The other day, a completely innocuous thing happened while I was at work: my coworker complemented my hairstyle. She and I have just about the same hair in color and texture, but that day we had opposite styles – hers was in full fabulous curl, and mine was braided down against the sides of my […]

My mom has a bit of a problem with experts. If you asked her, my mom would tell you that the problem with experts is that they don’t have to justify their opinions on the basis that they have implicitly earned that trust, and, in the reverse, other people who are not experts have not. […]

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 […]

Last year, I spent most of my time alone in Europe watching historical costuming YouTube (read: costube). After returning home for good and successfully finishing some knitting and crochet projects for pretty much the first time ever, I’m taking the plunge to get back into sewing. Read More

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 … […]

This is almost more of a general PhD update than a dissertation update, but I thought I needed to write something about my work since it’s been a while. My dissertation is extremely close to being done. I feel like I’ve had a full draft of this thing for years, but maybe it’s only been […]

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 […]

This week I did my research due diligence and thought about medieval Sicily in a new context. Read More I played an amazing (and free!) mobile game a few weeks ago, and it helped keep me sane. Read More The biggest thing stopping me from leaving my apartment in Palermo on any given day is […]

Lately I’ve been telling myself that if I could just set aside a big chunk of time – I always arbitrarily think of it as 4 hours – I would be able to focus and get over the hurdle of the chapter I’m trying to write. Read More

I recently read these two articles, both about the children of orphaned men who used DNA testing to discover unexpected ethnic identities: Read More 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 […]

In the week or so since most of the US has locked down to slow the spread of Coronavirus, I’ve repeatedly joked to my friends and family that last year, when I was living alone and far away from them while on research, prepared me for the experience of lockdown. During that year, I lived […]

I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated home office. This was by design – it’s been a requirement for every space I’ve lived in during grad school, at the expense of living spaces that were cheaper, or more private, or in more interesting areas near people I knew. But just because my office belongs to […]

If I had to encapsulate my academic aspirations into a single image, it would be the memory of sitting around the coffee table in the economics department lounge at Carleton, eating my professor’s homemade scones, drinking tea, and debating applied philosophy with professors and students. Read More Let me rant at you about a 10-month […]

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