To read the university’s triumphant all-campus email about restored NIH funding, you’d think UC administrators made it happen. But that’s not true. In fact the UC *Faculty Association* organized the lawsuit; administrators kept their heads down and hoped it’d go away.

UC faculty, please take note of who is being fearless and decisive in standing up for our rights. It’s not the admin, it’s not the senate. They’re structurally unsuited to the way we need to fight right now. It’s @uc-faculty.bsky.social. It’s time to join, if you haven’t already.

I love the idea of a (better) bot getting all the big-picture data so I can focus on close reading and the real work of literary studies, but I loathe the fact that a dean will think that because a bot can accurately describe a printed text it can *analyze* it too.

Sometimes I am impressed by what OCR can do for recognizing digital texts. But then sometimes I come across things like this. (from ctext: ctext.org/library.pl?i...)

Here is the East Asia content, which I edited: Xiaofei Tian, "The Turning Point: A Model of Becoming in Early Medieval Chinese Autobiographical Writings." Zhaokun Xin, "Diagnosing, Misdiagnosing, and Rediagnosing Women’s Anger in the Jin Ping Mei." 1/3

New issue of the JAOS Vol. 145 No. 3 (2025) lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/ja... @tommazanec.bsky.social @aspa1842.bsky.social

For my China studies friends here: new Wilkinson just dropped. 7th edition, huge news. On Pleco, too. If you don’t know what that means, do you even sinologize, bro? @pleco.com #Sinology🀄️📚

New translation tool for the languages of Buddhism—Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. dharmamitra.org Still makes mistakes (I just tested it on the 宋高僧傳 biography of the poet-monk Guanxiu 貫休 and noticed a few errors), but 1000x more accurate than anything I've seen before.

I picked the wrong year to start really following baseball again.* I'll keep on watching the Guardians and look for nice individual performances to enjoy as they slide toward non-competitiveness. That part will be fun. 1/5

It’s finally happened: a reader’s report on an article manuscript faults me for not sufficiently engaging with the scholarship of Thomas Mazanec. Achievement unlocked!

One for the ages. The only anthology of High Tang poetry that was actually compiled during the High Tang, now translated into English by Paul Kroll.

Open access, like all of the Library of Chinese Humanities volumes!

Position: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Chinese, Williams College, applications due 9/30/25. Language teaching + open specialization. apply.interfolio.com/169464 Glad to see at least one TT job out there for our students!

I currently teach 4 courses per year on the quarter system. If we switched to semesters, they would have to reduce my load if they wanted me to continue the same research output (and that’s not happening). Don’t expect a book from me for 10 more years in this case.

My personal 5-min. video: vimeo.com/84252711 on why humanities matter. I can’t improve on the message. But my passion now is the Center for Humanities Communication, which I cofounded to assist the humanities in methods, resources, tools for telling its _why_, center-humanities-communication.org

Author copy fresh out of the box! I'm shaking! @uofmpress.bsky.social made the publication process so smooth! And huge thanks for hosting an open access version, which will be available on my official publication date: August 5. But if you'd rather buy a hard copy, use code UMWEB30 for 30% off!

This sale starts today

Cornell University Press is having a 50% off sale next week (6/23-27). So if you want a physical copy of my book, it would be a good time to get one (the paperback would be about $17). Use the code 095000 at checkout. www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Genuine question: when does anyone find time to iron their clothes? Between coffee, exercise, shower, and getting kids ready for school, I don’t have a spare second before 8am. In evenings after kids are in bed, I want to relax, not iron clothes. Sorry (not sorry) for my wrinkly khakis.

Hosting another big event for Translation Studies, a talk by renowned translation theorist Lawrence Venuti titled "The Translator's Dilemma: Thinking vs. Doing?" If you're in the UCSB area and interested in translation, please join us! Thursday, May 1, 5pm Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)

Just spent 90 minutes editing a manuscript for JAOS that I apparently had already edited back in February. Now I have to go through and try to make sure the today-edits are incorporated into the February-edits. *bangs head on table*

This will be great and it's Open Access! www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isb...

Very excited for this one. Paul Kroll’s translation of the only surviving anthology of High Tang poetry that was compiled within the High Tang. Coming out in late June! www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isb...

Arjun Appadurai and Sheldon Pollock on boards of trustees: “Who actually runs Columbia University?” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Worth remembering that blue state governments are not reliable supporters of public higher education. The UCs are the world's greatest public university system - the state of California's willingness to substantially cut funding to them is deeply disappointing.

