A quick notice for those readers in the Boston area: unfortunately, I’ve had to postpone my Pietro Martire talk until Monday, 15 December (same time and place) due to illness. I hope still to see many of you there!
As I’ve been working‚Äînot very well, I’m afraid, as I have spent all of the Thanksgiving holiday laid up with a cold‚Äîon my Pietro Martire paper for this week’s Early Modern Workshop at Harvard, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels. Trickster, Davis’ re-imagining of the fascinating (and ultimately unknowable) [...]
On 2 December at 5:00pm I’ll be presenting a work-in-progress entitled “Pietro Martire in the Levant: Diplomacy and Orientalism in the Spanish Renaissance” as part of Harvard’s Early Modern History Workshop series. The talk will be held in the Lower Library [=1st floor] of Robinson Hall (map here). A bit of background: Martire (1457‚Äì1526) is [...]
I recently returned from Grand Rapids, MI, where I attended a small conference on “Renaissance Visions of Christian Origins” organized by Kate van Liere, Howard Louthan, and Simon Ditchfield. The conference was marvelous, and I hope to post a some new thoughts about historia sacra here in the near future. In the meantime, though, I [...]
As the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department, I’m always happy to meet with students interested in studying history at Harvard‚Äîwhether to answer questions about policy or their intellectual interests. I typically hold four office hours per week, though I routinely spend at least a few additional hours meeting with students unable [...]
In 1860, the Parisian polymath Ernest Renan (1823–1892) stepped off a ship in Syria and surveyed the landscape that unfolded before him. Renan had come to the Levant on behalf of the French government, assigned by his doting patron Napoleon III to oversee an archaeological inquiry into ancient Phoenician antiquities. Though still young—he was not [...]
I recently ordered a copy of How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors; the book consists of a series of brief essays by well-known authors, in which they pay tribute to their favorite totems. While I wait for the book, I figured that I’d share a photo of my favorite writing totem: my 1960s-vintage [...]
One of the best parts of my job as the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department here at Harvard is the opportunity it gives me to work closely with our Senior Thesis writers. One would be hard-pressed to find a brighter or more thoughtful group of students, and their individual projects—which took [...]
For some time now, I’ve been compiling bibliography on European replicas of Near Eastern Holy Places. Below the jump I’ve pasted a stab at all that I’ve collected thus far; please feel free to email me or to comment on this post to add things I might have missed!
Readers familiar with my dissertation will know that the Spanish antiquarian Benito Arias Montano (1527‚Äì1598) and his theory that Spain was settled by Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish captives play an important role. Now you, too, can read Arias Montano from the comfort of home, as the Spanish Culture Ministry’s Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliogr?°fico (BVPB) has put [...]