Tom Mazanec
@tommazanec.bsky.social
Author, Poet-Monks (Cornell UP). Assoc prof at UC Santa Barbara. Premodern Chinese lit & religion, translation, digital humanities. JAOS editor. Father of 2. Cantonese learner. Christ follower.
https://eastasian.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/thomas-mazanec
https://eastasian.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/thomas-mazanec
Cornell University Press is having a sale of 44% off. If you wanted to get a physical copy of my book, Poet-Monks, you can do so for $27 (paperback) including shipping. Just use the code 09WINTER.
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...
November 13, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Cornell University Press is having a sale of 44% off. If you wanted to get a physical copy of my book, Poet-Monks, you can do so for $27 (paperback) including shipping. Just use the code 09WINTER.
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...
Sometimes I am impressed by what OCR can do for recognizing digital texts. But then sometimes I come across things like this. (from ctext: ctext.org/library.pl?i...)
September 11, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Sometimes I am impressed by what OCR can do for recognizing digital texts. But then sometimes I come across things like this. (from ctext: ctext.org/library.pl?i...)
I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur because I have no interest in using these things or reading any scholarship that relies on them. Especially the AI-generated "analysis": it does cite my dissertation but doesn't really get the main point of it.
July 29, 2025 at 4:52 PM
I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur because I have no interest in using these things or reading any scholarship that relies on them. Especially the AI-generated "analysis": it does cite my dissertation but doesn't really get the main point of it.
But my real joy will be playing whiffleball with my kids in the driveway, and watching my son really take the game up as his own passion. 2/5
July 29, 2025 at 7:05 AM
But my real joy will be playing whiffleball with my kids in the driveway, and watching my son really take the game up as his own passion. 2/5
Hosting another big event for Translation Studies, a talk by renowned translation theorist Lawrence Venuti titled "The Translator's Dilemma: Thinking vs. Doing?"
If you're in the UCSB area and interested in translation, please join us!
Thursday, May 1, 5pm
Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)
If you're in the UCSB area and interested in translation, please join us!
Thursday, May 1, 5pm
Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)
May 1, 2025 at 4:19 AM
Hosting another big event for Translation Studies, a talk by renowned translation theorist Lawrence Venuti titled "The Translator's Dilemma: Thinking vs. Doing?"
If you're in the UCSB area and interested in translation, please join us!
Thursday, May 1, 5pm
Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)
If you're in the UCSB area and interested in translation, please join us!
Thursday, May 1, 5pm
Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)
Yeah, you’d think the California governor would be behind something like this.
The paper is here: 66fix.org/policy-paper/. $66 was the number in 2016. Which would have to be $88 today. Still very attainable if the will were there.
The paper is here: 66fix.org/policy-paper/. $66 was the number in 2016. Which would have to be $88 today. Still very attainable if the will were there.
April 1, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Yeah, you’d think the California governor would be behind something like this.
The paper is here: 66fix.org/policy-paper/. $66 was the number in 2016. Which would have to be $88 today. Still very attainable if the will were there.
The paper is here: 66fix.org/policy-paper/. $66 was the number in 2016. Which would have to be $88 today. Still very attainable if the will were there.
More bad news for us here at UCSB. $24 million reduction in state funds with $45 million in increased costs.
Admin solution? "Identify opportunities to streamline, merge, or phase out duplicative activities, and
Assess all processes for efficiency and to eliminate non-essential expenditures."
1/
Admin solution? "Identify opportunities to streamline, merge, or phase out duplicative activities, and
Assess all processes for efficiency and to eliminate non-essential expenditures."
1/
March 31, 2025 at 11:23 PM
More bad news for us here at UCSB. $24 million reduction in state funds with $45 million in increased costs.
Admin solution? "Identify opportunities to streamline, merge, or phase out duplicative activities, and
Assess all processes for efficiency and to eliminate non-essential expenditures."
1/
Admin solution? "Identify opportunities to streamline, merge, or phase out duplicative activities, and
Assess all processes for efficiency and to eliminate non-essential expenditures."
1/
No more NEH summer stipends or grants for Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Not surprising but still disappointing.
March 31, 2025 at 6:22 PM
No more NEH summer stipends or grants for Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Not surprising but still disappointing.
