When your body says: “Why not have both?” For about a year and a half now I’ve been in a constant state of intense planning. My plans started really coming into effect about 4 months ago. I’ll have to continue this way of doing things until the summer, and I’ll finally be done with everything […]
[Edit: Apparently I forgot to post this one, so I’m putting it up for posterity] This is a pretty short one. This week was pretty much a wash work-wise. I gave myself the task of deciphering the margin notes of Wellcome 82, the manuscript I looked at that has the urine flask image. But after […]
We’re in a semantic age, when battles are fought over the words we use to refer to people or experiences, and lines are drawn through vocabulary. In a non-political arena, I’m having a similar fight over the specific words historians use. How important are these distinctions, really? Read More After I reacquainted myself with my […]
I started this week off with a visit to a class on plague. Most of my work time was spent compiling manuscripts into an appendix that no one will ever read. And I’m taking out my mounting anxiety by sewing a coat. Read More In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one […]
Unless you are a very particular kind of musical theater nerd, there’s a good chance you don’t care that a show called Hadestown won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Musical last Sunday. But you should. Read More
Mind = Blown Italian food in the US is so standardized that unless you are eating at the fanciest of restaurants, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of or eaten pretty much all of the accepted Italian dishes out there. This is pretty typical of “ethnic” cuisines, by which I mean that when a large […]
There wasn’t a whole lot of actual research this week, but I did write a lot. Sometimes, research is all administrative issues. I started at the Huntington Library this week, but I couldn’t look at anything. First, the Huntington is a lot more formal and organized with its readers than other libraries I’ve been to, […]
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 […]
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 Graduate school is a tightly-kept gate, and frankly it shouldn’t be that […]
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
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. I applied to grad school twice – first to MA programs and two PhD […]
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 […]
Or why I study the Middle Ages and dress like the 1940s. If you run in vaguely historical or vintage fashion-oriented circles online, you’ve probably run into the Vintage Egyptologist (whose work I can’t condone) or maybe, more recently, the Overdressed Archaeologist (whose work I absolutely encourage you to check out). These two women combine […]
100 Years On, What Does It Say That We’re Still Censoring Egon Schiele’s Nudes? This brief article on a recent international ad campaign highlights exactly what’s wrong with the female body in public spaces – that we just can’t distinguish between nudity that is erotic and nudity that is irrelevant to sex. I have loved Egon […]
