Readers of this blog know that I have a mild obsession with Ronald Syme’s 1939 masterpiece, The Roman Revolution. My interest is as much as his extraordinary style as his intriguing analysis. There is, of course, also the chilling resonance of his volume in the contemporary world. Some of this might account for the continued… Read More →
I very much enjoyed reading Samual Moore’s Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (2025). It was a book that I would have liked to have read before David Pettegrew and I published our paper: It may have compelled me to shift from thinking about scholar-led publishing as a form of punk-tinged… Read More →
Over the weekend I wrapped up one of my books on the summer reading list: Kevin McGeough’s Readers of the Lost Ark (Oxford 2025). The book considers the various treatments that the Ark of the Covenant receives in Ancient, Medieval and Modern texts from Hebrew Scriptures to Raiders of the Lost Ark and in the… Read More →
Last week, I read Beth Munro’s new book, Recycling the Roman Villa: Material Salvage and the Medieval Circular Economy (2024). It is an interesting take on the afterlife of the Roman villa primarily in the west. I read this book to support my growing interest in the afterlife of large scale architecture in the Late… Read More →
I’ve been struggling over the last couple weeks to get back into a writing groove which isn’t great because I typically like to start my semester with a certain amount of momentum (it’s a bit like trying to get up to speed before having to climb a steep hill on your bike). I have, however,… Read More →
Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking about John Williams’s novels Stoner and Augustus. The latter was particularly on my mind as I continued my rather quixotic effort to re-read Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution and to ponder its relevance, less, perhaps as a treatment of Augustus’s reign, and more as commentary on the… Read More →
In Chapter XXVI of The Roman Revolution, Syme turns his attention to the government of the principate. Here, he threads the needle between conceding that the government of Augustus was at least competent, if not entirely superior to that of the republic in efficiency and the tendency to reward ability over membership in the aristocracy.… Read More →
On my flight from Greece to Cyprus, I read the first part of Gastón Gordillo’s book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014). To be clear, I’ve not read enough of the book to offer a thoughtful take on it (or the subject), but it was enough to get me thinking about how to apply some… Read More →
Next year, my institution will implement a new series of accessibility guidelines for classes. Among many of these, most of which are reasonable (e.g. alt text on images and so on), is a policy discouraging us from using PDF files to share texts in our classes. Needless to say, this is a massive sea change… Read More →
I’ve been meaning to write something about The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota over the last five years, and for whatever reason, I’ve not found the right moment to do it. As the dust settles on another semester, now feels like as good as time as any to look back at The… Read More →
On Friday, David Pettegrew and I are giving a paper titled “Convivial Survey and Publication of the Corinthian Countryside: Lessons Learned from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey” in Seville, Spain (via Zoom). This will draw fairly heavily on a paper that we’ve prepared for the Journal of Field Archaeology. My responsibility for the paper is… Read More →
I had a fitful week of reading last week, but I managed to read a bit on flights and between classes, talks, concerts, and brilliant architectural tours. Thing the First Glenn Peers’ relative new book Byzantine Media Subjects (2024) is really good and there is a lot to unpack in the potential of applying media… Read More →
