For all those interested in Mediterranean history, I heartily encourage you to apply to the 2012 NEH summer seminar on “Networks and Knowledge: Synthesis and Innovation in the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Medieval Mediterranean,” 2–27 July (Barcelona). An earlier round of the seminar generated not only some exciting work, but also the foundation of the Spain-North Africa Project.
James M. Lang has the first in a series of posts about the danger of letting “common sense,” rather than research into cognitive neuroscience, dictate one’s pedagogical practice. (He also had some salutary words about trusting that research too much.)
Next week will find me in Charlottesville, VA, for what is shaping up to be a fantastic symposium on the Spanish Inquisition organized by Alison Weber. (The program, in PDF, is here.) I’ll be speaking about the fate of Christian Hebraism in the Spanish Counterreformation. As many students of the subject know, the Inquisition abruptly [...]
In his engaging study of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard, 2010), Eric Nelson departs from the scholarly consensus which connects the development of modern ideas of republican liberty, economic redistribution, and religious toleration with the supposed “secularization” of political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, Nelson argues that it was [...]
I’m currently getting ready to leave this weekend for about five weeks in Europe. The first stop is London, where I’ll be participating in a conference on Historia Sacra in the Renaissance. (See brochure here, in PDF.) Then it’s off to Spain, for some research in Madrid and Simancas.
I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between my historical interests and my personal life. It’s a question that most historians get at some point in their careers, I suppose, and one that some must get quite often. Historians reading this blog will probably be familiar with some variant of the “Ah, you do [insert [...]
This weekend, I’ll return to the annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference hosted by the Augustinian Institute at Villanova University. I was last there in 2007, on a panel on Renaissance historia sacra with Kate Elliott van Liere and Howard Louthan. This time I’ll be joining Kate and Katrina Olds for a panel on “Visions [...]
Following on my last post about Good News on Teaching, a bit of bad news: Tuesday’s New York Times included an article (now one of the “most emailed”) about the impact of current students’ sense of entitlement on their professors’ ability to give them honest grades pegged to something more than basic compliance with course [...]
As someone with a strong interest in applying recent scholarship on teaching and learning in the classroom, I was heartened by this article from today’s New York Times. Note the appearance of Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist who has collaborated with Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, where I’ve also worked as a [...]