China… Surveying the Job Market for Chinese History PhDs, 2018-2021 13 Feb 202119 Feb 2021 Out of curiosity and as a service to my own PhD students, I did a review of some recent university job searches in the field of East Asian history, and thought it…
history and memory… On Memorial Day, and Korea 24 May 2015 One day in May back in the 1990s, an old man stood about ten meters from a small flag on my father's grave in Minnesota and gave a speech about…
Pensee Talks in Singapore 25 Dec 201425 Dec 2014 I will be in Singapore from 12-18 January, giving a number of talks at junior colleges, and culminating with a conference with my UK colleagues at the 'Imagining Asia Symposium'…
North Korea… North Korea Commentitis 11 Oct 201411 Oct 2014 Since the non-events in North Korea seem to require some academic or historical context, I've been quoted these last few days in Le Monde, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times,…
Pensee The Joys and Sorrows of Peer Review 13 Sep 201413 Sep 2014 Is our peer review process in some way broken? Does it cause more grief than joy? My colleague Jon Sullivan has done some writing on these kinds of issues as well,…
China… The Guardian’s North Korea Network, and a Note on Journalism, Fieldwork, and Academia 30 Apr 2014 The Guardian has created a new North Korea Network, of which the web journal which I edit, Sino-NK, is very much a part. Graciously, the editors in London also saw fit…
American Foreign Policy… “Spit at the American Gentlemen” : North Korean State Media Rolls Out the Welcome Mat for Google 11 Jan 20138 May 2014 A short article released on January 10 in Pyongyang was fairly enervating, though no news media outlet seems to have picked it up yet. Nor, as Daniel Pinkston has pointed out already, has any…
Pensee… Thickets, Brambles, and Snow: Why History is Needed for the Imposition of Clarity 29 Dec 2011 In attempting to follow recent events in Northeast Asia in so-called "real time," I have been struck by how completely incomprehensible the process truly is, and how partial. Historians are…
My Publications… A Note for North Korea Readers: Launching SinoNK 20 Dec 2011 Amid the proliferation of China-related blogs on the Web, it is hoped that this blog has a place -- be it stable, intermittent, annoyed, essential or otherwise -- on your…
Cultural Politics… Notions of Incompleteness and Hope: Fragments for Future Appropriation 1 Dec 2011 In his compact yet epic collection of short stories entitled Men Without Women, American writer Ernest Hemingway describes an Italian major who, bereft of a limb and then his wife,…
Adam Cathcart 