Time to start explicitly saying what used to be implicit (and what I regard to be the ethical limits of this sort of thing). From a paper I'm working on for next week's confererence.
March 7, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Time to start explicitly saying what used to be implicit (and what I regard to be the ethical limits of this sort of thing). From a paper I'm working on for next week's confererence.
I recently learned that my senior colleague (emeritus), Tu Kuo-Ch'ing 杜國清, passed away last Friday. My department and UCSB's Center for Taiwan Studies (which he founded) will write up a remembrance soon enough, I believe. But here is my own, personal remembrance.
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February 26, 2025 at 5:08 PM
I recently learned that my senior colleague (emeritus), Tu Kuo-Ch'ing 杜國清, passed away last Friday. My department and UCSB's Center for Taiwan Studies (which he founded) will write up a remembrance soon enough, I believe. But here is my own, personal remembrance.
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When you figure out some little textual puzzle simply by looking carefully at a manuscript, noticing handwriting quirks, figuring out a likely allusion , and using that to piece together a plausible reconstruction of missing words from the single source for an important text—is that not a joy?
February 24, 2025 at 10:39 PM
When you figure out some little textual puzzle simply by looking carefully at a manuscript, noticing handwriting quirks, figuring out a likely allusion , and using that to piece together a plausible reconstruction of missing words from the single source for an important text—is that not a joy?
It was an honor (and a delight) to chat with Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King about their award winning book, Taiwan Travelogue, last week.
Thanks to UCSB's Center for TW Studies and Translation Studies program, and the TW Academy in LA and TW's MOC for making it happen. They even signed my book!
Thanks to UCSB's Center for TW Studies and Translation Studies program, and the TW Academy in LA and TW's MOC for making it happen. They even signed my book!
February 24, 2025 at 6:12 PM
It was an honor (and a delight) to chat with Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King about their award winning book, Taiwan Travelogue, last week.
Thanks to UCSB's Center for TW Studies and Translation Studies program, and the TW Academy in LA and TW's MOC for making it happen. They even signed my book!
Thanks to UCSB's Center for TW Studies and Translation Studies program, and the TW Academy in LA and TW's MOC for making it happen. They even signed my book!
My sense of time at the end of this week (clock drawing courtesy of my 5 year old).
February 22, 2025 at 5:49 AM
My sense of time at the end of this week (clock drawing courtesy of my 5 year old).
I'll be hosting the annual Pai Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies. This year, it's all about premodern Korean literature, society, and digital humanities. The sources (sihwa 詩話) are all in Literary Sinitic, so it should be of interest to Sinologists, too.
Join us if you're in the area!
Join us if you're in the area!
February 3, 2025 at 10:16 PM
I'll be hosting the annual Pai Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies. This year, it's all about premodern Korean literature, society, and digital humanities. The sources (sihwa 詩話) are all in Literary Sinitic, so it should be of interest to Sinologists, too.
Join us if you're in the area!
Join us if you're in the area!
For maybe the first time ever(?), the City of Santa Barbara is hosting a lunar New Year Festival. I’m proud that my department, as a co-sponsor, can help make this happen.
But the vast majority of credit goes to SB Chinese School’s principal, @yumazanec.bsky.social
But the vast majority of credit goes to SB Chinese School’s principal, @yumazanec.bsky.social
January 27, 2025 at 9:33 PM
For maybe the first time ever(?), the City of Santa Barbara is hosting a lunar New Year Festival. I’m proud that my department, as a co-sponsor, can help make this happen.
But the vast majority of credit goes to SB Chinese School’s principal, @yumazanec.bsky.social
But the vast majority of credit goes to SB Chinese School’s principal, @yumazanec.bsky.social
The other thing we (I) forget is that plants evolve or get cultivated over time, too. So what's been Linneanly classified is not necessarily what existed in Warring States period. Just the other day I encountered the plant 須, which refers to brassica rapa, which has all of these cultivars:
January 22, 2025 at 11:06 PM
The other thing we (I) forget is that plants evolve or get cultivated over time, too. So what's been Linneanly classified is not necessarily what existed in Warring States period. Just the other day I encountered the plant 須, which refers to brassica rapa, which has all of these cultivars:
This is the kind of object lending its image to this diss on monastic poetry (from p. 4 of my book Poet-Monks).
