Greetings Wesleyan Students!
I would love to have you in a class, chat at drop-in hours, or to work with you in the digital humanities hub of the Travelers Lab.
I am truly and fully committed to the liberal arts college ideal of the teacher-scholar, which I take to mean helping you leave Wesleyan as fully equipped to research and educate yourself.
Please scroll down for a comment on pedagogy. Here is where you can find me this year.
Courses
The Travelers Lab–which is ongoing throughout the academic year–is a multi-campus international research lab network created by Prof. Gary Shaw (Wesleyan, History) and Prof. Adam Franklin-Lyons (Marlboro College, History). The T-Lab transforms research projects, questions, and methods through work with student researchers from all disciplines. This is the most exciting and dynamic teaching I can think of doing. Come and work with us and the team.
This FALL 2024 the Traveler’s Lab continues with our CDER and Comparing Chronicles projects. Want to join? Just email me, or join the methodological introduction to Digital History: COL 375 (open to all class years).
I am also teaching COL 221 (crosslisted with HIST and MDST) on written lives as political power, from the Middle Ages to Modernity. Why, since Gandhi, have few leaders successfully drawn upon the power of adopting a revolutionary approach to living as a means of effecting political, social, and cultural change? A student-centered collaborative pedagogy collectively workshops principles drawn from a wide range of examples of revolutionary living from the period known as the middle ages. This includes well-known and widely imitated examples such as the Buddha, the Prophet, and the Christ, to lesser-known examples including cross-dressing nuns, hermits on pillars, desert mothers, begging collectives, and much more. As a student you will then apply the ways these past lives were remembered and transmitted to contemporary movements such as Occupy Wall Street or the Black Lives Matter CHOP in Seattle and present that work via course assignments as short essays, presentations, and a self-designed final project that can be analytical, creative, or demonstrative. Join me.
In SPRING 2025 I am teaching a course that never gets old: COL 247 (crosslist: HIST/MDST/CLST). For what it’s worth, that’s a joke about the course topic. The Fall of Rome and Other Stories will explain one of history’s great mysteries: why do we still think the Romans matter so much not only for our own politics but for our political future? The answer is to understand the “Fall of Rome” as a story, and an idea, not an event–and then trace its invention and reception from the sixth century all the way down to our present. Here’s the catalog description: The fifth-century fall of Rome to barbarian invaders is an idea that slowly crystallized over time. This course will examine the birth and development of this “fall”–one of the most persistent stories in history–using the very texts in which it was first articulated. We will work with selections from a range of authors … to connect the fall of Rome with other attempts to explain catastrophe and change. The course will conclude by surveying the persistence of the fall of Rome as an idea, through the medieval, early modern, and modern periods, right into contemporary discourse.
Pedagogy
What first enticed and continues still to draw me to my field – vast, esoteric, fascinating, confounding – is the East Roman (Byzantine) Middle Age’s unique admixture of what now (in the 21st-century New England present) seems both approachable and strange.
East Rome (what we call Byzantium) seemed and saw itself as both familiar and foreign in its own time!
My pedagogy revolves around this: spark curiosity, and share enthusiasm, find joy.
East Rome provides endless questions for the curious. Even the traditional description of Byzantium — “Roman governance, Christian religion, Greek culture” — stubbornly resists a straightforward reading.
The monarchs of Constantinople were universally acknowledged as Roman, even as other kings claimed that title;
its Christianity was – by definition – ecumenical, even as other Christianities decried it as heresy;
it was acknowledged as the de facto medieval contributor to (never merely transmitter of) Hellenic learning, even as other centers of learning feigned at superiority.
I delight in the hard work of investigating the sources that remain.
I believe this labor is the goal: the historical habitus is learning to articulate an informed perplexity. That is, I am not a “Byzantine Historian” so much as I am merely another student of the past interested in helping to bring order to the engagement between “the historical past” and “the practical past”. When I am able to present the past as apparent paradox, in that refracted communicative act — shadows, traces, whispers — I can behold the richness and complexity of human experience as relationship, at once diachronic and synchronic, both haunting and homely.
The experience is humbling, inspiring, and profoundly disconcerting: what else? Come, practice with us.