Episode 1.1 – Brian Spivey

“What I found most rewarding about [this] experience was not being a producer of public facing scholarship…but being a facilitator and finding value in other people.”

Brian Spivey

Overview

Brian Spivey joins KHC to share his experiences at the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel.

Show notes

Episode transcript

Stephanie Narrow (00:13):

Welcome to the Krieger Hall Chronicles, a podcast that invites students, alumni, and faculty from UC Irvine’s History Department to share their diverse professional work as scholars, historians, and public intellectuals. I’m your host, Stephanie Narrow, and today with us we have Brian Spivey. Brian is a PhD Candidate studying modern Chinese history here at UC Irvine. His dissertation studies how proximity to natural resources affected the social, environmental, medical, and cultural histories of communities in Northwestern China. He also researches the history of Xingjiang and the PRC. A particularly timely topic given the more we learn about the persecution of Uighurs in the region today, Brian is also an Assistant Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books’ China Channel, and it is this work that brings him into our studio today. So Brian, to start us off, could you give us just a little bit of background of the Los Angeles Review of Books, otherwise known by the acronym of LARB, and its sister publication, the China Channel?

Brian Spivey (01:13):

So the LA Review of Books, you know, is a nonprofit literary organization, that publishes a lot of literature, culture, and the arts, especially with an LA flare to it or an LA focus, but not exclusively, they talk about national issues as well. I think they have a very broad and eclectic audience. China Channel is obviously people who are more interested in China, so in that sense, it’s sort of like a captive audience. But it also, like LARB, has that literary, cultural, artistic edge to it.

Stephanie Narrow (01:45):

Why did you choose to work with China Channel, what drew you to China Channel and LA Review of Books, or LARB?

Brian Spivey (01:51):

You know, as someone who received very little exposure to anything about China growing up, and then as someone who became very interested in China once I entered college, I’ve always kind of been bothered by how little I knew about China all through high school. And I wanted an internship that would somehow connect me with writing about China beyond the academy, which I always see as an important part of my career going forward, but which was also a serious publication. And so the China Channel was one way for me to experience how to work with other people in the academy, some people who are not in the academy, journalists, and how to write serious, but also public facing, work for people to consume about China’s past and China’s present. For LARB, that was more of an attempt to really get at sort of the nitty gritty details of how do you run a literary magazine or a humanities publication behind the scenes. You know, in, in our academic training we’re taught how to read, we’re taught how to interpret, how to critique. We’re taught how to research, we’re taught how to make sure our essays follow appropriate stylistic guidelines. And so some of the fundamentals of editing are kind of baked into academic education. And so I was confident in my ability to copy edit, and I had done some copy editing before at a journal I worked at at Georgetown, and I was curious: okay, well, how do you manage all of that stuff that’s going on behind the scenes? How do you get funding for a nonprofit literary publication.

Stephanie Narrow (03:23):

Perusing the China Channel website a few weeks ago, and I found this sentence in their mission statement, and I just thought it was really beautiful. That China Channel says that they create content that appeals to “the Sinophile who already watches China closely, and for the Sinocurious who is just opening Pandora’s Box.” So thinking about China Channel as writing for a more public audience – maybe academics, professors, China enthusiasts, China scholars, as well as just the everyday layperson – in your year working with China Channel, what has that taught you about engaging with a more public audience? How are you thinking about content differently now that you’ve had this experience with China Channel?

Brian Spivey (04:04):

You know, I think there’s an easy sort of binary way of thinking about the relationship between academic writing and more popular writing as if there’s only the academic audience and the public audience. But really, you know, my experience in the past year has shown me that there’s a lot of different audiences. There’s not just one public audience. It’s a bunch of fractured audiences. Some pieces are so relatable that anybody in those fractured audiences can relate to them. And some pieces are a little more niche. We just published a piece about Zhang Xiaogang, who’s a famous Chinese painter that most people would probably never heard of, that I think people who are interested in art and interested in China would be very interested in the piece. So I think most of our readers already have some connection or special interest in China. It has a literary and cultural edge that a lot of China focused websites don’t have. So many China focused websites are about pop culture or geopolitical thinking or contemporary news. Ours is really has a more cultural literary aspect to it. And so we have a lot of translations, a lot of poems. And so it occupies a really unique space in sort of the community of websites dedicated to understanding China for non-academic audiences.

Stephanie Narrow (05:19):

Well, Brian, you yourself are a scholar of modern China. And I wonder, thinking about that China Channel produces a lot of literary content, poetry, there’s some content about politics and economics of China, and it seems like you get a really full picture. And I’m wondering how has working with China Channel changed or altered that, or given you a different way to look and think about China?

Brian Spivey (05:42):

I think it’s kind of like any field of knowledge that you start really getting into: the more you learn the more you don’t know. As the perimeter of your knowledge increases, so does the perimeter of what you don’t know. I think the China Channel does a really good job of filling in those blank spaces that a lot of people don’t really think about when they think about China. One thing that I think that China Channel is really good at is showing that there’s China – the People’s Republic of China that we colloquially refer to as China – but the Chinese speaking world is much more diverse and much larger than that. There’s Taiwan, Hong Kong, expatriate communities in Southeast Asia and North America and Europe. And the China Channel tries to include all of those voices. So just by being exposed to and editing pieces that come in that are related to those angles or spaces about China that typically don’t get a lot of light shed on them has really expanded my knowledge of what could be constituted as China research.

