April 2024 Research Update

Amici! 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 valuable for graduate students as an opportunity to get some low-stakes practice in the ways that they might present their research at larger, higher-stakes professional conferences later in their career. It's also a much cheaper way to get that experience, as it doesn't involve any expensive travel.

A brief aside on academic conference presentations, at least in history. Broadly, they come in two forms: the more common is the paper panel. In a paper panel, each of the main participants presents their research in what is generally a 15-20 minute slot. In both history and classics it is common to arrive with a 15ish minute script which one simply reads to the audience, rather than presenting more fluidly from notes. This, as you may imagine, is not the most captivating of presentation methods.

In addition to the panelists, whose papers, at least in theory, relate to each other, you generally have a panel chair, who typically doesn't present a paper, but instead introduces each panelist and also handles opening the floor for questions afterwards. A panel may also have respondent or commentator, a member who is not presenting any of the papers but is an expert in the field and has read all of the papers and prepared remarks on them (positive and negative). Chair-and-commentator are sometimes merged, especially for 'individual submission' panels (that is, a panel composed by the event organizers out of individually submitted papers, rather than a situation where a group of academics submits a complete panel together).

The other standard form is the roundtable panel, which is intended as a more fluid, open discussion. The main panelists are discussants and the chair is a moderator; in some cases they may have pre-circulated a paper, but if so, they won't read it. Instead, a roundtable is supposed to be a discussion. The moderator facilitates and may be effectively a full participant in the discussion (but also may just facilitate) and the discussants discuss, debating with each other on the topic at hand. The moderator's job, then, is to introduce everyone and to come prepared with some questions to spark the discussion (or restart it, if the previous topic runs down).

For a graduate student panel, I think the non-graduate student moderator (so, me; it's not uncommon for that to be a professor or the like) ought not take the focus off of the graduate students, so I kept my role to setting the questions keeping the conversation moving, but my panelists (Annabeth Poe, Sarah Bernstein and Trevor Wiley) were all quite on the ball once everything got rolling, which made my job pretty easy.

April also saw me trek out to the annual meeting of the Society for Military History in the middle of the month to moderate a panel on 'Warfighting other than Battle in the Late Classical and Hellenistic Periods' with Paul Johstono, Jeffrey Rop and J.E. 'Ted' Lendon.

The two panels was an interesting study in contrasts. The HGSA panelists were great, of course, but just starting out and relatively new at this. By contrast, the SMH roundtable was a formidable brace of scholars (and me) - all three have had their work cited on ACOUP - discussing and debating to a packed room with more than a few senior scholars in the field. I also took a few liberties as moderator, both to engage a bit more in the discussion (and sparred a bit with Ted who I was excited to at last meet in person!) and also to inject some humor, mostly by making fun of Paul a little in the introductions (he's a good friend, so I knew I could get away with it; he's also a Duke PhD, so I knew he deserved it). I think that set the tone for a more free-wheeling, active and energetic panel really well, and the panelists delivered. More than one participant at SMH commented to me that it was the best roundtable of the year.

The key contention we fought over was the question of 'irregular' military operations - small raids, ambushes, clashing foraging parties. Most of our sources leave these sorts of events out, but they do appear from time to time, raising the question, "are we just getting brief glimpses of what things are like all the time - with lots of smaller operations and skirmishing - or are we hearing about it here because it is unusual." Ted Lendon gamely took the minority view (that actually this sort of thing was uncommon) and the result was a fantastic debate, with interventions as well by Wayne Lee and Kelly DeVries (names that those into Early Modern or Medieval warfare respectively will immediately recognize).

Lendon made a valiant effort, but I don't think he quite managed to shake the general assumption that small-scale 'irregular' fighting 'other than battle' was happening more broadly throughout ancient warfare, but that it is merely an accident of our sources that we so rarely see it. Paul Johstono brought to the panel some of his own really interesting work on what are basically policing and counter-insurgency actions in Ptolemaic Egypt that we only know about because Egypt is strange and papyrus evidence survives there, while Jeffrey Rop looked at how irregular fighting shows up in ancient military writers, particularly in the context of strategems (little tricks a general can employ to get an advantage). Overall a great, thought-provoking discussion, including audience-led discourses on things like, "what makes a battle different from other kinds of fighting?" (to which I answered 'consent' - an idea that I think I want to perhaps develop on the blog at some point) and how we ought to understand the fighting actions on the Column of Trajan. A great, fun, wide ranging discussion.

And of course, a conference like SMH is also a great chance to touch base with all sorts of old academic friends and scholarly acquaintances. I got a chance, after a long email correspondence, to finally meet Jon Parshall (of Shattered Sword) in person and talk to him about his new book project, which is shaping up to be fascinating and frankly monumental (but I don't want to spoil anything - safe to say it's on World War II).

Meanwhile, I have, of course, been chipping away at the book project. I am still working through the chapter on non-state 'barbarian' mobilization I discussed last time, but how to have that finished by the end of this month. And of course, April also saw the end of classes (with finals stretching into May), so by the time you read this, the semester is done, final grades are in and we've embarked upon summer, where I can really focus (hopefully) on really pinning down the remaining elements of the full book manuscript in preparation for submitting it in December/January.

And that was the month! I also, as a bit of end-of-semester relaxation and May the Fourth celebration, built out the Lego Star Destroyer (4,700 pieces! it is enormous) set my better half bought me (more than a year ago!), so I'll attach some images of that process to this, so you can see what it looked like coming together!