the conversation.

Reading: Javier Marías, Berta Isla (2017).

I have almost forgotten everything from the two years of Japanese language study I took at UCLA as part of the requirements for PhD students in the Chinese track. Yet the everyday life of institutionalized academia often reminds me of the causative form: the verbal form that expresses making (or letting) someone do something, which, when declined in the passive, turns into “to be made to do” something.

As scholars, we live in the causative-passive form.

This morning, while attending one of those grandiose yet Kafkaesque meetings, I remembered a venerable colleague of mine who often used to say, “Folks, we have been participated again in an institutional project, this time about this and that…”

A while ago, I was interviewed by the team at the Asociación Hispánica de Estudios de China. The interview is part of Diálogos de Estudios de China, a series of conversations with Hispanic sinologists and Sinophone Hispanists, and is now available online. I am very grateful to Gabriel García-Noblejas, Juan Carlos Moreno-Arrones, and Víctor Cortizo for giving me the opportunity to share some aspects of my academic trajectory and work.

Angela Zito, 1979/1984: Of Scholarship, Sinological Tourism, and Thermoses:

In the long 1980s, I was just living. When you are just living, your point of view is so narrow — yet you do not know. We sing from inside our temporal cages. We only see them after we have made larger ones; we only see them from far away. Decentering the self may be the start of accounting for how the self exists in the world.

Jennifer Feeley, interviewed by Michelle Chan Schmidt in Asymptote:

I do sometimes see literary works that people describe as being translated from, for instance, Taiwanese Mandarin or mainland Chinese Mandarin. I wonder: how do these designations relate to the written versus the spoken language? I don’t know. I think this comes from good intentions because people want to acknowledge that there is not one monolithic “Chinese” language, which is true. But there is such a gap between written and spoken Chinese languages in many places, especially Hong Kong. I’m not sure what to do with this language issue. It’s a thorny thing.

Last week, we wrapped up our doctoral seminar for first-year PhD students. As in previous editions, at the end of our final session I shared with them the five habits they had cultivated throughout the seminar—habits I hope they will carry forward into their academic and professional lives.

Today, I learned that the students have decided to self-organize a reading group so they can continue meeting every Wednesday afternoon to discuss texts they find interesting. This is the best possible outcome any teacher could hope for.

Reading: László Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, trans. Ottilie Mulzet (2016 [2004]).

Sinking my teeth into it. Focused, not frenzied–yet. Antonin Dvorak, Serenade for Strings in E Op. 22.

Iban Zaldua, This Strange and Powerful Language: Eleven Crucial Decisions a Basque Writer Is Obliged to Face, translated by Mariann Vaczi, 2016 (2012):

This is not strange by the way, for any writer has to make decisions constantly. As Vita Sackeville-West put it, even the very moment of starting to write a novel is a crucially important decision for a writer. But I do have the impression that those of us who write in a marginalized, subdued language in a diaglossic, folkloric state; in decline; in full recovery; very ancient (cross out what you think does not apply); those of us who write in a language like Basque, from a small, colonized country, with the greatest level of autonomy in Europe; overdeveloped; schizophrenic (cross out, with even greater momentum if at all possible, what does not apply) as the Basque Country, we are obliged to make a few more decisions than most writers. Even those dilemmas that we share with writers of other languages and countries assume their own idiosyncrasies when we face them in our tiny corner of the Global Republic of Letters.

Lothar von Falkenhausen, Lawrence Scott Davis (1951–2024).

What a remarkable gesture by Lothar von Falkenhausen: to write this piece for Sino-anthropologist L. Scott Davis, which turns out to be a superb combination of obituary, multiple-book review, state of the field–and a reflection on the paradoxes and vicissitudes of scholarly life as well:

For most Sinologists, Lawrence Scott Davis (he went by Scott) is not a household name. But it should be. Scott was without question one of our generation’s most startlingly original minds in the field of China studies—a genuine prodigy (qicai 奇才)—one of a very small number of scholars able to conduct both high-level ethnographic research in contemporary Taiwan and in-depth, archaeologically informed philological investigations into Chinese ancient classical texts. Besides, he was a stupendously well-read and polyglot all-round intellectual, a technology wizard, a gifted musician and songwriter. His academic career may have been checkered and peripatetic; but his publications (…) are notable for their originality, theoretical sophistication, broad outlook, and cultural sensitivity. In writing this obituary, I hope in particular to whet the readership’s appetite for his soon-to-appear magnum opus (Davis forthcoming), which tragically he did not live to see in print.

Fascinating doctoral seminar today on an iconic paper by the late Salvatore Iaconesi, “Interface and Data Biopolitics in the Age of Hyperconnectivity. Implications for Design.”

The paper makes a strong, convincing claim for interdisciplinarity:

This is a complex process, which involves the aforementioned trans-disciplinary approaches as well as considerations that regard current business models, legislations, human rights, and (often national and international) security. There is no simple way to confront with this type of problem. Rather, it is a problem to be dealt with through complex approaches, combining not only different disciplines and practices, but also society as a whole.

Just back from the MLA Conference in Toronto. Very honored to be invited to  participate in the double panel organized by Satoru Hashimoto and Christopher Lupke on The Future of East Asian Comparative Literature. Very rewarding to hear how scholars at different stages of their careers imagine the future of the field from their own vantage points. Our current state of the discipline is nothing but the accumulation of these overlapping temporalities—and their accompanying predicaments.

It was great to reconnect with colleagues and old friends. I was struck by the generalized concern about the larger state of things. Probably for the first time ever, I saw broad agreement across the spectrum: R1 faculty, liberal arts college faculty, community college faculty, plus leadership, plus administrators.

Tina Lu,  The Family We Are:

Things are different now. We are living in an age of radical disruption. The unthinkable happens on a daily basis, it seems, existential threats so pervasive we can only brace ourselves for the next blow. (…) But I have also been thinking about another way to make meaning, how to attempt, in the magical alchemy of teaching and learning, to turn loss into some form of remembrance. (…)

It got me thinking of my own teachers’ teachers, my “grandteachers,” if you will: a Belgian poststructuralist, a Manchu prince, a Canadian Miltonist, a Jewish philologist who fled the Nazis, a brilliant commentator who had his home ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, and so many, many more. Of course, I recognize that some of the grandteachers whose impact is the deepest have been forgotten: Who taught my quietly radical Arkansan high school history teacher? Who were the language teachers who taught my many language teachers? I invite you to partake in this exercise, which I have found comforting. It doesn’t take much to realize that each of us, in and of ourselves, is a big tent already, housing all sorts of disagreement but also conversation.

Each of us is a conglomeration of teachings passed down by teachers, teachings that we ourselves have the privilege of passing down. That’s the true family that we are.

Reading: Jennifer Egan, The Candy House (2022).

Franz List, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses III, S. 173: No. 3, Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.

Very honored to have been invited as a keynote speaker for the symposium Whose East, Which West? Networks, Archives, and Diasporas in China and the Ibero-American World, taking place in late June. I’m especially grateful to Allen Young, Anna Kathryn Kendrick, and Ruth de Llobet at NYU Shanghai for their kind invitation. The call for papers is now open!

Alexandra Jacobs, Kiran Desai’s Long-Awaited Return Is a Transcendent Triumph:

Almost 20 years in the making, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai, is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes and chilly optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time.

On 9 October 2017, Iceland qualified for the 2018 World Cup. It was a truly historic moment: the smallest country ever to reach the World Cup finals.

Today, at 4:35 p.m., I qualified for the World Cup finals. In the evening, we celebrated at home.

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.