brithistorian | Entries tagged with academia

I was reading the June 2025 American Historical Review tonight and came across Peter Lorge's review of A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science by Huang Pumin, Wei Hong, and Xiong Jianping, translatied by Fan Hao. It's one of the most brutal academic takedowns of a book that I've ever read. I'd like to share with you the first sentence from each paragraph, which manage to convey the sense of the whole thing, with my comments afterward in brackets.

"The field of Chinese military history in the West has grown considerably in the last couple of decades but remains extremely small." [So this book should be useful.]
"A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science is therefore valuable if only because there isn't much else." [My comment #1 was right, but just barely.]
"The term 'military science' is particularly problematic. [Dang! We're not even out of the title and things are already "particularly problematic!"]
"More problematically, the authors believe that Chinese military thought — or military science, in their terms — did not change after it was established in the pre-imperial period (before 221 BCE)." [It's never a good sign when any paragraph in a review begins with "more problematically."]
"This brings us to a deep-rooted problem in this book's scholarship." [After two paragraphs of problems, we now come to "a deep-rooted problem"? Damn!]
"Readers unfamiliar with Chinese history, let alone Chinese military history, will find the discussions of history and warfare confusing." [In other words, if you know enough to understand this book, you know too much to learn anything from it.]
"The translation itself appears to be generally competent, although the translator is not well-versed in the deeper meanings of either the technical military terms in Chinese or in English." [It looks like he's about to let the translator off the hook, but no.]

Apparently October was a big month for people interested in early 20th-century English educational policy: My master's thesis on English education acts, 1901-03 was downloaded 5 times! Twice in Singapore, once in Melbourne, once in Lima, and once in Sollom, England. This brings my all-time download total up to 63: 18 from the US; 10 from the UK; 8 from Singapore; 3 each from Australia and India; 2 each from China, Malaysia, Russia, and Vietnam, and 1 each from Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Algeria, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Iran, Jersey, New Zealand, Peru, and Pakistan.

I remember when I posted about having to get a bound printed copy of my QP[1] to submit to my department that several of you were surprised that my department was still requiring this because you were required to submit your paper to ProQuest but never to produce a printed copy. If you were one of those people - or if you are in academia and you know your department requires ProQuest submission either instead of or in addition to submitting a hard copy - and you feel comfortable doing so, would you please PM me with what university and department you were/are at, whether Proquest was in addition to or instead of a hard copy, and if this is based on your experience completing a degree, what year that was?

I'm trying to get my department to pay for the Open Access fee when I submit my paper to ProQuest, and while I'm at it I'm bringing up the possibility of making ProQuest submission a routine part of the QP process. It would be nice to have examples of universities that I know require ProQuest submission, rather than having to say "I know some people that this is their experience" but then have to admit that I don't know where they had that experience.

[1] Note for new readers: QP (qualifying paper) is what my department calls a master's thesis.

According to a statistic in chapter 35 of Cells at Work!: Code Black, only 10% of people who attempt to quit smoking are able to make it 6 months or longer. Reading this made me think back to my own experiences quitting smoking.

I quit smoking on May 1, 1999. I did one month on the patch, then came off the patch abruptly when I had a seizure on June 1, 1999. I spent the three days of most acute withdrawal symptoms in an ICU, and part of that time with acute memory problems - my memory was "resetting" every 10 minutes or so.

By August I was back in school, continuing work on my master's in history and working as an assistant in the Asian Studies/Critical Languages Office.[*] In December I was allowed to drive again. In June 2000 I was allowed to come off my antiseizure medication (and haven't had another seizure since that first one).

It was a weird time that I haven't thought about in a while.

