David Porter

The next talk in our series on Frontiers of Late Imperial China is coming up on October 28. Sam Bass of the University of Toronto will be speaking on "Slavery an Dependency in Qing Mongolia, 1760-1850" at 4:00 PM in the McIntyre Medical Building (room 210/211) at McGill

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)

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

Where the Qing did have a great deal of ethnic prejudice was in places like Yunnan, Guizhou, Taiwan, etc, where indigenous groups were absolutely viewed as savages and there were extensive efforts at replacing them (via settler colonialism) and "civilizing" them

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

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)

The AI made some mistakes along the way - it at one point invented a whole set of fake correspondences with a different collection. But I would probably never have found these matches without it (indeed I didn't when I first worked with these Manchu texts a decade ago)

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

This is not because Cofnas personally is a victim deserving of special protection but because the procedures that exist for firing people need to be capable of distinguishing between racist cranks doing work of no scholarly merit [con't]

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

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.

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)

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.

There is, however, a real question about the ability of admissions offices to identify those differences successfully. That is, I'm sure there are a lot of students who don't get admitted to say, Harvard, who would be more academically successful than many of those who are admitted

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

Plus, he did a substantial amount of data fraud (using the same quotes from research subjects but attributing them to different people)

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