Last week, I received word from my department that a course I proposed, called "Divinity and Femininity: Women’s Religious Lives in Pre-modern China" has been accepted and I get to teach it next year. This is particularly exciting news! The course abstract: This course focuses on the religious lives of women in pre-modern China, beginning…Read more Divinity and Femininity
graduate school
Pray consult the story related in the following chapter
Sixty-three years ago, David Tod Roy was, as the New York Times puts it, "a 16-year-old American missionary kid looking for a dirty book" at a used book store in Nanjing, China. The book? The Chin P'ing Mei (金瓶梅), a 100-chapter vernacular novel from 16th century China. It relates the intricate details of daily life…Read more Pray consult the story related in the following chapter
On Writing
From the editorial preface to Mackay's From Far Formosa: "To a man of his ardent temperament and active habits prolonged literary work is the most irksome drudgery. He would rather face a heathen mob that write a chapter for a book." (4) -J. A. MacDonald While I haven't faced any mobs lately, there's plenty I'd…Read more On Writing
The glamor of graduate study
When taking my comprehensive exams years ago, at one of the many moments when I lost sight of the forest of Chinese literature for the trees of individual pieces of scholarship on it all, my advisor suggested I go back to the sources themselves. It was just what I needed, although I still managed to…Read more The glamor of graduate study
Far From Formosa 