Stephanie Narrow (06:43):

Would you have been able to, in the same way, get at some of these new forms of knowledge that you’ve not only experienced, but generated, at China Channel in your PhD training? Are there certain things that have been afforded to you or opportunities that you’ve been able to take advantage of working for LARB and for China Channel this last year that you wouldn’t have had in normative PhD coursework?

Brian Spivey (07:07):

So I guess there’s two things I would say to that. One, because the China Channel is so eclectic and so capacious that I am most certainly exposed to writings of Chinese scholars that I would not be exposed to in a traditional Chinese history PhD program. The other aspect is sort of the behind the scenes work that I did for LARB. You know, how do you run a fundraising campaign? How do you use social media to promote or cross promote your work? What is a good email onboarding series? All these kinds of questions that are really actually vital to running a literary nonprofit or a humanities organization that you would not be taught in a PhD program. The content that you might publish on some of those websites you might learn in a PhD program, but the management and development side of it obviously is not emphasized at all.

Stephanie Narrow (07:59):

Right. And these things don’t just manifest out of thin air. And I think it’s in that process of development that you learn a lot about collaboration – and collaboration is not something that I would say we have as many opportunities for in our PhD. Most of our work is solo research. Speaking for myself, what I’ve really liked about my past internship opportunities is the opportunity to work with other people and to be pushed out of my professional and intellectual comfort zone. In that way, how has it been for you working with other people who might not be history PhDs? Can you tell us a little bit about those relationships that you’ve built at LARB and China Channel?

Brian Spivey (08:39):

Yeah, the collaborative aspect has been really rewarding because, as you mentioned, in most PhD programs, that collaboration, especially in history, is not really built into the program. Just being an editor, of course, you’re forced to collaborate with people who submit pieces, or you solicit pieces from someone else. By soliciting pieces I was forced to find people outside of my knowledge base: who would be a good person to write about blank topic. And so you collaborate with emeritus faculty who are the sort of the doyens of their field. And then I’ve also had a concerted effort to collaborate with graduate students who I think have a lot of really interesting things to say, especially PhD students who have just come off a year of dissertation research. Sometimes you just need to reach out to them and tell them, “Hey, I value your viewpoint. And here’s an opportunity for you to share your research to a more public audience.”

Stephanie Narrow (09:33):

Well, and I also think too, it’s so important – and this is not something I think is as impressed upon us as PhD students – is the importance of building a professional network beyond your department and beyond your university. And the PhD and doctoral education itself can be so insular and it’s really easy to get trapped in your bubble. And what I have enjoyed again, about my previous internship opportunities, or even my current position as the Program Officer for the Career Development Program, is the opportunity to connect and to learn from people who I may not have had the opportunity to talk to or to connect with or to learn from. And I think that has helped me stay a bit more grounded in some of the more difficult moments of research and writing. So I think having a community beyond UCI has really helped me thrive in my own studies.

Brian Spivey (10:29):

Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned the community building aspect of it. That’s also something that I perhaps found the most rewarding. You know, going into it, I thought “Well, okay. So I’m interested in translating academic work about China to more broader audiences.” But what I really found most rewarding about the experience was not being a producer so much of that kind of public facing scholarship or public facing knowledge or translating that academic knowledge, but was being a facilitator and finding value in other people

Stephanie Narrow (11:00):

Thinking back to day one to now, what are some of your most important takeaways? What have you learned from your year in this position?

Brian Spivey (11:08):

For the LARB side, I learned how extremely difficult it is to run a literary nonprofit in today’s world. If you are running a humanities organization or a humanities magazine or literary nonprofit, the importance of maintaining relationships with people who care about that kind of stuff. So for example, for our fall fundraiser, we hand write letters to a variety of people explaining what LARB did over the past year, some of its accomplishments. These are usually people who previously had supported LARB financially and why it would be helpful if they donated again. And in terms of the China Channel, I learned, how do you find interesting people who have something to say, but who haven’t really published anything. When you think of a certain topic, and you think about the people who write about that topic, the question of how do you make something connect with broader audiences if you’re a historian. I learned that narrative and story matters. I think historians are fortunate in this respect. I think compared to other disciplines in that narrative is like our, fundamental way of communicating.

Stephanie Narrow (12:10):

So lastly, Brian, is our words of wisdom. And looking back on your internship with China Channel, and LARB this past year, what advice would you give to other history grad students about the value of internships?

Brian Spivey (12:24):

Um, I would think about the skills that you will learn in your PhD and the skills that you won’t learn in your PhD and try and find an internship that will allow you to learn the skills that you are not expected to learn in a PhD. So for me, that was a lot of the management and development work.

Stephanie Narrow (12:46):

To learn more about this episode, including show notes and a full transcript of today’s episode, please visit our website at sites.uci.edu/kriegerhallchronicles. For the Krieger Hall Chronicles I’m Stephanie Narrow, and thanks for tuning in.