January 2020

Denise Ho contributes to new online resource, "The Mao Era in Objects"

A new resource entitled “The Mao Era in Objects” was launched on January 29, 2020 at the University of Oxford’s China Centre.  The interactive website features twenty-four essays on everyday objects from China’s Mao Era (1949-1976) and has accompanying primary sources, including art, photography, ephemera, documents, oral history, and video.  These “object biographies” range from the familiar, like Mao badges and currency, to the less known, such as hand-copied literature and personal diaries.  Denise Ho, assistant professor of history, served as a co-investigator for the project and contri

Exploring the possibility of changing our faculty meeting time

We have discussed moving our current faculty meeting time: Tuesday, 3:30pm to 5pm.  It may in the end prove impossible, and, sadly, likely no time will suit all of us.  Nevertheless, let’s try.  Please consider the below times and let us know all that work for you.  If you have suggestions of other times or prefer that we meet for longer than 90 minutes or have any other thoughts, please use the comment box.  Consider this the start of a conversation.  Nothing will likely change for next year, but may, and could certainly for future years.  Also, please note, with apologies, that were

TLS: "Not playing with fire: The precocious Romanian generation of the mid-twentieth century" by Marci Shore

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain includes a character who is Enlightenment personified. “Our Western heritage is reason – reason, analysis, action, progress!” Settembrini the organ-grinder extols. He has no doubt: humanity is “moving onward and upward, toward a goal of fellow-feeling and enlightenment, of goodness and joyousness”. The Magic Mountain was published in Germany in 1924; Settembrini is a caricature. Nonetheless, as the historian Peter Gay observed, “what Weimar needed was precisely more Settembrinis”.