-
My New York Napkin Collection
At first I wanted the napkins. Anyone who has eaten a few meals at mid- or lower-end restaurants in China knows that getting table napkins can require the persistence and negotiating skills of a senior diplomat. You’d think the waitstaff were personally paying for each napkin out of their own paychecks (wait, maybe they are?)…
-
Magic-Loop Mittens, Knit Without Fear
I promise, I will not turn this site into a knitting blog. I actually have at least half a dozen other posts in rough draft form—book reviews! photographs! China stuff!—and need to clean those up and publish them. But first, one last post (for now) about knitting. My favorite knitting blogger is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, known…
-
Gone Grant: UC Pacific Rim Research Program Ends
I have a very clear memory of finding out that I’d been awarded a UC Pacific Rim Research Grant, because I thought I’d been rejected. I was kind of on a break from grad school in the spring of 2012, working on ChinaFile at the Asia Society and living in Princeton. As I rode the…
-
Knitters Take Manhattan: Vogue Knitting Live! NYC
(Random side note: although I loved both of my apartments in Shanghai, one thing neither ever offered was quiet, primarily due to the incessant renovations other residents were always undertaking. It just struck me how wonderful it is to sit down with my coffee and laptop early on a Sunday morning and write without the…
-
A Longwood Christmas
Remember how I swore I was in for the winter and had no plans to go anywhere as long as the mid-Atlantic region was doing its North Pole imitation? Well, as Mary Poppins would say, that was a piecrust promise (“easily made, easily broken”), because my mother, brother, and I decided to go to Longwood…
-
Winter Hibernation
I am so ready for this. Temperatures in New York have plunged this week, and I’m ready to hibernate. Between travel for work and the holidays, I don’t think I’ve spent a full week in my apartment since I moved here over Thanksgiving weekend. But now, I’m looking at my calendar and don’t see any…
-
Notes from #AHA2015
The annual meeting of the American Historical Association was held in New York this past weekend. Admittedly, I didn’t have a specific reason to go—I wasn’t on a panel or interviewing for a job or trying to sell a book manuscript—but it seemed odd not to attend when the largest meeting of my (sort-of) profession…
-
Out with the Old, In with the New (Eventually)
I achieved my final resolution of 2014 and early on New Year’s Eve finished the dishrag I started knitting over the weekend. Now my mother has one in reserve for the day when my previous creation (c. 2009) truly bites the dust. It’s seen better days, but still has some life left in it. This…
-
A Project I Can Handle
2014 has been a hell of a year. I don’t mean that the year has been bad, but it has been very full. Full of planes and trains, hotel rooms, conference panels, deadlines (more often missed than met, unfortunately), packing and unpacking, writing as much as I could as fast as I could, and a…
-
Bookshelf: The Secret History of Wonder Woman
“Why would a distinguished Harvard professor write about a comic book character?” Heaven forbid a distinguished Harvard professor write about something so common as a comic book character! But as I heard the distinguished Free Library of Philadelphia donor who introduced Harvard historian Jill Lepore at the library last night voice the question he had…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 