January 20, 2025 at 3:59 PM
This is the kind of object lending its image to this diss on monastic poetry (from p. 4 of my book Poet-Monks).
'll be hosting the author (Yáng Shuāng-zǐ) and translator (Lin King) of Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄), recent winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature, in about a month. If you're in the UCSB area, please come!
January 18, 2025 at 12:42 AM
'll be hosting the author (Yáng Shuāng-zǐ) and translator (Lin King) of Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄), recent winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature, in about a month. If you're in the UCSB area, please come!
This guy, curiously, also has a Manchu seal, which a book historian tells me was not uncommon among Meiji-era Japanese intellectuals.
This edition is held by the Library of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 文哲所, Academia Sinica 中央研究院, in Taipei, which I scanned in October 2023.
This edition is held by the Library of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 文哲所, Academia Sinica 中央研究院, in Taipei, which I scanned in October 2023.
January 6, 2025 at 6:20 PM
This guy, curiously, also has a Manchu seal, which a book historian tells me was not uncommon among Meiji-era Japanese intellectuals.
This edition is held by the Library of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 文哲所, Academia Sinica 中央研究院, in Taipei, which I scanned in October 2023.
This edition is held by the Library of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 文哲所, Academia Sinica 中央研究院, in Taipei, which I scanned in October 2023.
For #ManuscriptMonday, here's a page from an edition of 300 Tang Poems that dates to 1893, likely annotated by a Japanese scholar named Itō 伊藤 who was possibly a colonial administrator in Taiwan. Famous lines are highlighted and rewritten in the margins.
January 6, 2025 at 6:20 PM
For #ManuscriptMonday, here's a page from an edition of 300 Tang Poems that dates to 1893, likely annotated by a Japanese scholar named Itō 伊藤 who was possibly a colonial administrator in Taiwan. Famous lines are highlighted and rewritten in the margins.
For the Sunday morning crowd: I also wonder to what extent Bly’s book shaped the enormous popularity of Wild at Heart by John Eldredge in the evangelical circles of my high school and college years. Has anyone looked into this?
December 15, 2024 at 2:35 PM
For the Sunday morning crowd: I also wonder to what extent Bly’s book shaped the enormous popularity of Wild at Heart by John Eldredge in the evangelical circles of my high school and college years. Has anyone looked into this?
Just picked up Iron John at a friends of the library used book sale. I find it fascinating from a kind of “huh, that’s what men in the 90s thought?” way. There must be abundant scholarship on the mythopoetic masculinist movement. What’s good scholarship to put this in perspective?
December 15, 2024 at 6:16 AM
Just picked up Iron John at a friends of the library used book sale. I find it fascinating from a kind of “huh, that’s what men in the 90s thought?” way. There must be abundant scholarship on the mythopoetic masculinist movement. What’s good scholarship to put this in perspective?
Very grateful for this generous review of my book Poet-Monks by Charlotte Eubanks in The Medieval Review. I particularly like that she got what I was trying to do in chapter 5, on incantation.
scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/ind...
Sinology 🀄️📚
scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/ind...
Sinology 🀄️📚
December 10, 2024 at 10:57 PM
Very grateful for this generous review of my book Poet-Monks by Charlotte Eubanks in The Medieval Review. I particularly like that she got what I was trying to do in chapter 5, on incantation.
scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/ind...
Sinology 🀄️📚
scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/ind...
Sinology 🀄️📚
When I teach a unit on Classical Chinese for our giant East Asian traditions class, one of my favorite images to include is this one, of Ōkōchi Teruna 大河内輝声 (1848–1882), last feudal lord of Takasaki domain 高崎藩, discussing “toilet culture” 厠坑文化 with Guangdong painter Luo Xuegu 羅雪谷 via brushtalk.
December 10, 2024 at 5:09 PM
When I teach a unit on Classical Chinese for our giant East Asian traditions class, one of my favorite images to include is this one, of Ōkōchi Teruna 大河内輝声 (1848–1882), last feudal lord of Takasaki domain 高崎藩, discussing “toilet culture” 厠坑文化 with Guangdong painter Luo Xuegu 羅雪谷 via brushtalk.
Always a good feeling
November 28, 2024 at 6:00 PM
Always a good feeling