Winter Break Projects: Corinth, Cyprus, and Courses

Winter break is both a nice respite from my teaching and service routine and also a chance to get some research and course preparations done amid the holiday festivities. I’m moderately excited to bring one project in for a landing and substantially move the needle on another before classes start again on January 8th. Grabbing time over the next couple weeks is all the more important since my spring semester will be (as the kids say) hectic AF.

1. Christian Corinth. Late last summer, I wrote a rough draft of a paper on the Corinthian periphery for a series called “Early Christian Centers” published by Tübingen’s Mohr Siebeck. I’ve enjoyed writing these handbook style essays over the last few years and found them a nice way to refamiliarize myself with the scholarship on the Corinthia in support of my return to doing some work at Isthmia.

Unfortunately, this paper was left in draft when other responsibilities dropped on me at the end of the semester. My plan is to return to this paper next week, finalize the citations, track down any illustrations necessary (probably by pestering my buddy David Pettegrew for photographs!), and do some kind of stylistic edits.

I don’t think I’ve shared my rough draft here on the blog. For those of you interested in how sausage is made, here’s my current draft. 

2. PKAP 2 Conclusion. A slightly bigger and more complicated project is PKAP 2. This is the sequel to PKAP 1 (2014). The bulk of the manuscript is done. We publish the results from three seasons of excavation.

More importantly, for folks interested in the interpretation of material from Koutsopetria, the conclusion of this volume circles back around to some issues noted in the first volume of the PKAP series including the role of the state in the settlement patterns at Koutsopetria and Vigla, the place of the Early Christian basilica at the site in the religious landscape of the island, and the connection between the settlements at Vigla and Koutsopetria and other sites on Cyprus and in the Eastern Mediterranean more broadly. We’re inching closer to it being done and hope to have a draft of the entire manuscript complete by the end of January.

3. Course Prep. The end of one semester almost always brings about a flurry of course preparation. I’m teaching two partially new preps in the spring (Historical Methods and Byzantine History) and need to sort out a Practicum in Editing and Publishing class where the enrollment jumped from 5 the last time I taught it to an even dozen. There’s no link to this class yet because I’ve not even started to put together a syllabus!

Fortunately, there is a slew of entertaining sports over the next two weeks giving me time for some leisurely syllabus building. Stay tuned!