During the pandemic lockdown, I was finally convinced to watch Outlander. When the show first aired, it gained immediate notoriety for being a steamy romance. What I found was a shockingly boring military historical drama about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 that, yes, was interspersed with a significant amount of explicit sex, but seemingly half […]
A lot more than names and dates. Yesterday, my husband linked me to this article, which turned out to be more a promise than an actual essay. Despite its title, it does not actually explain the importance of promoting history through video games – it just pastes the words of English historians talking about the […]
Do you ever get a taste in your mind? Like you just imagine a flavor that you’ve never had before and you wonder whether you can make it happen? That’s how pretty much all of my cooking projects come together. Call it my particular form of synesthesia. Read More A while back I wrote about […]
Right before I took my oral qualifying exams, I called my adviser in a panic. I had failed my German and Latin exams almost ten times each, and time was running out to pass them before I would have to push back my oral exam date. My adviser talked me down. “Take a walk” he […]
Happy new year. It’s been increasing radio silence on this blog, which is to be expected after 3+ years of writing. I started writing here as a more publicly-accessible outlet for the kind of writing I have always done – essays that draw together my personal and professional thoughts on current topics. But there’s always […]
Happy new year. Read More A few months late to the party, I finally watched Bo Burnham’s Inside. And then I watched it again. And then I listened to the soundtrack on repeat for several weeks. Read More It might sound like I’m making a value judgment here, that traditional is better than historical. Really, […]
I can’t say that ancient cuisine sounds particularly exciting, even for someone like me. But I was surprised earlier this week when, after watching this video from the Historical Italian Cooking research group, I felt inspired to make a variation on an ancient Roman frittata. I think frittatas are often kind of overblown, since they’re […]
Money is perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when most people consider pursuing a graduate degree, and for good reason – this is a life built on financial uncertainty that is, for many people, prohibitively expensive to even enter. Read More
Check out this video I did with the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages YouTube channel. We start with my views on the Ornament of the World documentary and then get into the larger topic of diversity in Norman Sicily.
Pregnancy, like any major life event, has a steep learning curve. You can’t really prepare, because you don’t know how things are going to be for you, but at the same time, you can learn about the range of things you can expect and know what resources are available once you run into trouble. Read […]
I got irrationally angry today when I read this New Yorker article. It should be obvious by now that I have very strong opinions about history in general and certain topics in particular, one being the Black Death. And so when large publications make claims about the Black Death that I find … problematic … […]
I recently read these two articles, both about the children of orphaned men who used DNA testing to discover unexpected ethnic identities: I actually read the second one first, but I think if you’re going to read them, do it in this order. The crux of both articles is that a family found its ethnic […]
Money is perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when most people consider pursuing a graduate degree, and for good reason – this is a life built on financial uncertainty that is, for many people, prohibitively expensive to even enter. Read More
Amid the Coronavirus scramble that has left my local Costco completely bare of hand soap, sanitizing wipes, and tissues, I had the completely irrelevant thought this morning that I haven’t washed my hair in weeks. I’ve done plenty to care for my hair – cowash, conditioner, combing, rinsing – but I haven’t used shampoo in […]