[*] The Critical Languages Office was an oddity of University of New Orleans. During the time that I was there, UNO wanted to start offering classes in Japanese and Korean. (I fulfilled my undergrad language requirement with 4 semesters of Japanese.) But, for whatever reason, the foreign language department didn't want to be responsible for it. So, the history professor who headed the Asian Studies Office (he was an expert in Central Asia - UNO had no one in history specializing South Asia or East Asia) somehow ended up also assuming responsibility for the Critical Languages Office, which was created to manage the Japanese and Korean courses. The entire staff for both "offices" (they both operated from the same physical space) consisted of one professor, one secretary (who also taught some of the Japanese courses), and (for the years 1999 and 2000) me. One of the projects conducted in that office, which I helped with (in a very small, behind the scenes, uncredited way), was the editing of two volumes of The Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History. Everyone who was involved in the office during the time that I was there has long since left UNO, and all of the office's functions have been either scattered over various parts of the university or discontinued. It was a very strange, confusing, impromptu sort of thing, and frankly I'm surprised it worked as well as it did.

I was able to go turn in the bound copy of my QP this morning, then make it home before the snow started. It's been snowing pretty fiercely since about 10:30 this morning. It seems to have stopped right now, so I'm going to go move the garbage cans and shovel at least some of the snow.

Otherwise it's been an uneventful day. I started undecorating from Christmas. I'm up to 1182 days on my Duolingo streak. That's about it.

ETA: Back from shoveling. We got about 7 inches of heavy, fluffy snow (which I didn't think was a thing that happened). I was able to shovel about 1/4 of it, which is enough for now (I had to get the trash bin down to the curb). I'll break out the snowblower and get the rest tomorrow.

I just finished my timed readthrough of my presentation: 26:30! Thankfully less than the 29:15 I had predicted, but still not nothing. I guess I'll get to work on that once I get back from running errands.

ETA: Breaking it down by slide makes it look like a much smaller task. Cutting 6:30 over 52 slides is only 7.5 seconds per slide! ^_^

If it seems like my QP is eating up my timeline, don't worry: It's doing the same thing to my brain!

I just finished writing my script for my oral presentation. Tomorrow, I get to read it aloud and find out how much I went over by. (The presentation should be no longer than 20 minutes; I estimate that my script as written is about 29:15.)

My slide show contains 52 slides, but a much smaller number of unique slides. Now that we don't have to go through the trouble and expense of producing actual slides, I'm a huge believer in putting a slide in multiple times rather than ever going back to review it.

After having had to distill my notes down into the paper, and then having to distill the paper down into the presentation, I feel like my brain has been wrung out like a sponge. But at least the finish line is in sight.

I've finished my revisions to my paper and settled on a new "boring"[1] title: "Alice and the White Knight": John Tenniel's Satire of the Victorian Idea of the Medieval. I've also started work on my presentation - 3 slides so far, consisting of my title slide and the beginning of the introductory material. Tomorrow I'll start seriously working on the presentation, starting with reading through my paper and making a list of all the ideas I present, in the order I presented them (a sort of retroactive outline, since the final paper doesn't exactly match the planning outline).

One month from today I'll be presenting this, and then I'll be done!

[1] The word "boring" here comes directly from one of my committee members. She said the original title I had come up with ("You ought to have a wooden horse on wheels": John Tenniel's White Knight as a Satire of the Gothic Revival") would be good for a conference presentation, but for the paper itself I needed a more strictly informative title, even if this comes at the expense of being interesting, so that my paper will turn up in searches. The committee were also unanimous in thinking I needed to mention Alice in the title.

For no reason at all, I decided to check my school email tonight. I wasn't expecting anything, since my committee had until the 31st to get back to me, so I was very surprised to see an email from my advisor. He said the committee had completed their first reading of my QP and they agree that it's ready to move on to oral review! So I've got a Zoom appointment with my advisor on November 1, to help me prepare for the oral review, and then I've got the oral review by Zoom on November 10. After that, there are three big dates remaining in the semester:

December 5: Deadline for me to submit a revised version of my paper, including any requested edits from the oral review.
December 15: Deadline for the committee to decide whether or not to accept my paper.
December 16: Public presentation of my research (assuming the committee has decided to accept my paper[1])

[1] I've never heard of anyone in my department having their paper rejected, and I'm assuming that if I was headed that way I'd be receiving a lot of negative feedback by now, but I don't like to take things for granted.

I just completed all of the revisions requested Tuesday and have submitted my QP to the full committee!

