Greetings Wesleyan Students! I would love to have you in a class, or to work with you in the “digital humanities” hub of the Traveler’s Lab.
I am truly and fully committed to the liberal arts college ideal of the teacher-scholar, now manifest in a multi-campus research lab created by Prof. Gary Shaw (Wesleyan, History) and Prof. Adam Franklin-Lyons (Marlboro College, History). In the Traveler’s Lab, which is ongoing throughout the academic year, we work on transforming our research projects, questions, and methods with student researchers from all disciplines. This is the most exciting and dynamic teaching I can think of doing, and I would love to have you come and work with me and the student researchers on my team. This year we are developing the infrastructure for a complete upgrade of the Constantinople as Palimpsest Project which will be called the Historical Topography of Constantinople (HTC). We are also beginning to develop analytical models for the data we have derived from the Geography in the Chronicle of Theophanes project. If you are interested in joining, please drop me an email.
For FALL 2022 I am on sabbatical from teaching and working with the Traveler’s Lab.
In SPRING 2023 I am also teaching the College of Letters Medieval Colloquium: COL 242 with Prof. Joe Fitzpatrick (for COL Sophomore majors only).
I will also be teaching a new course on how a life becomes political power, from the Middle Ages to Modernity, entitled Revolutionary Lives (COL 221 and cross-listed with HIST and MDST). This course begins by asking why, since Gandhi, few leaders have successfully drawn upon the power of adopting a revolutionary approach to living as a means of effecting political, social, and cultural change. I will use a student-centered collaborative pedagogy to collectively workshop principles drawn from a wide range of examples of revolutionary living from the period known as the middle ages; from 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.