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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

We’ve talked a lot over the course of the semester about the establishment and maintenance of transnational and global connections, but recently during my research for my project I have come across cases of the opposite: the rejection, dismissal and

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by the Italian-American author, Pietro di Donato. Its highly unusual language and foreign-sounding syntax, which seemed to blend multiple styles and registers into a composite narrative voice, intrigued me from the start. That, combined

This time spent in isolation has made me reflective. I’ve considered starting a podcast, writing a novel, embarking on a cooking journey that I meticulously document (if you are looking for some light evening entertainment, the Making Perfect series on

Reading the news this morning, I (unsurprisingly) found that almost every article on the home page was about the coronavirus pandemic, ranging from a governmental crackdown on fake news to its potential impact on university admissions to a limited though