Month: April 2020

In my last blog post I introduced you all to Johann Reinhold Forster, a Prussian naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook on Cook’s second voyage into the Pacific. When Forster moved from Prussia to England, not only did he

These past few weeks, I focused on working on a part of my project that I had yet to fully explore. As I mentioned before, most of my work had been focused on exploring transnational feminist first wave movements in

I am not sure if anyone else has found it tricky to find new topics of conversations with the people around them. We tend to gain our news from the same sources, leaving little for discussion at our collective mealtimes.

I woke up yesterday morning to see ‘Rosa Parks’ trending on Twitter. When someone trends on Twitter these days, it is usually for one of four reasons: they’re dead (not possible in Parks’ case, since she passed away in 2005);

At the suggestion of Dr. Banerjee and after thinking about my project more critically, I’ve decided to switch up my project to focus on translation. Given my lack of knowledge of Classical Chinese and the fact that this new project

[Started 08/04/20] During an interview with BBC Radio Classics, composer Daniel Pemberton discussed how one track for his score to the motion picture Gold essentially operates as “the quintessential sound of capitalism”[1]. The track, ‘At the Sound of the Bell’,

Fighting in the age of transnationalism: MMA through history One of the documentaries I’ve found myself watching and rewatching during quarantine has been Fighting in the Age of Loneliness by Felix Biederman and Jon Bois. The documentary covers the emergence

Buried somewhere in the Greenwood Cemetery in Ruston, Lincoln Parish, Louisiana is a victim of the Spanish Flu—my great-great grand uncle Judge Newton McKay Smith. After losing an arm for the Confederacy during the American Civil War in the 1860s,

Fossil fuels propelled mankind into modernity. To be modern is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by energy. We are citizens and subjects of fossil fuels. The question I pose myself is the following: why is this crucial

The nation is an imagined thing, as Benedict Anderson concluded back in 1983 in his appropriately-named classic Imagined Communities.[1] Nations are fictions that weave themselves into the fabric of history. They are territories bounded and colored in on maps. They

My title might be slightly dramatic, but we live in an age of catchy New Yorker titles and Caroline Calloway’s instagram captions. But now that I have you here, I think (fingers crossed) I have made great strides this week.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and now that I’ve realised how many blog posts I still have to do, I figured now is a good time to do this! I would like to introduce

As we enter the last four weeks of teaching, that means we’re slowly approaching the deadline for our final essays. As such, I’ve spent most of my week working on my 4000-word proposal, which will be centred on the Cuban-Chinese

Having read the interview with Frank Snowden in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history) I keep wondering: if something like Covid-19 or the Spanish flu 1918-19 affects millions of people in various ways (death, social life, family, unemployment, the economy, recession) why

Im finding it harder and harder to find something interesting to write about, or even speak about for that matter. As days start blending into weeks, I feel as though Im beginning to lack topics of conversation at the dinner