Books

This week is turning out to be a busy one, but I continue to work away at several projects for The Digital Press and this weekend is poised by a great flurry of publishing activity. The good news is that I have some momentum toward finishing up some of these projects. For example, here’s the… Read More →

I spent some time this weekend with Ben Anderson and Mirela Ivanova’s thought provoking little book: Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline: Toward a Critical Historiography (2023). It was the kind of book that cut through the moralizing and sometimes too-simple approaches to the almost universal call to decolonize to reveal the complex legacy of… Read More →

I’ve been very anxious about how little reading I’ve done lately. For whatever reason, I tend to think of my reading/writing life as a balance. When I find myself reading too much and writing too little, I start to feel like a dilettante. Lately, however, I’ve found myself writing too much and reading too little. Not… Read More →

I’ve been doing a good bit of work on Digital Press projects over the last month. It is very rewarding in that it both gives me time to think about the process of knowledge making and to help bring new works of scholarship and learning into existence. This is what’s prompted today “two thing Thursday”… Read More →

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from reading Michael Roller’s and Paul Shackel’s work on northeast Pennsylvania coal industry in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their ability to locate the activities around Hazleton, Pennsylvania (particularly Lattimer and Pardeesville) in the history of American labor, immigration, capitalism, and in Paul Shackel’s most recent book, global… Read More →

I’ve already broken from my summer reading list schedule by reading Virginia Burrus’s latest book Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus (2023). I don’t have much of a post today other than to observe that she appears to make a reference to my favorite Bob Marley song, “Duppy Conqueror” when she states concerning Hilarion’s first… Read More →

I have resisted (and plan to continue to resist) commenting on the most recent article on pseudoarchaeology in the SAA Archaeological Record magazine. I’m sure the article is good and thoughtful and important. I’ve blogged here about my apprehension about how recent attacks on pseudoarchaeology have also laid bare the historical insecurities and challenges facing… Read More →

On my flight over to Greece, I read Michael Winkler’s Grimmish (2021) on Richard Rothaus’s recommendation. It was good and weird. Essentially, it was a 200+ page reflection on pain through the story of Joe Grim an obscure, but not unremarkable early 20th century boxer. Grim’s claim to fame was not his victories in the… Read More →

My summer reading list this summer is a hot mess and my track record of following through with my summer reading is … well, it’s not good. That said, if there’s any time where certain unrealistic aspirations are appropriate its in the spring when I can look ahead to a few long flights and the… Read More →

I’ve been thinking a bit about the work of Chester Himes and the relationship between Black crime novels and certain trends in the archaeology of urban areas. In particular, I’ve been fascinated by the methods that Himes and other Black writers create “carceral landscapes” in mid-century US cities. Their attention to detail, for example, reinforces… Read More →

This is the second part of my consideration of Sarah Wasserman’s book The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. (Minnesota 2020). Her book offers some useful perspectives for archaeologists (but the literary and the dirty kind) and is part of my sort of random reading associated with an ill-formed new project that is… Read More →

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of reading Sarah Wasserman’s book, The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. (Minnesota 2020). The book’s chapter of Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes originally drew me to this book, but as I started reading it, I realized that the entire work had something to contribute to… Read More →

As we dig out of the 14 inches of snow that have already fallen on us today, I thought it would be nice to share the acknowledgements for my book. It was a pleasure and a privilege to learn (and continue to learn) from so many amazing colleagues and friends over my nearly three decades… Read More →

One of the more frustrating and time consuming exercises involved in submitting my book manuscript was producing an abstract not just for the book, but for every chapter of the book. I tried to think of this as somehow a useful exercise (for me as an author) or even as some kind of “victory lap,”… Read More →