I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. I’ve been too focused on writing and keeping ahead of a seemingly endless array of (possibly pointless) administrative tasks that I’ve struggled to slow down and just read. In fact, I’m excited about my impending travel not because I like travel (I hate it), but because… Read More →
I have many simmering anxieties as a scholar. Among them is my worry about having to publish the North Basilica at Polis on Cyprus by myself. This means immersing myself again in the literature of Early Christian architectural history. Among the most interesting features of the North Basilica is the presence of apsidal exedrae on… Read More →
One of the challenges of a summer reading list is staying to true to it enough to get through at least some of it while also being flexible enough to read unexpected books that come my way. Catherine Keane’s More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus (2024) is just such a book.… Read More →
It is a pretty exciting time for scholars of Early Christian architecture and archaeology. A new generation of scholars is returning to fundamental problems and sites in our field with new ideas and renewed vigor. There is no better example of this than TWO major articles on the Christian building at Dura Europos appearing in… Read More →
A few years ago my wife, Susie, and I prepared a survey of over 3000 mid-century houses in Grand Forks, North Dakota. As a part of this work, we identified a couple early post-war neighborhoods in Grand Forks that we felt deserved further study. You can read our final report here. This past year, Susie… Read More →
I have a phobia of reading old books. It’s irrational as most phobia are, but nevertheless guides my actions to an embarrassing extent. As a result, it took a particular nudge from my buddy Kostis Kourelis (and a generous copy of the book) to will myself to read Kevin Lynch’s What Time Is This Place?… Read More →
Scholars interested in the architectural history of post-Roman Cyprus have been enjoying the immense (and sometimes overwhelming) outpouring of scholarship in their field over the last 20 years. Much of this work has been both high quality in terms of argument, but also (and perhaps as importantly) high production quality with careful illustrations, vivid photographs,… Read More →
It’s been a long week and I’m looking at a day filled with meetings, teaching, and other adventures. In light of this, it seems like a good time for a Three Things Thursday. Thing the First Last week, while having a conversation with one of my old Greek archaeology buddies, he casually mentioned that Rhys Carpenter… Read More →
As summer comes to a close (a few trees are recognizing the shorter days and starting to hint at their early fall transformations), I’m trying to wrap up a few projects. Yesterday, I posted an almost final draft of my paper on Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity. Today, I wanted to post the very… Read More →
A couple of weeks ago, I started to write some of a short introduction to the baptisteries of Greece that I’m working on with David Pettegew. I’m assuming writing about the Early Christian architecture of Greece is a bit like riding a bike… That said, right now, it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of random… Read More →
Over the next five weeks or so I have to go back to some research that I was doing in around 2008 to write a short piece and catalogue of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece. (For some reason this makes me use my Allen Iverson voice: We’re talking about Baptisteries. Not a basilica. Baptisteries). Anyway, the… Read More →
For the last year or so, I’ve served on our town’s historic preservation commission. The main mission of the group, from what I understand, is to identify and inventory historical monuments in town while also serving as consulting body for any decisions having to do with heritage in our community. The commission is funded annually through… Read More →
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on my paper from next week’s Dumbarton Oaks colloquium titled The Insular Worlds of Byzantium. My paper is a bit of a rambling affair which seeks to consider whether island archaeology is a useful way to think about the island of Cyprus in the Late Roman and… Read More →
This weekend I read Daniel Abramson’s Obsolescence: An Architectural History (2016). I mostly read it for fun, but I have also been thinking about issues of obsolescence, functionality, and space on UND’s campus, in our community, and in the context of an archaeology of the contemporary world, particularly in the context of our accelerated and accelerating… Read More →
