A timeline is an obvious solution to make that clear to a tenure committee consisting of people who don’t even do history. But if “my history” is that long and covers allegedly five thousand years (historians have issues with that claim), it’s a squeeze to fit it all in. One solution is to borrow the scroll format, like Along the River during the Qingming Festival. I felt I already was pushing the format of my file by including illustrations for a non-Art tenure case, so I let that go for now.

Squirrel to the rescue! He can unroll the timeline like a garden hose to its fullest extent for display purposes, and can reel it back in anytime to tidy it away. And while we’re at it, I might as well point out that any East Asian historian worth their salt at a SLAC (Small Liberal Arts College), ends up covering Japan and Korea as well. It does help to have a little hippo on hand to model the correct reaction, of course! This ended up being a full page in my file, because… East Asian history is really long, you know? And just to be clear, I highlighted my area of scholarly expertise in purple, although I will happily cover it all “from Yao to Mao” and beyond.

The top panel has become a very regular feature at the start of any premodern Chinese history class to orient us for the session that day, and I use little coloured pointers to indicate where exactly we are. Reusable, and fun: what more do we want out of tenure file products?

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Sparing you the convoluted backstory, he started as our morale booster during a summer writing group, then we considered appointing him department chair but apparently that wasn’t working out (we have a fab human department chair now). Instead he happily took up the position of mascot, brightening the department’s social media whenever we needed to mark our presence on Instagram or Twitter without showing our own faces. Even the College’s president has remarked on his media-savvy presence. And since the original plushie is mine, and I helped to design the social media strategy, of course I had to include him in my file so I could talk about this in the “Service” section. On Friday, you’ll get to see more of him!

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He’s just putting the finishing touches to the composition, overlaying PRC over the United States. Add some text in a standard comic book typeface, and voilà: there is an inviting illustration of the territory I cover in my courses. And Will you look at the size of that?!?! It actually is larger than the US! Who’d have thunk? Squirrel also got to show off his mind-bending map-comparison at the start of every China-course already, so this is definitely a “multi-use” illustration!

Oh, that little blue hippo? If you’re not already familiar with him, I’ll introduce him next week Monday! Until then, I’d love to hear how you convey scale in your courses. Leave a comment!