In An Antique Land (1992)

（1980年代，印度作家Amitav Ghosh還是英國牛津大學人類學博士生，當時他到埃及兩個小鄉村做農業田野調查。他在這本書結合自己的田野筆記以及12世紀興盛的印度洋貿易歷史。同樣的區域，跨越八百年的旅行，又兩種人文學科的對話，被譽為翻天覆地的旅人歷史書。）

"A subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale", Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land beautifully interweaves two types of journey undertaken by the author himself.

One journey leads Ghosh to the country side of Egypt in the 1980s as a student of anthropology. His investigation erstwhile revolved around agriculture, though  in In An Antique Land, readers see more of the villagers across a span of a decade than of the author's research subject per se.

Another journey shows Ghosh traveled from manuscript to manuscript, like a historian, hoping to reconstruct the life of a slave from the Malabar coast of India based on only few leaks from the letters penned by the slave's Jewish master Abraham Ben Yijû and his circle of mentors and friends.

One Week with Carlo Ginzburg

（以下是我聽義大利史學家Carlo Ginzburg到台灣中央研究院及台大歷史研究所演講的感想。）

The 2015 Fu Ssu-Nien Lectures （傅斯年講座） was awarded to Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian historian and a practitioner of microhistory. 

This was his first trip to Taiwan. He stayed for ten days, gave two lectures, joined one symposium and agreed to a conversation with students and faculty from the History Department of National Taiwan University (NTU). Before taking the flight back to Europe, he visited Hualien.

Like a fan, I followed all of Ginzburg's talks in Taipei, at the same time feeding my hunger for knowledge by watching all his talks on youtube. Chances came that I was able to ask him several questions at the conversation about colonial archives and philology, and they not only earned me a pleasant dinner with him and several faculty members from NTU and Academia Sinica on the last day, but also put me into contact with fellow historians that take interest in my research.

How fortunate and grateful! Yes, I take it as a call from History.