iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 10h

Final reminder that this exciting talk by George Qiao previewing his forthcoming book (coming out early next year, I believe) is coming up on Friday - it's open to all (as long as you can make it in person)

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Amy Stanley @astanley711.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Excited to be working with Norton on two new histories of Japan! I have my work cut out for me for approximately the next decade!!

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

We’ve got an Ivy League provost over here who can’t use his own brain to write an OpEd, he needs ChatGPT to help him with his sentences and thoughts. He needs the bot to write emails clearly. I’m so disgusted and also laughing so hard somehow

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I've got no particular interest in defending JKR who is a horrible person, but as a linguistic matter, I think Cho Chang is fairly justifiable as a somewhat irregular romanization (and note that lots of name romanizations of diaspora Chinese are irregular!) of a name like Zhang Zhou/Zhao/Qiu

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Continuing in the same vein, how about next he makes a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico that eliminates all the tariffs that are strangling the North American economy?

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

On Friday, October 2nd, we'll be hosting George Qiao of Amherst College for a talk at McGill titled "The Business of Empire: How Frontier Trade Remade China in the Early Modern Era." It will be 3:30 - 5:00 PM in Arts 260 (on the main campus of McGill)

Poster containing the same information as in the main post plus some sponsorship information

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The funny thing about the Qing specifically is that the stuff that everyone thinks about as emblematic Qing imperialism (Dzungar wars, conquest of Xinjiang) was not particularly tied to bigotry - the Dzungar genocide was brutal but also seems to have been a spur of the moment decision by Qianlong

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I certainly agree that most English speakers don't read it, but there's actually quite a lot of very excellent Qing history written in English - plenty to get a sense of how the empire worked!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Zhang Xianzhong wondering what he has to do to get some credit

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Society for the Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies @ssycds.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Job alert: The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in either middle period China (Six Dynasties to Yuan) or modern China (late Qing to present). Link in comments.

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

In the interests of considering valuable humanistic uses of LLMs - I was just able to use Claude to identify the Chinese source of several Manchu-language stories of the strange (that were translated/adapted/elaborated from that Chinese source)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Probably underrated how many Americans are just mad that Trump is ruining the HOMES acronym they learned as a kid for the Great Lakes

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This is true from a linguistics perspective, of course, but from a socio-political perspective "Chinese language" is an extremely important concept, and really can't be done away with

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sakura christmas @prof-christmas.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Thinking a lot about my courageous college friend, Felicia Sonmez, today, who also lost her job as a national reporter at the Washington Post—for speaking out about the toxic sexism in the newsroom back in 2023.

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The politicization & illegal cancellation of federal research funding is an existential crisis for every research university in the country, especially flagship R1 publics. Again, you would think university presidents would speak up, loudly & collectively, about this. Alas. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This is true. I think the nuance in the Cofnas case as currently playing out is that firing you in this hypothetical is a decision that should be made by biologists, not by the university administration unilaterally

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The terrifying thing about "race realist" "scholarship" is that I'm pretty sure this is actually an effort to refute an even more extreme anti-Semitic conspiracy theory

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

For anyone in the Montreal area: here's the preliminary schedule for the lecture series on Frontiers of Late Imperial China that I've put together for the upcoming academic year.

Lecture Series: “Frontiers of Late Imperial China”
Note that all talk titles remain tentative. Talks will be scheduled for the late afternoon (normally 4:00 to 5:30 PM, though we will try to schedule the Friday talk a bit earlier: 3:30 – 5:00 PM). All talks will be in English and will take place on the main campus of McGill University. Exact details, including specific location, abstracts of talks, etc. will be disseminated in advance of each talk.
Schedule:
Friday, October 2: George Qiao (Amherst College): “The Business of Empire: How Frontier Trade Remade China in the Early Modern Era”
Wednesday, October 28: Samuel Bass (University of Toronto): “Emancipation with Abolition in the Mongolian Frontier”
Wednesday, December 2: Sixiang Wang (University of California, Los Angeles): “Poetry as Constitutional Language in Early Modern East Asian Diplomacy”
Wednesday, January 20: Sarah Bramao-Ramos (Colby College): “Reprints, Retranslations, and Colophons: Reconstructing Manchu-Language Print Culture”
Thursday, February 18: Lan Wu (Mount Holyoke College): “Between the Reins: The Kinetic Reality of the Qing’s Inner Asia in the 18th Century”
Thursday, March 11: Lili Xia (Barnard College): “Geocultural ‘Northernness’ of Jurchen-Ruled China”
Thursday, April 8: Jaymin Kim (Rice University): “From an Open Frontier to Interstate Borderlands: Qing Central Asia, 1750s-1840s”
Funding Acknowledgment
This lecture series is generously supported by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as well as matching funds provided by the Foo-hooa Se 復華詩 (Renaissance of Chinese Poetry) program of McGill University and McGill’s Centre for Global Chinese Studies.
Questions
Please contact the organizer, David Porter (david.porter@mcgill.ca) with any questions. If you would like to be added to a dedicated e-mail list to ensure that you receive all updates about the series, please contact Jingyuan Wang (jingyuan.wang6@mail.mcgill.ca), who is assisting with logistics.

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

My triumph of the day was discovering a downloadable English-subtitled version of 五朵金花 so I can assign it to my Borderlands of Modern China class again after it disappeared from Youtube a few years back (literally days before my students were supposed to watch it)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

This may or may not be true as framed, but it's a bit misleading. As any professor who has taught at a top school can tell you, there are substantial differences in student ability even among those already admitted.

