Amici! It is now June!
We are now, properly speaking, into the academic summer (in practice, I have been in academic summer for all but the first few days of May). The popular perception is that academic summer is, for academics, a 'vacation,' but those of you who have been here will know that it is quite the oppose: it is writing season (or research season or both...
2024-06-02 18:09:06 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now May!
April is always a busy month for non-research related work as it is the end of the semester, as well as a standard spot in the calendar for smaller or more local conferences. I opened the month on April 5th, moderating a panel for the NCSU Graduate Student History Conference on social media and history. These sorts of smaller conferences are val...
2024-05-05 21:09:55 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! it is now April!
Indeed, it is April 1st, but you need not fear any sort of April Fools humor in this update. I have nothing against it, per se, but find most April Fools online content unfunny and tiresome. That said, I will note that, in what has become a tradition, 2024-04-01 19:02:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Amici! It is now March!
February - even a February longer by one day - rolled past pretty quickly. I'm going to keep this update on the short side (fitting for its short month) because I am rather pressed for time this week.
For research updates, this month has been spent largely finishing out the chapter on pre-Roman equipment in Spain, which I had paus...
2024-03-06 16:53:21 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now February!
Apologies that this update comes a few days late, but I was in the final crunch to get the chapter done that I had promised for the Routledge Companion to Video Games and History.
And I was going to dive right into that, but as I was drafting this, 2024-02-05 18:12:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Amici! It is now January. Happy New Year!
Alas, I open with news that is somewhat of a bummer. As I noted last month, I had a campus visit for a very exciting academic job. Alas of the four candidates, my understanding is that I was the second choice...and the first choice accepted the offer. The campus visit went very well, there was a lot of enthus...
2024-01-06 01:05:50 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now December! Happy Holidays - whichever you observe (I am a Christmas fellow, myself).
My apologies that this post comes late, but the reason it is late gets us right into my professional update. Early this weekend I was out of town because I was doing a 'campus visit,' the final stage of the academic job interview process.
Now for whatever reason, ac...
2023-12-03 16:45:37 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now November.
I'm afraid I don't have a tremendous amount to report for October, as my time beyond ACOUP and teaching was mostly consumed with working on job applications. The last of the jobs on my list for the season are now in, however, so I am hoping to turn more fully to other projects.
I have started laying down sentences on the next chapter of my book...
2023-11-02 03:00:19 +0000 UTC View PostConscript Fathers (and/or Mothers)!
Since we've now done the last ACOUP Senate polls winner and runner-up topics (Roman Roads and Greek and Phoenician Colonization), I'm throwing up another open thread to solicit more questions, both of the short sort for another Q&A referenda ad Senatum post as well as potential long-form questions for the next poll (to go up later this mont...
2023-10-16 03:45:26 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now October!
I am sorry this is coming out a bit late! As seemingly happens every year, I underestimate the impact that job season will have on my writing time and then act surprised when my schedules fall apart in September. Every year.
In any event, I have good news, so I won't bury the good news: the book project has been approved for a contract b...
2023-10-03 19:21:56 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now September!
Apologies for this update coming a touch late, it got caught up with the start of the semester, some writing work (discussed below) and a trip to take our little one to see her 95-year-old great-grandmother.
Still, there is some research news. To begin with, we have peer review reports for the book project back from OUP, much ...
2023-09-04 19:36:14 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now August!
August is always a month which comes in the academic calendar with a touch of dread, as it means the end of summer and the beginning of the Fall semester. My own classes start in the week of the 21st, so I now have to be finalizing syllabi, planning readings, coordinating with TAs and so on.
As you may recall earlier in the summer, I managed to s...
2023-08-01 16:21:13 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now July!
Indeed, you may have noticed it is rather far into July. Once again, by way of apology, here is a picture of a cat:
The reason I delayed the update was to wait until I could report that I had submitted the sample chapters (ch. 1, 3, 4, 10 and 11, plus the ...
2023-07-11 22:24:18 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now June!
More correctly it is now more than a full week into June, so I apologize for this update coming late. Here is a cat picture to make it up for y'all:
We're now properly into summer and so I've had the month of May to push forward on the book project and, to...
2023-06-09 15:41:18 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now May!
I suppose the thing to start with is that the pedant household has our newest addition in late April. Our little girl arrived three weeks early and with more excitement than I'd have liked, but everyone is fine, healthy and home. The early arrival has caused something of a disruption in my work schedule, but we've got a shift-system working in the p...
2023-05-01 13:38:00 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now April!
March was a very busy month! I was scheduled to give three invited talks, as I mentioned last month. The first two, at the University of Maryland and iDiv happened as planned, where the last one at Tel Aviv University did not due to the political unrest there (it was cancelled when the university joined the general strike). Obnoxiously that ...
