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If Anyone Needs Me, I’ll Be at IKEA
Getting my apartment was surprisingly easy. I picked it out on Saturday and went to Jacky’s office early on Tuesday morning, armed with my passport and an enormous stack of renminbi (the largest denomination is a 100RMB bill; I had seventy-nine of them to pay my first month’s rent and Jacky’s commission). Bathrobe Guy showed…
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House Hunters International
I took a deep breath late this morning and ventured into the unknown world of Shanghai real estate. An acquaintance had given me the names of several real estate agencies that she had dealt with while searching for a place recently, and I took the subway over to the French Concession to check out her…
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October 13, 2012
It’s amazing how little Shanghai seems to change sometimes. Even though there’s constant construction and the city is always being transformed in various ways, on a street-by-street basis, things look very much like how I left them last August. These days, it seems, Shanghai is less about sweeping change than subtle alterations to the cityscape.…
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Heidelberg 2012
Thursday I don’t frequent the Evil Empire that much anymore, but Starbucks is getting my patronage today because it seems to be the only place in Heidelberg that offers air conditioning. It is stunningly hot here—ninety-plus degrees, no breeze, and not much to speak of when it comes to shade, as the Old Town features…
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Scene from a Research Trip: Ish Sauce
I grabbed my wallet and followed Jen into MaMa BaBa’s Deli, half of a small cinderblock building standing next to Boston Post Road somewhere in Milford, Connecticut. Though all its signs were new, the deli’s cracked parking lot needed a fresh coat of blacktop and its front windows sported ads for Boar’s Head Meats, the…
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THATCamp@Penn: Thoughts on the Day
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to the Summer Arts Camp at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. SAC was a six-week program focused on the arts, where other campers and I chose from different courses taught by CHC faculty and independent artists—usually, I think, taking four or five courses a summer. SAC…
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Why I Tweeted (Parts of) My #dayofhighered
April 2, Monday of this week, was the first online #dayofhighered. Inspired by the #dayofdh that those in the digital humanities have conducted since 2009, Inside Higher Ed blogger Lee Bessette proposed the #dayofhighered as a way of describing to the public what, exactly, academics do all day. Lots of people participated by tweeting their…
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Illustrating the Elevator Talk
Like every grad student out there, I frequently hear the question, “What’s your dissertation about?” At this point, I have a pretty good 30-second answer, which goes something like this: I’m working on children’s cartoons in twentieth-century China. I’m especially interested in the Sanmao comic strips, which ran off and on from 1935 to the…
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“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
The plummy voice of Julie Andrews rings out through the Grand Court of Center City Philadelphia’s Macy’s store every hour on the hour throughout the month of December. As children (and more than a few adults) crowd for seats on the floor of the Grand Court, Andrews invites them to enjoy the Christmas Light Show,…
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On Rereading Gatsby
For well over a decade, I’ve been listing F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of my favorite authors. I went through an intense Fitzgerald phase in high school, enthralled by his descriptions of flappers and bootleggers whooping it up during the Jazz Age while unconscious of the troubles ahead of them. In retrospect, I have to…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 