Cyprus has long hung out “betwixt and between” the Aegean Greek world and the Near East. As a result, scholarship on Cyprus can sometimes be marginalized neither being “Greek” enough to appear in the places where scholars publish on the Greek world or Near Eastern enough to appear in appear in typical Near Eastern venues.… Read More →
It feels like a good time to offer a Three Things Thursday post as it’s not the Third Thursday of the Semester. Such alliteration will not occur again until the Thirteenth Thursday and who knows what’ll happen to me by then! Thing the First Here’s a little Writing Wednesday update. I had a good day… Read More →
I’ve been thinking and talking about walls a good bit lately — including an hour long conversation with David Pettegrew about the fortification of the eastern Corinthia. Last week I posted some scrappy notes on the Hexamilion Wall vaguely related to a paper that I’ll give in November at Michigan State. David and I discussed… Read More →
I’m starting to read and think about walls more partly for a paper that I’m giving at Michigan State in the fall and partly because at some point Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore and I will have to publish some of our work at the Roman Bath at Isthmia and we need to find ways… Read More →
Lately, I’ve struggled a bit to find the enjoyment in writing. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is. Perhaps I’ve been writing too much technical stuff and not enough creative stuff. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit like I’m on a treadmill or writing too far ahead of my reading. Whatever the reason, I’m… 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 was tied up in a meeting last night and was not able to attend the premier of some pieces that my buddy Mike Wittgraf prepared from recordings that we made in Merrifield Hall a few years ago before it underwent renovation. We did this as part of a larger project to commemorate Merrifield Hall… Read More →
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 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 →
For some reason baptistery projects take a long time to come out. This week, two baptistery related projects of mine somehow reached milestones. It’s a Christmas miracle. The first is the MASSIVE Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity edited by Richard A. Etlin. I had only a tiny contribution to this gigantic and long… Read More →
I have to admit that today’s blog post is a bit of a hot take on the very recently published volume: On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007-2014 edited by Elena Korka and Joe Rife. I’m not going to come out and say that this is the perfect holiday read, but runs… Read More →
At the end of the semester, I tend to experience a bit of priority creep as the number of “do right now” projects (grading, end of semester deadlines, and so on) begins to encroach on the “do sometime soon” or “wouldn’t it be cool to do?” projects. That kind of ontological ambiguity which is only… Read More →
Last week I finally finished Foteini Kondyli’s recent book, Rural Communities in Late Byzantium: Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean (2022). It’s really quite brilliant and offers a model for the kind of intensive regional study that is possible as the result of slow, deliberate, careful research across archaeological survey, texts, architectural study, and… Read More →
