Category: Higher Education
-
Weekly Wanderings: June 8, 2025
Last week I wrote about Marco Rubio’s announcement that the United States would curtail the number of Chinese student studying at American universities. Since then, there has been no further information from Rubio about what he meant, but Donald Trump appears to be walking back his Secretary of State’s message. In speaking with General Secretary…
-
Weekly Wanderings: June 1, 2025
On Wednesday, May 28, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” and “revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” from mainland China or Hong Kong. While what that means, exactly, is pretty vague, the overall message is clear: the Trump Administration…
-
Weekly Wanderings: May 25, 2025
In the Michigan running community, Memorial Day weekend means one thing: Bayshore. It’s a shorthand, an in-the-know reference to the start-of-summer event officially called “Traverse City Track Club Bayshore™️ Presented by Munson Healthcare.” There’s a full marathon, a half marathon, and a 10K, and all three usually sell out. This year, that meant a total…
-
Weekly Wanderings: July 7, 2024
Greetings from Jakarta! I am in Indonesia for the briefest of long-haul trips—on the ground for six days, down to the hour—to work at the AAS-in-Asia conference this week. I arrived Saturday afternoon and will leave for the conference in Yogyakarta tomorrow morning, giving me one free day for some quick tourism. I walked around…
-
Burying Books versus Praising Them
When asked as a child to name my hobbies, my usual response was “books.” I wasn’t athletic or artistic; I couldn’t play a musical instrument or entertain an audience on stage. My skill was reading, and I honed it daily: on the bus ride to and from school (two hours a day just to read!…
-
Speaking Events in Shanghai and Hong Kong
Early morning jet-lagged greetings to all from Shanghai, where I landed last night. This is my first time in China since the summer of 2016, and I’m very curious to see what has changed in the intervening two years. So far all I can say is that they now take your fingerprints when you…
-
Weekly Wanderings: AHA FOMO Edition
▪ Four thousand historians descended on Denver this weekend for the annual American Historical Association (AHA) conference, but I wasn’t among them. Driven by a fear of missing out (FOMO), I went back and forth and back and forth about going to the conference, eventually deciding that I just don’t need to be there this…
-
The Uncompromising Jill Lepore
I’ve mentioned here before my enormous history-geek fangirling for Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore. Lepore is an excellent example of someone who works inside and outside “the academy” (aka the university) with equal success, which is one of the reasons I have so much admiration for her (the other being the…
-
Two Upcoming Events in SoCal
I will be back in California for a week at the end of this month—first to San Francisco for work, then to Irvine for … well, a working vacation? I originally intended my three days in Southern California to be pure vacation—visiting friends, going to the beach, eating my annual In-N-Out burger. But then I…
-
The Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Past and Present
I spent last weekend in Chicago attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS, shorthand for both the association and the annual meeting). On the night before I left for the conference, my boss handed me something she had found in her office—the program for the 1971 AAS. Promising to treat it…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 