Jeppe Mulich
@jmulich
Teaching history and politics at City St George's. Work on Asia and the Caribbean. Too much time thinking about RPGs. Currently Brighton, previously Hong Kong, New York, Copenhagen.
A short interruption in the summer of classics to reread one of my favorite turn-of-the-millennium novels.
The summer of classics continues with Michael Palma's new translation of Dante. This is a very different experience from the last time I read Inferno some sixteen years ago. Impressive and poetic.
Everyone's reading the Odyssey at the moment. Not content with a single work, however epic, I am instead declaring it a summer of classics. This August will be dedicated to reading or re-reading the stuff I missed in college, or more likely forgot in the intervening twenty years. First up: Milton
Thanks to @mjbayly.bsky.social for the recommendation, this is great stuff. And just the text I needed for my current project.
A highlight of my archival research this week is seeing letters written in Hawaiian and signed by Hawaiian monarchs (in this case Kamehameha III)
The British fleet temporarily stayed there after the Convention of Chuenpi in early 1841.
On the last day of an archival research trip I always treat myself to some time in the map room. This is one of today's finds.
More HK art from the Rijksmuseum, this one a photograph from 1988 by Vincent Samuel Mentzel.
View of North Point, in aquarelle, from 1895. From the collections of the Rijksmuseum .
I've been into HK cinema since watching my first John Woo film in Cinemateket in Copenhagen ~25 years ago. It's very odd that we are currently in a new golden age when it comes to restoration and accessibility of HK films on physical media, despite the state of the actual HK movie industry.
I've been distracting myself from the current reality by reading about extremely wealthy families waging wars against each other over territory they could rarely hold, either to enrich themselves or to distract from domestic schisms, until those domestic issues grew completely out of control.
What better way to procrastinate from writing than by unpacking and sorting more books.
Finally done with marking and other outstanding duties. Sabbatical officially on and back to working on the next book.
Make America great again is another way of saying give America death squads again.
Annual new year's reading. This time around the Danish intelligence assessment includes a discussion of American efforts to change global orde, using quite concerned language.
This arrived at the perfect time, just as I'm preparing to cover Taiwan in my modern China module.
Excellent book talk yesterday, showcasing Kerry Goettlich's pioneering work on the history of borders and their importance for international order.
When all the books you accumulated during graduate school and life in New York arrive after having sat in a storage room for 12 years but you realize that the shelves they are supposed to sit on are somehow full of books you've accumulated since then.