David Porter
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Historian of Qing China @mcgillu Historien de la dynastie Qing, résidant à Montréal
Joined November 2016
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My book, Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners, is now available for pre-order from Columbia University Press (as well as the usual array of online booksellers). The code CUP20 gives a 20% discount here:
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During my 7 (ugh) years on the academic job market, I was the sort of obsessive who went and figured out who got every one of the jobs I didn't get. This did me no good, but it does mean I now have some potentially interesting data about who gets jobs in East Asian history.
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@joemayall
@perdricof
The first couple episodes, but seems like that's less relevant than the fact that I'm a professional historian of East Asia who did a graduate field in early modern Japanese history
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@joemayall
@perdricof
Yes, the Portuguese traded at Nagasaki because a succession of various local/national Japanese authorities saw that as advantageous to themselves. Japanese daimyo actually competed to secure control over European trade. That's not colonialism.
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@joemayall
@perdricof
I, like every other historian who has been criticizing your article over the past couple days, know that Portugal never made any meaningful attempt to colonize Japan under any reasonable definition of colonialism
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@joemayall
@perdricof
The Treaty of Tordesillas no more constitutes a Portuguese attempt to colonize Japan than the notion that the Chinese emperor was a universal ruler constitutes a Chinese attempt to colonize Europe.
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I'm not a "China guy" in the sense used here (in that I only write professionally about history), but I and many of my friends/colleagues have been massively disillusioned by what has happened in Hong Kong and especially Xinjiang over the past decade and I don't think we're wrong
every single china guy basically lost it in this last decade. Oh you really enjoyed their 2007 book about Chinese politics which was nuanced and thoughtful and tried to be objective? Too bad they're doing "Xi Jinping: The Red Emperor 2: The Tightening Grip Of Pooh" now
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I am thrilled and relieved to announce that after seven years on the academic job market (and six years of uncertain and unstable non-tenure track employment), I will, as of August 1, 2024, be Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill
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Seems to me that if you are the editor in chief of an academic journal, you shouldn't publish what is clearly an undergraduate's coursework as a review of a book that has been at the center of a great deal of controversy, just because the undergraduate is from your university
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@joemayall
@perdricof
I'm honestly unsure what you're trying to refer to with this. There were a few fairly minor military engagements between Portuguese and Japanese (often linked to competition among Japanese themselves), but the Portuguese were not training troops "to fight in Japan"
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Like this is an actual line in a published book review from something that is supposed to be a serious academic journal:
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But having a different outlook on Chinese politics in 2024 as compared to 2012 seems pretty reasonable to me.
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It's certainly true that there's a lot of anti-China hysteria. I'm particularly bothered by people who treat economic growth in China as bad because they're our "enemy," ignoring the principal effect of Chinese prosperity, which is improving the well-being of 1+ billion people.
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Disclaimers up front - I'm only including tenure-track jobs in North America in East Asian history that I applied for (the last criterion excludes all sorts of things, like jobs exclusively in Japanese and/or Korean history, jobs so shitty I couldn't countenance them, etc)
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(And calling it undergraduate course work is not a gratuitous insult - I googled the author who is quite literally an undergraduate, not even a history or East Asian Studies major)
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It seems commonly accepted on here that most published scholarship in the humanities is pointless, unreadable, and/or insipid. But my experience in my own field (Chinese history) is that there is a really substantial volume of fascinating original work, often pretty readable
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Have looked into the matter further and there are in fact 3 reviews (out of 12) in the most recent issues of the Chinese Historical Review written by undergraduates at the same institution as the editor in chief of the journal
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In total, it covers 64 jobs, which is, as you may realize, not a lot for 7 years. I applied to a bunch of other stuff ( post-docs, NTT jobs, jobs in thematic fields not specific to East Asia, jobs in East Asian Studies not specifically for historians and jobs in the UK)
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First off, what sort of job status did the people who get jobs have? 19 were ABDs, 4 were inside hires (held NTT jobs at the place that hired them), 26 held NTT jobs or postdocs at other universities, 14 held tenure-track jobs at other universities, and one was a senior hire
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So not getting a job as an ABD is far from unusual, even for people who eventually succeed. Indeed, ABDs are a distinct minority among successful applicants
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But I think the non-permanent jobs are of less interest, and the jobs that were either non-history, non-East Asia focused or non-North American are really part of different ecosystems from the bulk of the jobs I aimed at
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of the leading individual schools were Harvard (8) and Columbia (7). More surprising to me was the school tied for 2nd (also with 7): UC Santa Cruz. I guess Hershatter and Honig were running a real powerhouse program!