2023-04-01 19:15:50 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now March!
Looking back it appears I missed the January research update (which should have appeared February 1), so my apologies there. I will be honest with you all, I have been pushing quite hard these past few months and I am frankly pretty burnt out, but there are quite a few months to go before I can rest.
But, let's start with book project updates. &nb...
2023-03-03 01:54:22 +0000 UTC View PostPatres et matres conscripti! It is time for another Senate poll (as well as the normal open thread)! As before, feel free to drop questions for future Referenda ad Senatum posts in the comments. I keep a running list of questions asked that I choose from (some posted here, others sent by the messages feature, etc) for those posts.
For the long post topics,...
2023-01-27 18:39:48 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now 2023!
In addition to the holidays and such, this month was also dedicated to the book project. I ended up somewhat behind where I wanted to be, but I have three chapters ready to show (I had hoped for four, but I hit a fairly major snag in one that delayed things) and so I going forward with my plan to begin sounding out publishers.
I've decided to start...
2023-01-01 07:19:13 +0000 UTC View PostTime for another book snippet!
This snippet is a good example of how the 'equipment' sections of the overall project are structured. Each one takes a piece of battlefield equipment and first discusses who wielded it and when (adoption dates end up only really being relevant for the Romans, mostly). The attention to exactly which soldiers seem to have carried what matters becau...
2022-11-22 20:23:41 +0000 UTC View PostAnd the next book snippet!
This one should be especially fun if any of you have been wondering where all of my ancient farming rules of thumb seem to come from: it's this section! The key takeaway from this whole exercise is actually very simple: given the organization of the countryside in the ancient world, manpower was actually cheap but surplus was expensive ...
2022-11-15 21:30:49 +0000 UTC View PostAs promised, here is this week's snippet of the book project.
This snippet actually follows quite closely on the first and is part of what we call a 'literature review.' A literature review is the part of an academic work which seeks to situation the present work with respect to previous scholarship: who are you building on, contracting, adjacent to, etc. The litera...
2022-11-09 02:13:01 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now November and for once this update is coming out on time!
October , as usual, has had me mostly focused on academic job applications (which I detailed in last month's update), as the application due-dates tend to be either in October or very early in November (Nov. 1 being the largest single cluster).
That said I do have a few odds and ends to report. I r...
2022-11-01 15:45:40 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now October! Apologies that this is delayed a bit; we lost power on Friday and only got it back Saturday evening, which delayed this and a few other things.
September has been something of a short month, since PDXCON ate the first week and there's also been a bit of life going on in the background. Nevertheless, alongside the blog, I've had two main professi...
2022-10-03 17:28:08 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now September. Well into September, in fact; apologies for that!
This update was delayed by me being in Stockholm for PDXCON2022, where I was part of the historians panel with Eleanor Janega. It was the first time Paradox has brought historians to their historical-grand-strategy convention, but it seems to have been a big hit. As far as I know it was r...
2022-09-07 19:13:13 +0000 UTC View PostAmici, it is now August (fifth!).
Apologies for this coming late, but as you may recall from last month we've been moving house. Which has now happened! My office is more or less set up (my book aren't all unpacked yet, but since this was late I figured I ought to write it first). The cats are beginning to settle in as well after a difficult first few days. This is...
2022-08-05 18:42:04 +0000 UTC View PostHey folks, just a quick update. Moving day is tomorrow so the normal update is going to be delayed. Expect it later this week or this weekend at the latest. But you absolutely will get your update.
It'll probably also be a fireside this week and then Logistics part III (marching, scouting, etc) next week - I had hoped to get Logistics III done earlier but all of...
2022-08-01 19:06:30 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now July!
June has been a useful month, though in ways that don't leave me with a lot of concrete things to report. The two reviews I discussed last month are both submitted, but neither has come out yet.
A few forthcoming things are beginning to come into enough sight to talk about. First off, it looks like my panel submission for SCS/AIA has been acc...
2022-07-01 17:20:20 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now June!
As you may recall, at the end of last month I was at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History, acting as a panel chair. That week was, as you might imagine, quite busy; my students took their final exams immediately after I got back and then it was the rush to get final grades in. If you've only ever been on the stude...
2022-06-02 00:00:41 +0000 UTC View PostPatres et matres conscripti! It is time for another Senate poll and also a good moment for an open thread. As before, feel free to drop questions for future Referenda ad Senatum posts (I do keep a list of questions asked) in the comments.
For the long post topic votes (to be tackled hopefully after the upcoming series on ancient generalship), the options run thusly (n...
2022-05-17 18:13:18 +0000 UTC View Post