This week started off very productive and then I just lost steam. I’ve continued my work on the Geniza documents, looking for instances of spices traded in Sicily. And I’ve found some really interesting stuff. I think, for instance, that there was a pretty substantial shift in the trade of spices when the Normans came to […]

So this may seem obvious, but I have trouble leaving the past in the past. I’m a historian, so certainly I think that the past has value in the present. I think there’s something to be learned from how we got to where we are, or the ways things have changed (and the ways they […]

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

I arrived in Sicily this week, and after struggling through some small mishaps, I started working. Read More This week I largely finished with my manuscripts at the Wellcome, reunited with a past professor, and had a fortuitous meeting with a conservator. Read More Last week I stayed home and did some editing. This week […]

Cheese and yogurt waiting to be stirred. Enchiladas are a labor of love, so I keep coming up with lazy methods for getting the same flavors and textures. Read More About two months into my pregnancy, my older brother D said “you’re so lucky you’re doing this in school, it’s way easier.” He wasn’t wrong. […]

A while back I wrote about my dissertation writing process and its many stages of revisions. Now that I technically have a full draft (albeit one with a bunch of holes and exposed seams), I’ve entered the reading phase. Read More

This week I checked in with my advisor about my progress and I returned to Chapter 5 so I could jump down a rabbit hole of alchemy. After reading through all my writing last week, I had a chat with my advisor early this week about where things stand. He said he’s happy with my […]

I love onions, but I also hate them because people cook them badly.  I find biting into anything and pulling out a long string of onion very upsetting. Or getting an unexpectedly crunchy and spicy onion. Ew. For an ingredient that is nearly universal, there’s a lot of bad onions out there. I have some […]

Oh hey, I got to look at a manuscript this week! And I asked my advisor some embarrassing questions about Latin. After some hiccups last week in ordering my manuscripts, I finally got to look at one of them this week. Maybe it’s because I was in the process of writing next week’s Angry History […]

Things got a bit derailed this week while I was figuring out funding for next year and talking to a journal editor about an article. I definitely at least started this week doing what I said I was going to do, which was working on finishing Chapter 5. The writing is very close to being […]

This week I largely finished with my manuscripts at the Wellcome, reunited with a past professor, and had a fortuitous meeting with a conservator. I’ve gone through every manuscript I requested at least once. When I was applying for fellowships I had a hard time estimating how much time I would need at a given […]

It’s amazing how big a part of my identity as a New Yorker bread is. Read More In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those deep losses that aches dully for a long time. Among the women I know, there is a feeling that RBG was one of us, whatever […]

The day I left the hospital, holding my child made me physically ill. Call it some combination of physical and emotional stressors. I was recovering from preeclampsia, a serious pregnancy complication that causes an unsafe spike in blood pressure paired with a drop in heart rate and can lead to seizures. I was also starting […]

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 […]