Books

It’s been a hectic, but interesting week. This means that my mind is cluttered with half-baked thoughts and competing priorities. This seems like a good excuse for a three things Thursday. Thing the First I continue to be fascinated with Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo. Not only is an entertaining book, but it also… Read More →

This weekend was a rare two book weekend thanks to two flight. I read Adam X. Smith’s Afrocentricity in Afrofuturism (2023) and Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (2016). Both books will contribute in significant ways to my work on Black pseudoarchaeology. Smith’s book situates Afrofuturism within… Read More →

This has been a HECTIC week, but I think the rest of my semester should come into better focus from this point on. This past week I got three things more or less off my plate and it seems like as good a time as any to share them. Thing the First This past week… Read More →

The second part of our piece for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary issue is a bit scrappier than the first, but I think it says many of the things that we want to say (even if the citations and some elements of emphasis remain unpolished). If you want some background to what this… Read More →

I’ve been visiting family this week and I haven’t had as much of a chance to listen to music as I would have liked. (And, like most music lovers, I can’t wait to listen to Meshell Ndegeocello’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin). Instead of listening to music, I read Jason Weiss’s 2012… Read More →

Every year, I try to read one book on teaching. This week, I read Catherine Denial’s (which could be a pen name, but I’m honestly not sure) A Pedagogy of Kindness (2024). I hoped that it would speak to my ongoing efforts to be a more engaged, thoughtful, and (for lack of a better word)… Read More →

Last week, I had an interesting conversation on The Social Media about the news that Taylor and Francis would be selling academic works published under their various imprints to a group who wanted to use them to train their AI. This situation was “shocking” to several of the academic authors on the thread, and this… 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 →

I will admit that it’s taking me a bit longer to get my feet under me this summer than I would have liked. Every year travel gets a bit harder and it takes me a bit longer to recover. To make matters just a bit more complicated, I also feel a bit more pressure each… Read More →

I had a long flight over the weekend and I managed to get a certain amount of work done, but most of the time that wasn’t in fitful sleep, I was reading a James Sallis novel. I worked my way through two more novels from the Lew Griffin series: Black Hornet and Eye of the… Read More →

I don’t want to say that I’m behind in my preparations for this summer, but I will concede that things are not as far along as they usually are. One thing that I absolutely had to do is build my summer reading list. Each year for the last dozen years, I’ve posted what I planned… Read More →