Greetings and welcome!

I am a historian of the Byzantine East and the Medieval West actively exploring the possibilities of the ‘digital revolution’ in a collaborative scholar-student venture: the Traveler’s Lab.

For Wesleyan students: here is what I’ll be up to in 2016-2017.

As a teacher-scholar I teach those in my classes how history has been done, and how to do history: how to re-tell the story of the past in their own voice through questions, insight, and analysis, and then to bring that voice into the conversation of scholars past and present.
That means I actively engage the intersection of “the historical past” and “the practical past” by studying and conveying the scant remains of a constructed past known as the ‘Middle Ages’ into a collage of interpretations which I then synthesize, asserting this synthesis communicates something trustworthy about past reality right to you, in our shared present. Then I do it again, differently.
In my classes, we work on history as a habit of mind, a rhetorical narrative, a set of questions, and a corresponding set of ways to answer those questions.

Please click on the sidebar (or here) to browse to a brief academic bio, my professional c.v., publications, some current research and teaching projects, or various in-linked, book-faced, edu-cademiad, tweeted personnae.