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

How the majority of academics on this site seem to have brainwashed themselves into "Arday didn't plagiarize" continues to baffle me.

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Yes, and also it's bad for the field of history in general because Great Books curricula reject many of the basic premises of how historians approach the past (not saying "Great Books" have no value, just that if that's all the humanities is, a lot is lost)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

A handful of (very short) pop reading quizzes over the course of the term: a good way to encourage and reward students spending time actually reading what I assign (especially in the age of AI) or just a way to piss them off and fuck up my enrolment/evals in the year before I go up for tenure?

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I think this is true, but you have to have some sort of system for signaling the need for intervention because faculty in the kind of large classes that 1st years mostly take are not going to be able to do it consistently themselves

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Indeed. Every single person who makes the argument "Arday didn't engage in academic misconduct/didn't plagiarize" (which I've seen far too much of) is playing right into the fascists' hands in contributing to an agenda that seeks to delegitimize far more than Arday personally

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post malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

i think it sucks a lot that the dude facing professional disgrace killed himself but the solution is not no professional disgrace

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Zoomer Antimillenarian @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

It would never have been broken by the right-wing gutter press--and in general been a much smaller story--if he'd simply not made vicious, tyrannical libel threats against the mainstream press when they got their hands on the story *first*. He brought the Streisand Effect down on his own head.

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Ray Thomas @raythomas.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

"All academics are fabulists" is just straight up right-wing conspiracism.

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Happy to share the AAS Diversity & Equity Committee is sponsoring an @asianstudies.org Digital Dialogues session 8/19 "Academic Job Market 101: Becoming Familiar & Planning Ahead"! I'll introduce fundamentals & what to expect when you're expecting (to graduate)! www.asianstudies.org/jobs-profess...

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I'm a lot more sympathetic to Harper's article than most of the academics on this site, but this point is 100% true

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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

tinyurl.com/mvhb4rkb "Canada is spending big to recruit top global minds. They may find it hard to stay in the country - if they can even get in."

tinyurl.com

View Content - Meltwater

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The notion that there are tons of humanities academics just turning their noses up at jobs at state flagship R1s that could be theirs for the taking is pretty silly. It's actually really hard to get a job at a place like LSU! (Or any tenure-track job anywhere, for that matter)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Should more writing about academia deal with environments other than elite private schools? Absolutely! But the idea that you can just decide you want a job at a different type of university and get one is completely ridiculous and entirely out of touch with the actual academic job market

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

This is true, but an accurate description would actually strengthen what is perhaps the most important point in the article - that universities generally treat adjuncts like shit

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sakura christmas @prof-christmas.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Northwestern University is hiring an Assistant Professor in modern Japanese history, with an emphasis on connections across and w/in its empire, process of decolonization and aftermath, and global and regional contexts. Come work with @astanley711.bsky.social! Deadline is October 30.

history.northwestern.edu

Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese History: Department of History - Northwestern University

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

My impression is that 1) Bates is a pretty extreme case - a lot of the most over-the-top stuff is stuff I've never seen anything like (I can't imagine faculty being involved enough in students' lives for someone to tell me that a few students' interpersonal dispute was an "attempted lynching")

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The complexity here is that though "most qualified" is probably meaningless, there are definitely some people who are clearly more/less qualified than others and search committees are sometimes surprisingly capable of inviting the obviously less qualified people to be finalists

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I don't think McConnell is secretly dead, but this is still pretty funny

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

My department is hiring an assistant professor of (post-1945) Korean history. Come work with me! recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF10290 Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions about the position. And I'd be ever so grateful if you could spread the word to potentially interested parties.

recruit.ap.uci.edu

Assistant Professor of Korean History (post-1945)

University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

PSA to prospective PhD students: Don't use LLMs to write e-mails to faculty you want to work with (or if you do, you better have done a good job making it not-obvious that you used an LLM).

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

For all of you who work on the best kind of history (Early Modern East Asia), there's a tenure-track job at Brown this year: apply.interfolio.com/190380

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

One more fun bit that appears repeatedly in Qing interrogations of Russian border crossers is that they're always asked what people in Russia are saying about the "return of the Torghuts," to which the answer is always "nobody's talking about that"

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Realized I slightly misread what was happening while reading in the archives - it's not that their noses would get cut, but that their noses are already sliced and the Qing suspects they're guilty of a more serious crime and won't believe Russia cut their noses over some nonsense about # of fingers

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Other fun conversations from Qing talking to Russians crossing the frontier: "we heard that previously your woman khan led troops against her husband. Do you know if that's true?"

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Archive amusement of the day - family of Old Believers has left Russia for the Qing empire, supposedly because they think they'll be able to live in peace/practice freely there

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

And China. Not having democracy isn't an escape from this phenomenon

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Some academics seem to be committed to proving that conservative enemies of academia are entirely right about it. I still think they aren't and that most scholars just want to ignore this shit to stay out of trouble, but that there are professional academics defending obvious plagiarism is shocking

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

If you think there are lots of white academics with extensive plagiarism in their work (there may well be!), then identify it so that they can be subject to appropriate criticism. But this is the lamest possible defense of what Arday did, which no honest academic would consider acceptable

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Had a very fun conversation with the Chaguan writer, who I think did a quite good job with the article. It's funny to see a long discussion reduced down to a single brief quote, though I think I was helpful to the piece in other ways - like alerting him to the Qing history project fiasco.

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