My scheduled Zoom meeting with my advisor turned into him just emailing a file with his comments marked in it because they weren't the kind of comments that really necessitated a meeting. Altogether he had 30 comments for me, some of which were as minor as using "19th" instead of "nineteenth" or neglecting to italicize Punch in one place. Most of them were just cases of fixing awkward wording or more clearly identifying sources of quotes. I have to find a few additional images and add a couple of additional references to the images I already have. I'll have to write a handful of new sentences and go back to my sources for additional information on literally a couple of things. But all in all, not nearly as much as it could have been. ~~The most time-consuming this is probably going to be going through the whole paper and moving all my footnotes so that they're inside the punctuation instead of outside it~~[1]. In his emails accompanying the file, my advisor said "This is in excellent shape" and "Your argument is rock-solid, evidence well mustered, and writing clear and engaging." So I'm feeling great right now. Not even the fact that I have to go to the DMV after I finish writing this can bring me down. ^_^

[1] Don't have to do this after all - I'd misread the feedback.

Over the course of the weekend I've put all the parts of my QP together, done all the front and back matter (title page, abstract, table of contents, list of illustrations, bibliography, illustrations, appendix), and it's in a condition that if I had to, I could turn it in right now. Altogether it's 74 pages long - the longest piece of academic writing I've ever done!

Since my deadline to turn it is in noon tomorrow, I'm going to put it aside for the night and give it a last readthrough in the morning before submitting it.

Current Mood: relieved

As part of preparation to turn it in Monday, I just copied all the sections I've written into one document. I have written write a bit more than I had thought: Altogether, the text and footnotes of the paper (to which I still need to add a conclusion) comes to 44 pages! Also, I noticed when I was scrolling through it in order to re-click all the alerts from the spellcheck and grammar check that I'd told Word to ignore (because apparently the instruction to ignore doesn't get copied when you copy the text) that one entire page of my report is dedicated to the history of mousetraps!

And now, back to work...

Yesterday's advisory meeting went well. He had half a dozen pieces of feedback on the sections I had submitted, all of which were on the "expand on this a little, trim that a little, move this from here to there" variety - no major flaws found in my interpretation. He said my writing was "a delight to read," which was a huge confirmation that I've been successful in my intent: I've had to read so many things that were important and informative but at the same time dull and/or practically incomprehensible that I have always strived for my work to be a pleasure to read.

I've made a to-do list of everything I have to do to have my final draft ready for Monday and it came to 33 items, ranging in scale from "write the introduction" down to "go through the section 'The Problem of Alice' and change '19th' and '20th' to 'nineteenth' and 'twentieth'." I was able to knock out five items yesterday and have already done five today (since my goal was for three yesterday and six today, I'm one item ahead on the week so far).

Further updates to come.

This morning when I sat down to make my QP writing plan for the next week, I realized something that's both exciting and frightening. I've been writing my paper a chunk or two a week. Next week's chunk is to put everything together and submit the entire paper! This won't mean I'm done - I have to submit my paper to my advisor on Monday for discussion on Tuesday and probably revisions before I submit it to my committee next Friday. Then, while waiting for feedback and either revisions or acceptance from the committee, I have to start getting ready for my oral presentation of my research, to be done in mid-December. Plus I have to be prepared for a comprehensive oral exam on my research. So, not the finish line, but definitely a major milestone!

Dear Author:

You cannot say that an artist belongs to a particular school of artists when that school does not exist anywhere except for the sentence where you just made it up. If you really want to invent a new school of artists, you have to define the membership of the group, define the common characteristics of their work, tell whether the artists involved considered themselves a school, and otherwise be prepared to defend your invention. To just drop the name of a non-existent school of artists and expect the rest of us to act like you're making sense is totally unreasonable.

No love,
Me

ETA: I just ransacked her footnotes and happened to have on hand a copy of the work that she cites for this school of artists. So I looked up the original statement and she is overstating her evidence in a big way. There is a huge difference between "There was a group of illustrators who could almost be called the X School" and "John Tenniel was a member of the X School." And she gets extra points taken off because John Tenniel wasn't even mentioned in the book from which she grabbed the name of this nonexistent school.