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Anyway, it's a shitty job market out there for East Asian historians (as it is for other humanists). Best of luck to all of you suffering through it!
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So anyway, here's what I saw in the 64 jobs I am including (which is everything that fits my criteria except for one job from last year where I can't figure out who got it)
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29 job-getters had PhDs from the really elite/wealthy private universities (Ivies, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, WashU, etc). 3 got PhDs from more moderately prestigious privates (Georgetown and USC, to be specific). (yes I know this distinction is arbitrary and imprecise)
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34 jobs went to Asian/Asian-American women, 17 to Asian/Asian-American men, 7 to White women, and 6 to White men. None went to people of any other race (best I can tell, anyhow) nor did any go to a non-binary person though there's a very good chance I could have made mistakes
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This is a wildly unfair mischaracterization of what I'm doing here. I have intentionally not named the student or criticized them at all. I do not argue that the student did anything wrong. But journal editors have a professional responsibility to select qualified reviewers
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One thing to add here - literally 0 jobs (that I applied to) in East Asian history in North America went to someone with a PhD from outside North America.
Others with multiple hires included Princeton (4), UCLA (3), UC Davis (3), Wisconsin (3), NYU (2), Wash U (2), Georgetown (2), Texas (2), Illinois (2), and Chicago (2)
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The humanities are very cheap to teach and usually make universities money. So the decision not to support humanities research and teaching is not the kind of hard-nosed financial decision advocates for cutting humanities programs purport it to be
I did not realize that West Virginia University's plans to cut its entire world languages and literature department is yet another example of supposedly "data-driven" admins eliminating a humanities program that their own data shows is a profit center:
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Some excellent
#AAS2024
swag! Looking forward to reading Mårten's new book (and very grateful for him slipping me a free copy!)
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14 got PhDs from elite publics (your Berkeleys, Michigans, and the like), 17 from good but not super elite publics (the less famous UCs and the like), and 1 from a regional public (SUNY Buffalo) (again, I know these distinctions are clearly arbitrary/imprecise)
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@elvinxmeng
And here it is in Manchu (the onetime "國語"), from a rubbing of a stele at the 資福院 (the standard romanization of the highlighted word is "tubet" and it indeed refers to Tibet - I admit that wargi dzang was more common in Manchu, but the idea that "Tibet" was Latin is bizarre)
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Second, where did successful applicants get their PhDs (note, this data and all subsequent data effectively double counts people who got T-T jobs multiple times, which did happen)?
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Keep in mind that for this issue, results will definitely be biased toward schools with relative strength in Chinese history, as opposed to Japan/Korea (though some of the jobs in question did go to Japanists/Koreanists) because of what things I applied to
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Others with multiple hires included Princeton (4), UCLA (3), UC Davis (3), Wisconsin (3), NYU (2), Wash U (2), Georgetown (2), Texas (2), Illinois (2), and Chicago (2)
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I think, in general, a sophomore finance major is not a qualified reviewer for a monograph on Qing history when the review is to be published in a scholarly journal. This is even more the case when the book is one that has been the subject of an immense amount of controversy.
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Of course there's some bad/worthless stuff too, but I genuinely think the crisis in my field is not about quality of scholarship but about the ability of people doing great stuff to get secure employment that enables them to keep doing it.
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@ValueHao
I do my best not to post about things outside my area of professional expertise (with the occasional exception of interacting with local Quebec political issues in French as part of working on improving my French).
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This suggests to me that the editor has begun publishing his own student's coursework (apparently basically unedited). This seems like a serious issue of professional irresponsibility to me - am I missing something?
