Category: Higher Education
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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…
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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…
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What to Keep? What to Toss?
I’m now into the one-week countdown before leaving Shanghai, and it’s going to be a busy week. I’ve sorted through all my clothes and packed one suitcase, made arrangements with my (somewhat annoyed) landlady to end my lease early, and taught my class at warp speed so we’ll finish next Monday afternoon, 24 hours before…
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Twelve Years a Graduate Student? Yes, Twelve
“Oh, you’re still in school?” I don’t think any doctoral student can refrain from cringing at this question. Friends, relatives, and airplane seatmates unfamiliar with the PhD process don’t always understand how unbounded it can be: it takes as long as it takes to get through coursework, pass a set of rigorous qualifying exams, draw…
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Lean In Too Much and You Might Fall Over
I’ve never before been to a conference panel that left both the speakers and audience in tears, but experienced that for the first time at the Western Association of Women Historians (WAWH) meeting yesterday. Titled “Leaning In, Opting Out, and Moving Up: A Roundtable on Women in the Academy,” the panel featured four women who…
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The Conference Dress
I call it “my conference dress.” An afterthought purchase at Kohl’s back in my second year of graduate school, the dress is now always the first thing I pack when going to any major conference where the outside temperature will be above 50 degrees. It’s black, made of a stretchy, drapey material that doesn’t cling…
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#AHA2014: Book Mania
Like every other historian I know, I love books and can’t resist a deal (or free ones). Publishers are aware of this, and they enable us to quench our thirst for new reading material by setting up huge exhibition halls at academic conferences like the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) that I’ve…
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I’ve Become a Talking Head
I’m spending the weekend in the very, very, VERY cold city of Washington, DC, attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. I will have more to say about that later, but for the moment, a quick link to a video interview with me that History News Network just posted. HNN’s editor is taping…
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LA Review of Books: The UC System Is Failing Its Graduate Students
What I didn’t completely understand when I accepted UC Irvine’s offer of admission almost six years ago was that I wasn’t just enrolling in a school; I was marrying a university system. And the UC system, I have learned, is one of the most dysfunctional families imaginable. The latest episode to stir up graduate student…
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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…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 