More bad news for us here at UCSB. $24 million reduction in state funds with $45 million in increased costs. Admin solution? "Identify opportunities to streamline, merge, or phase out duplicative activities, and Assess all processes for efficiency and to eliminate non-essential expenditures." 1/

The first grant I got for my forthcoming book project "How Buddhism Spread in Japan" was an NEH summer stipend in 2016. Without it, this book would have never gotten off the ground, and I probably wouldn't have gotten tenure. It feels like the humanities suffer a new casualty every day.

No more NEH summer stipends or grants for Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Not surprising but still disappointing.

No more NEH summer stipends or grants for Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Not surprising but still disappointing.

“Premodern,” in the East Asian studies context, usually means everything before ~1860.* My advisee just got a TT job where she’s expected to teach Chinese lit and culture from the Bronze Age to the fall of the Qing in 1911. Like in Euro medieval studies, an excuse to reduce tenure lines.

If you are what you do, by outsourcing the work, you will have become less

Something that's curious to me is how the role of admin has narrowed to lowering/eliminating labor costs -- higher ed's most expensive "input." The role is so formulaic and cookie-cutter that admins notoriously jump from institution to institution. Why couldn't _that_ job be replaced by a robot?

But, at least for me, teaching is “baseball,” translating is “baseball,” writing is “baseball.” None of it is interesting unless a real human is doing it. Who cares about clout-chasers just trying to get more pubs or admin trying to shave costs? And yes, baseball remains “baseball.”

A very rare Song dynasty #manuscript up for auction this week. A parting poem to a Zen student written by Chan Master Xutang Zhiyu 虛堂智愚 (1185-1269), signed and dated 1254. This is exactly the kind of poem and manuscript I studied at length in my book “The Poetry Demon.”

Never met Prof. Gregory in person, but I’ve learned so much through his books, especially _Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism_ and _Sudden and Gradual _. All students of Chinese Buddhism in the anglophone world live in his shadow. The end of an era.

Went to a 90-minute presentation about the crisis of research funding at UCSB, led by the Office of Research. All about NIH, NSF, NASA, Dept of Energy. The humanities & arts got one line: “Oh yeah, all of is relevant to NEH & NEA, too.” Confirmed to me that they don’t see what I do as “research.”

Just pitched 6 innings from my knees to 6-7 year olds. What tiny strikes zones! I think I need to practice pitching from this specific distance and kneeling position. I’ve never felt so bad about striking hitters out… Also, my throwing arm hasn’t been this sore since 2003!

UC joins dozens of other universities in instituting a hiring freeze. What utter failure at the campus, system, state, and federal levels. “First, we will implement a systemwide hiring freeze to help the University manage costs and conserve funds.” ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/employee-new...

This actually still needs to be officially approved by the membership next month at the annual meeting in Boston, but among the executive board it has unanimous endorsement. I suspect it will be approved. @aos-site.bsky.social

Two recent reviews of my book. One in Chinese, a summary with context here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Second in English, mostly praise with list of "faults" that are either incorrect or don't affect the book's argument: doi.org/10.1353/cri.... My response to #2 here: docs.google.com/document/d/e...

This has got to be the worst index I’ve ever seen. Let’s start with Z because the first English entry is “account”=zhànghào. Then C, because the next entry on the English list that doesn’t start with z in pinyin is ”Actions menu“=cāozuò càidān. Then G, because “ad”=guǎnggào.

It’s a wild read, which only multiplies in the English and Japanese translations. We were really honored to host both Lin and King through UCSB’s Center for Taiwan Studies. bsky.app/profile/tomm...

UMASS IS RESCINDING ALL GRAD POSITIONS FOR THIS YEAR

I think LOTS more freezes are forthcoming in the next few days, including from institutions with enormous endowments that haven’t been announced yet. The slow-moving higher ed crisis is now a landslide. Hard to envision a recovery of the U.S.’s university system…

“Allow your disappointment in this fact to be leavened by the knowledge that you, yourself, are the most important determination of what America’s future will look like. If you, and millions of people like you, resolve to stand up, we will win.” www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-more-y...

Hamilton Nolan, The More You Have the Less You Fight www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-more-y...

Hiring freezes from Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Stanford, among others, in response to federal funding cuts. www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/03/harv...

Time to start explicitly saying what used to be implicit (and what I regard to be the ethical limits of this sort of thing). From a paper I'm working on for next week's confererence.

The corollary of this is that many simplified forms date really far back. 万, for example is found very often on Dunhuang manuscripts (not 萬), same with 浅 rather than 淺, etc.

A new episode of The Medieval Podcast with @5minmedievalist.bsky.social : Buddhist Poet-Monks in Medieval China with @tommazanec.bsky.social www.medievalists.net/2025/03/budd... #history #Buddhism #China