A pox on Victorian art historians! They're even worse than early 20th-century art historians as far as just referring to someone by their last name. At least with the early 20th-century art historians, you can discover the first name if you can find the first place in the book/paper that they refer to the person. Victorian art historians feel no such compulsion. I'm sure it would shock them that a day had come that an art historian wouldn't immediately know who they mean when they refer to "Dr. von Eye," but that day has come to pass! My writing yesterday took about twice as long as it should have because of the need to locate these first names.

I got an email from my advisor this morning that my committee had approved my prospectus! They had some feedback for me, of course, but only 5 items, of which I only consider one to be really major: Two stylistic things, one administrative thing (concerning formatting my bibliography), one thing that I would have covered in the final paper but didn't fully explain in the prospectus because I haven't finished the research yet, and one things that's actually going to require a little bit more research. But even the most serious piece of feedback doesn't call into question my methods or my conclusion, so I'm feeling pretty good right now.

While researching for my QP this morning, I had a feeling of mastery over my material, which is very rare for me. I came across a piece in a book where an author made, with no supporting evidence whatsoever, the claim that "Alice and the White Knight" was "probably" based on a 15th century Italian bronze medallion (Pisanello, Medallion of Gian Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, c. 1446-48, bronze, Haags Gemeente Museum, collection of Dr. Cornelis Hofsteder de Groot, the Hague). Having never come across this claim before, I immediately became suspicious, so I looked more closely:

The horse is wrong. The horse in the medallion has one hoof raised, while the horses in both "Alice and the White Knight" and "Knight, Death, and the Devil" have two diagonally-opposed hooves raised. This is very significant, because it's also the proof that Dürer modeled his horse after one of Leonardo's horses (none of the other horse sculptures that Dürer saw or could have seen during his time in Italy had this conformation).
Where is Tenniel supposed to have seen this medallion? The specimen of the medallion that the author provided a photo of is in The Hague. A quick search of London museums shows that the National Gallery owns a copy of this medallion, but didn't acquire it until 1957, prior to which time the medallion wasn't even in England!

Congratulations, author - you just earned yourself a paragraph in my QP. However, because of your shoddy scholarship (if it can even be called that), it will be a short paragraph. (To attempt to make my case as watertight as possible, I have to not only prove that "Alice and the White Knight" was modeled after "Knight, Death, and the Devil," but also to specifically disprove other suggested models.)

Also, today I happened across this poem that Lewis Carroll wrote when he was only 13 years old (long before he was Lewis Carroll) as a parody of Victorian instructive poetry for children. It's called "My Fairy":

I have a fairy by my side
Which says I must not sleep,
When once in pain I loudly cried,
It said "You must not weep."

If, full of mirth, I smile and grin,
It says "You must not laugh,"
When once I wished to drink some gin,
It said "You must not quaff."

When once a meal I wished to taste
It said "You must not bite,"
When to the wars I went in haste,
It said "You must not fight."

"What may I do?" at length I cried,
Tired of the painful task,
The fairy quietly replied,
And said "You must not ask."

Moral: "You mustn't."

Yesterday afternoon I got the feedback from my advisor on the latest round of prospectus revisions. It turned out to be the last round of prospectus revisions! All I had to do was remove one picture I had planned to use (this engraving of the White Knight by Barry Moser)[1] and I was cleared to send it to the full committee. So I did, and now I'm waiting for their feedback (they have one week to approve or deny my prospectus) while - of course- continuing to read more of my sources. But it's definitely feeling more like I'm making progress now.

[1] The reasoning behind this was that Moser's work was too far removed chronologically from everything else in the paper, which I can get behind. As I told my advisor, the Moser engraving was something interesting that I found (interesting specifically because the knight was carrying an umbrella) but not at all crucial to my argument.

Big Answers to Small Questions

Not afraid to state the obvious.

Dang! Academic smackdown!

Getting the word out there!

Grad school final papers - hardcopy vs Proquest

Looking back: Quitting smoking

Pretty successful day

Let the cutting begin!

QP progress report

QP update

Suprise QP update!

QP update!

QP update

QP Progress Report - Big News!

QP update

QP advisory meeting

QP update

An open letter to one of my sources

Thoughts from writing my QP

QP report

QP update

QP progress!

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