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Oh and one last thing, not about who got the jobs, but about how job numbers have evolved. Of jobs fitting the criteria I laid out, there were 12 in 2017-2018, 11 in 2018-2019, 4 in 2019-2020, 2 in 2020-2021, 10 in 2021-2022, 12 in 2022-2023, and 13 in 2023-2024
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Took me longer than the rest of the world to get my hands on it, but so excited to finally have the physical copy of Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners! Thanks to everyone at
@ColumbiaUP
for making this happen, especially
@caelyncobb
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Finally, there's the race/gender demographics question. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this without knowing more about what the applicant pools look like, but it may be of interest. And this is very crude data because my stalking was not all that in depth. But here it is
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As a historian of a region that has fewer faculty members in pretty much any North American history department than Europe does (often way fewer), I've been really struggling not to respond to the recent spate of Europeanist lamentations with East Asianist whining of my own.
This is completely true for early modern Europe as well. As history outside the Ivies and a few public R1s gets transformed into a pedagogy first, rather than research first discipline, it’s becoming impossible to sustain these subfields.
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The academic job market can remain terrible for a couple centuries and people will keep getting PhDs
What can the crisis in the academic job market teach us about the Qing-era crisis in the imperial examination system?
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Nobody should be mean to the student or attack them, but the journal and its editor need to make changes to ensure that this does not happen again
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Happy to answer any questions that I can - again, keep in mind that this is not comprehensive data, but rather linked to my own choices about what jobs to pursue, so no need to correct my omissions. This is anecdotal, not scientific.
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There are serious scholarly issues to be dealt with in relation to this book - a student who seems to be encountering a monograph for the first time (and again, there's nothing wrong with that; everyone reads a monograph for the first time at some point) is not prepared for that
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I'll be teaching an advanced Manchu reading course. By "advanced," I mean people who are capable of attempting to read unannotated texts by themselves even if they struggle to understand everything. So not a super high bar, but you do need to be familiar with basic Manchu grammar
Please share the news! We are delighted to announce that the Manchu Studies Group will be offering free online Manchu courses at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels in Summer 2024. All applications due May 10. Details below:
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This is not the student's fault - it is not a reasonable expectation of sophomore non-majors that they meet this standard. It is the fault of the editor and I don't think it's unkind to point out the irresponsibility (and, indeed, unkindness) of putting a student in this position
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So relative stability (at a pretty low number) over the past 7 years, with the exception of total collapse at the height of Covid
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I guess I'd also add that even if you've made the very misguided decision to publish this review, an editor has a responsibility to an author (especially to one who does not have the normal professional preparation) to help them make their work better
This is a wildly unfair mischaracterization of what I'm doing here. I have intentionally not named the student or criticized them at all. I do not argue that the student did anything wrong. But journal editors have a professional responsibility to select qualified reviewers
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Honestly, it's amazing how high the quality of scholarship in English-language Chinese history remains - it's perhaps better than ever even as the conditions under which it is produced continuously degrade
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@cglassey_author
ABD is "all but dissertation" - in this context I mean people hired before they completed their PhD (normally this comes with the expectation that they would complete their degree that year and thus have it in hand by the time they start, though that doesn't always happen)
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@ChaseNClary
I would agree that the direct response to protests is on the same spectrum (especially compared to the US, which has unusually violent police). But I think the national security law and the way it has been applied does not have a counterpart in the West
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It is theoretically possible (if quite rare) for an undergraduate to be a qualified book review author for a professional scholarly journal. I think it is clear to anyone who reads the review that this was not the case here.
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I think abandoning teaching students to write because some of them will instead use AI is a bad idea. Let's say 25% of students would submit AI work (and it's actually not that bad in my experience). Should the other 75% get no opportunity to develop their writing skills?
I no longer assign the traditional essay. In class essay exams, journals, participation grades, and I think we should bring back oral exams.
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The history (and present) of the Sibe is quite interesting. But a couple precisions - 1. the Qing court ordered a large detachment of Sibe to move to Ili; it was not voluntary resettlement.
When Manchu power collapsed in the early 20th c, the intense erasure of Manchu cultural identity which swept through the rest of China didnt affect Ili Valley or Xibe people.
