At the end of high school, I became really interested in JM Barrie’s classic story of Peter Pan. This made a lot of sense at the time – I was on the cusp of adulthood. But as I contemplate giving birth to two boys, I’m revisiting the story from a new perspective. Read More
For me, one of the hardest aspects of pregnancy has been the conflict between not wanting/being able to do work, feeling obligated to work, and my impressions of other people’s expectations for my work. While this is a tension that reflects a perfect storm of being pregnant while also having a fairly work-intense job, the basic dynamic here is common to academia broadly. Read More
An experiment with frozen yogurt that’s halfway to ice cream. Read More
Chocolate chip cookies, plus a lot of ingredients that supposedly promote lactation in women who have just given birth, but anyone can eat them because really who is going to resist chocolate chip cookies? Read More
Thanks to my rapidly growing pregnant belly, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching the PBS series “Finding your Roots” and it’s got me thinking about how historians use sources and what the average person knows about them (and a lot about genealogy, which you can read my extended thoughts on here). Read More
I recently read these two articles, both about the children of orphaned men who used DNA testing to discover unexpected ethnic identities:
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Over the past two years, I’ve been embarrassed to tell people where I live. Read More
I love onions, but I also hate them because people cook them badly. Read More
Graduate school is a tightly-kept gate, and frankly it shouldn’t be that way. I’ve gathered some wisdom about how to succeed in making it past the gatekeepers from my own experiences as well as those of my friends in various fields. Read More
My research year is going to start out pretty typically for a history PhD – a few months in an archive looking at some old manuscripts. And then things are going to get really weird when I bring an x-ray gun to Italy so I can take readings on things made of copper. Read More