August 2014 – Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Sanmao Saturday: Introducing Zhang Leping and His Sanmao the Orphan Comics

Way back when I was in my first year at UCI, I had to write a research paper and was struggling to find a topic. I knew that I wanted to do something on popular culture, but I only had about ten weeks to do all the research AND write the paper—no time to makeContinue reading “Sanmao Saturday: Introducing Zhang Leping and His Sanmao the Orphan Comics”

The Cronut Comes to Shanghai

I’m a little surprised at how far behind Shanghai has lagged in opening a cronut (I’m sorry, a Cronut™) shop. In New York, the birthplace of the croissant/donut hybrid, cronuts are old news: the inventor of last summer’s trendy dessert has already moved on to pushing his other creations, like an ice-cream sundae in aContinue reading “The Cronut Comes to Shanghai”

So, What’s Next?

“How’s your dissertation going?” and “So, what’s next?” are the two questions I’ve been asked the most over the past year. Now that I’m very nearly free of the first (I spent much of today dealing with paperwork to file the dissertation so my PhD can be conferred next month), here are my many responsesContinue reading “So, What’s Next?”

Wanderings: Two Weeks in Taiwan

I’ll begin by admitting that I was wrong. I know a lot of people who have spent significant amounts of time in Taiwan—studying Chinese or doing archival research—and without fail, they tell me that they prefer Taiwan to mainland China. It’s cleaner, it’s better organized and better run and easier to get things done, theContinue reading “Wanderings: Two Weeks in Taiwan”

Time for a New Look

Scroll down for photos of my new purple hair, nose piercing, and panda tattoo! Just kidding. I’m not the one with a new look—though I could probably use a haircut—this website is. I decided to take some time today and finally make a few changes I’d been planning for a while. Major aspects of thisContinue reading “Time for a New Look”

Wall Street Journal: Denying Historians: China’s Archives Increasingly Off-Bounds

Before I came to China to do research for the first time, I worried about how I would get access to the archives. I had heard plenty of war stories from historians who had done their dissertation research in the 1980s and early ’90s, when the archives had been opened to foreigners (unlike the MaoContinue reading “Wall Street Journal: Denying Historians: China’s Archives Increasingly Off-Bounds”