(Sibo=Xibe)
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The idea that teaching can be "apolitical" is of course nonsense, but I think that in most cases, the right way to understand claims of teaching apolitically is teaching that does not make convincing students to adopt the instructor's political beliefs its goal.
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My book research relied substantially on a Fulbright. Obviously the broader program still exists, but Fulbright funding for work in China (PRC and Hong Kong) was eliminated by a Trump Executive Order and Biden hasn't brought it back.
In fact, the major grant that funded the research for this book - actually without which the book would have been impossible to research or write, doesn't exist anymore: the SSRC-IDRF. It got cut when Mellon cut funding for it.
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As the person who, a couple months back, tweeted about some issues with the Chinese Historical Review's book review section, I want to say how impressed I am with how quickly the journal's management has been turned around. Congratulations to CHUS on making these changes happen!
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@davidstroup
I do think the OP is right that there are a lot of western-based people with pretty extensive China experience who've turned a lot more negative, though. Which is different from claiming general media coverage was positive back then
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This is true, though humanities professors also push this on each other. There's a whole movement on this website of people who like to denounce their colleagues who assign more than 20 pages a week of reading as being bad teachers with wildly unreasonable expectations
A month after writing this, I think I'd probably state it in even bolder terms: If you teach a 'humanities' subject, you're functionally not allowed to surpass a relatively low difficulty threshold. The experience of such classes being easier than 'STEM' is mostly due to this. ..
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Looking forward to this launch event for my book on March 25. Thanks to
@mcgill_HCS
for putting it together!
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When my wife got her t-t job here at McGill and they gave me a temporary lecturership, one of her relatives (non-academic) told me - "oh after you've taught there for a bit and they see how good you are, they'll offer you a real job."
i guess i would have thought that real life TT professors would reliably give better job market advice than my non-academic mom who used to go 'have you considered being a professor at university of toronto?'
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One underdiscussed frustration of peer review is when you spend a lot of time doing a very thorough review with lots of suggestions for potential improvements for an article and then it gets published with almost none of what you talked about addressed
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@mccormick_ted
The beauty of Canada is that every province is entitled to its own publicly funded Jordan Peterson
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He got much more attention here for a certain review, but George Qiao's article on long-distance trading firms based in Qing Shanxi is really fantastic
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I appreciate the impulse for constant cynicism about Harvard, but Harvard PhD students in the humanities serve as TAs for a total of 4 semesters over 5 years (and in my program, it was actually only 3 semesters). There would be far cheaper ways to supply the labor they provide
Translated: people should go to grad school because we require feudal labor for tenured faculty. We can’t downsize PhD programs—even though there are no professor jobs—because we maintain class privileges for “real” profs by offloading teaching duties onto exploited PhD students.
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Make mounted archery an Olympic sport - it would be so much more fun to watch than standing archery!
This is indeed fascinating. Mongolians are famous for their skill in archery, yet they haven't won a single medal in Olympic archery events. Why? Maybe it's because of the fixed target?
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Should note that I have just seen that someone else noticed this issue a few hours ago, lest I seem to be trying to steal credit for this discovery
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I think tearing it down and building a coffee shop is in fact more or less the actual goal. Libraries, we have been told, are places for students to hang out and study, not places to hold books
At what used to be a leading research library, where they moved all the books off-site, going from 2,4M volumes to 5,000. At this point you might just as well tear it down and build a coffee shop.
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But what's ultimately important is that different regional fields shouldn't be fighting for scraps as history departments are progressively reduced in size. The problem is not an undervaluing of Europe - it's an undervaluing of History as a discipline
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Imagine cutting your Chinese, Russian, and Korean programs given the world we live in. It's worse than short-sighted - it's an embrace of ignorance of parts of the world that are of exceptional political, economic, and cultural significance
Colleagues at Duke have also expressed dismay at the cutting of thriving programs like Russian language: "I will be blunt: this move will damage the reputation of
UNC-G at all levels."
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Very pleased and honored to see Slaves of the Emperor on the shortlist for the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace K. Ferguson Prize!
