Three Things Thursday: Teaching, Travel, and Reading

This month is hectic, hence the disruption in my regular blog posting. Worse still, fragments of blog posts are beginning to collect in the queue, but between late semester meetings, conferences, and deadlines, I’m struggling to develop these fragments into something more substantial.

In other words, it’s a good time for a three thing Thursday.

Thing the First

I’m thinking a good bit about my Byzantine history class in the spring and planning to model it on my relatively successful Roman history class from last year. This means that it’ll focus on three or four key primary texts. I’ve not decided which primary texts (although I have some ideas!), but I think that I will assign Anthony Kaldellis massive The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (2023).

Of course, there are students who will see assigning a 1000+ page book for an undergraduate class as cruel and unusual punishment, but my plan isn’t for the students to read the entire book. Instead, I’ll ask that every student read at least one 300-ish page section of the book and write a critical review of it. This feels like a nice way to get students to engage with some scholarship on Byzantium, without being thrown into the deep end of very fussy and specialized debates. Kaldellis’s commitment to writing narrative history will help keep students engaged in the “story.” More than that, Kaldellis command over detail offers a nice counterpoint to my tendency to generalize. His extensive references will provide students with a change to dig deeper into a particular topic.

Thing the Second

Traveling sucks for so many reasons. It reproduces colonial inequality, it adds carbon to the atmosphere, spreads disease, and is generally unpleasant. I got to wonder whether the inefficiency and inconvenience of travel might work as a check on the continued reproduction of its more “toxic” elements.

In other words, is there something self-correcting in travel? 

Are forces of efficiency and economy conspiring to make travel less and less appealing, which, in turn, starts to temper the environmental and political damage that travel induces. For example, post-COVID tourism still has not returned to 2012 levels. While tourism is on the rise again, my experience this past week gave me reasons to hope that this rise will not culminate in a return to 2018 or 2019 levels.

Whatever romance existed in travel (perhaps clinging on from mid-century, post-war modes of travel and tourism that celebrated the power of the American dollar and the emergence of a global bourgeoise), it seems to be waning especially as airlines, hotels, airports, and the other institutions necessary to make travel possible are struggling to turn profits or looking to wring every dollar (and ounce of dignity) from the bedraggled traveler.

Thing the Third

Over at NDQ, I’ve posted an essay recognized in this years Best American Essays. Erica Goss’s essay “Talismans” was listed as a “Notable Essay.” In general, I’m not a huge fan of these competitions in part because by elevating some work, they invariably obscure other work (although I suppose one could argue that they draw attention to other authors and contributions published by the journal. 

Whatever one thinks of books like Best American Essays (and the myriad of little competitions), the essay is good. Read it here.