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 [...]
Last weekend I fortunate to attend a ‘Scholars’ Day’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focused on their new exhibition “El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III.” The morning consisted of a guided tour of the exhibition led by William B. Jordan and Richard Kagan, and both the tour and [...]
Though it has been up for several months, only today did I notice David Plotz’s “Digging the Bible” series over at Slate.com. The series is essentially Plotz’s travel journal from an extended visit he made to Israel, in the course of which he toured a number of archaeological sites associated with the Bible. As he [...]
… Continued from “Digging the Bible, I” … This history of destruction and disregard was only reversed in the fourth century, well after all memory of the actual localizations o the Holy Places had been forgotten. What accounts for the resuscitation of interest in the Holy Land was the Christianization of the empire under Constantine [...]
I’ve recently returned from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, where I received the 2007 Carl S. Meyer Prize for the paper I delivered last year (entitled “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Spanish Reconstructions of Palestine, 1469‚Äì1598;” see here for the abstract). The Meyer Prize, as the SCSC website explains, “is awarded annually for [...]
In addition to the two research papers I’ll be presenting this month (see “Two October Conferences,” below), in November I’ll also be heading out to Worcester, MA to participate in the New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC)’s fall Teaching Conference. I’ll be joining forces with Cassandra Volpe Horii from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching [...]
For the uninitiated, that’s the state motto of New Hampshire, where Maria and I spent the Columbus Day weekend hiking, leaf-peeping, and eating as much diner food as possible. (The Littleton Diner in Littleton, NH gets high marks!) We took a bunch of photos out in the woods around Mount Washington; have a look, and [...]