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Also, if we're talking about the US government, why hasn't the China Fulbright program been resumed? Eliminating it was a Sinophobic Trump policy - the Biden administration needs to bring it back!
To achieve that, we need robust engagement with Chinese history and culture. We need jobs, research, funding to continue this work.
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@erin_bartram
Though to be clear, a lot of people for whom it's not part of their job do this work anyway
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Really enjoying Mårten Söderblom Saarela's new book. Among other contributions, he does a great job showing that the notion that bannermen officials were losing their ability to use Manchu in the 18th century is nonsense
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Was annoyed at a douban review that gave my book 4 stars, saying that it was useful to consult but missed the mark in many ways. But then I saw the user had given Soulstealers 3 stars and felt much better because if you think Soulstealers is mediocre, your opinion is worthless
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Knowing that many people are under the misapprehension that the horrendous abuses happening in Xinjiang are inventions of Western anti-Communists is a big part of why I spend time in my class on Borderlands of Modern China having all my students explore
Well, you WOULD need to read Chinese and understand Mandarin to read publicly-available court rulings and official documents.
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The book launch for Slaves of the Emperor is happening today
@mcgill_HCS
. Looking forward to hearing my colleagues' comments and to introducing the book to everyone here. This is open to all, so if you're in Montreal and interested, please come! Copies will be for sale as well
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If you don't let the faculty decide what students deserve degrees, what's the point of having a university?
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"My colleagues in my department won't approve a new Europe hire" isn't the real problem. "My university will only let us replace three retirements in three different fields with one new hire" is the real problem.
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Yeah, there's not some unfilled glut of jobs in these places. I applied for jobs in Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming in my 7 years on the market. Never got any of them either
Kind of baffled by people being like “there ARE tenure track jobs, you just turn your nose up at teaching in red states” because firstly, there also aren’t any jobs there, and secondly I’m not sure wanting access to things like healthcare counts as coastal elitism
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The others are all written by professional scholars, specialist PhD students, etc and as far as I can tell, there is no indication in the journal itself of the undergraduate reviews being some sort of particular initiative
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I think historians don't use the term "selection bias" but are actually usually quite attentive to the problems of biased/non-representative sources. This is a basic issue we talk about even with first year undergraduates - what can you actually learn from a given source?
i think this is acc a broad problem, esp in less explicitly social-scientific qual fields like history. extreme selection bias is v common, but it often passes unnoticed because nobody even considers it. massive problems ignored because noone involved has the conceptual toolbox!
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I'm teaching intro to East Asian history up to 1600 again this year and would like to get further beyond the last second textbook cribbing that I was doing a lot of the first time around. Any suggestions for favorite articles that could make for interesting additions to lectures?
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The three undergraduate reviews are not marked in any way, nor are they physically grouped together
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So score one for the ignorant non-academics. Anyway, my job market advice for humanists is to have a spouse in an academic field with a better job market, and hang on for dear life as you pick up whatever scraps their employer is willing to give you
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So I got bored of the article linked here and quit reading after the weird rant about how describing the language spoken in Qing Altishahr as "Eastern Turki" is an attempt to split China
The much-acclaimed 2023 exhibition at
@britishmuseum
"China's Hidden Century" on life in the Qing is now under attack in China for not toeing China's view on the 19th century, critiquing western scholars involved and
@citibank
for underwriting it. 1/
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And remember, the fact that you have a tenure-track job and someone else doesn't does not make you better than them (nor does you having a fancy R1 job and them teaching 4-4 at a regional public university)
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Listen to the actual June 4th expert, not the idiot propagandist he's responding to
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Studying people's understanding of their world on their terms is quite important for historians, but I don't think this means we need to accept as possible that saints actually flew (or that dragons existed or that circulation of qi explains anything meaningful about the body)
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The vast majority of faculty do not work in environments like this, though? For example, literally none of this is true at McGill. (Also, I'm pretty sure that personal assistants for faculty members were far more common 50 years ago than they are now)
At top R1s faculty members often have personal assistants, depts have multiple administrators who keep the dept functioning, have granting administrators to support their efforts, and huge personal research/expense codes. Not to mention state-of-the-art physical infrastructure.
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