tommazanec.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

submitted 13 hours ago • 0 comments

My sense of time at the end of this week (clock drawing courtesy of my 5 year old).

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Re-sharing – now without the editorializing! “On Friday, Penn notified department chairs that it will cut admissions across graduate programs, a decision faculty members say was made after programs had already accepted students.”

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

The University of Pittsburgh confirmed Friday that there would be no new Ph.D. offers of admission while Pitt works to understand how reduced federal aid could impact the institution.

submitted 1 day ago • 56 comments

Happening this afternoon! If you're in the SB area, consider yourself invited.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. —Wendell Berry

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

One of the milestones in early Chinese history that I routinely teach is that in the 530s BCE, the state of Jin 晉 inscribed law on metal for public viewing, thus creating the radical concept that the law should be publicly accessible (even if literacy rates were low). It's for us!

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

I will repeat this point endlessly: what we are witnessing is an existential threat to higher education, across all disciplines, from the "worthless" humanities to the "practical" STEM fields. We need to band together. I know @aaup.bsky.social is trying to push back.

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

Can confirm that I know of at least one person whose tenure-track job offer was rescinded in the negotiation phase because of this nonsense. It is an existential threat to all academic fields, from STEM to the humanities to medicine to the social sciences and beyond. We need to band together.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

North Carolina State University announces a hiring freeze in response to federal funding issues. There it is, another step in the dismantling of higher education, barely making the news (because it’s not happening at Harvard). www.wral.com/news/educati...

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Recently published by Natasha Heller: Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/litera...

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Do you know who should be the next Translator in Residence at the U of Iowa? Tell them to apply!

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

I'll be hosting the annual Pai Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies. This year, it's all about premodern Korean literature, society, and digital humanities. The sources (sihwa 詩話) are all in Literary Sinitic, so it should be of interest to Sinologists, too. Join us if you're in the area!

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

This was wild! More than 500 showed up, there was whole troupe of UCSB students doubling as musicians (including 1 of my Classical Chinese students on guzheng 古箏), the old head of the the Ch-Amer Association did calligraphy for 3 hours straight, my daughter and her friends did their folk dance... 1/

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

This is a nice meditation on / memoir about snakes. Happy year of the snake! 蛇年快樂，靈巧像蛇！

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

This was wild! More than 500 showed up, there was whole troupe of UCSB students doubling as musicians (including 1 of my Classical Chinese students on guzheng 古箏), the old head of the the Ch-Amer Association did calligraphy for 3 hours straight, my daughter and her friends did their folk dance... 1/

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

I enjoyed this piece by Nicolas Tackett comparing the reunification of the Sui to the reunification of the Song... superficial similarities but deep differences in cultural geography www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Self and Body in Early East Asian Thought by Mark Lewis, freely available until Feb 29 www.cambridge.org/core/element...

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Vance, in fact, is Neo-Confucian here. This is basically the Great Learning 大學 in a nutshell. Investigate things 格物 -> extend knowledge 致知 -> make thoughts sincere 誠意 -> rectify the mind 正心 -> cultivate self 修身 -> bring order to family 齊家 -> govern the state 治國 -> illuminate luminous virtue 明明德.

submitted 24 days ago • 3 comments

蛇年大吉！Happy Year of the Snake! Here are different ways the Chinese languages have landed on naming the slithery creature 🧵 The most common name is 蛇, attested in the oracle bones as 它. (The etymology of this word is uncertain; see en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%9B%87) /1

submitted 25 days ago • 2 comments

Happy year of the snake, everyone! 靈巧像蛇 Be as wise as serpents (馬太福音 / Matthew 10:16)

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

How do I get this on the radar of the #Medievalsky people?

submitted 25 days ago • 2 comments

Shao-yun Yang's critique of historians' habit of applying the label "cosmopolitan" to the first half of the Tang dynasty. Excellent reminder to all of us that you can't ignore the rest of the world even if you're only telling the history of one region or linguistic sphere. doi.org/10.1017/S002...

submitted 25 days ago • 3 comments

Just think for a second how many PRC citizens read English fluently vs how many American citizens read Chinese fluently. Even accounting for the population gap (expect about 1/5 of Americans cp to Chinese), we are running way low.

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

1/ Why does the U.S. seem to be caught off guard so often by what China or Chinese companies accomplish? Here’s an off-the-top-of-my head thread unpacking some reasons—structural, cultural, and epistemological—for this recurring phenomenon.

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

you might have missed last Friday's new piece in the @digitalorientalist.bsky.social about working with #Chiense texts and LLMs! Check it out now 👇 digitalorientalist.com/2025/01/24/e...

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

For maybe the first time ever(?), the City of Santa Barbara is hosting a lunar New Year Festival. I’m proud that my department, as a co-sponsor, can help make this happen. But the vast majority of credit goes to SB Chinese School’s principal, @yumazanec.bsky.social

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

My favorite translation for the day is “Spelunk Heaven” 小有清虛洞天 “Clear and Vacuous Spelunk Heaven of Lesser Existence” from Dominic Steavu’s “The Writ of the Three Sovereigns: From Local Lore to Institutional Daoism.”

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

For Chinese lit, start with the Seven Masters of Jian’an 建安七子 (c. 200) and end with the literary reforms of Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 & co. (c. 1050), just before you get to the New Policies of Wang Anshi 王安石.

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments