Amici! it is now May!
This update may be a bit shorter than usual, as I am writing it while returning from the annual meeting of the Society for Military History. Alas, I don't have a paper or an abstract to share with you, as I am just acting as a panel chair, not as a presenter this year. I do want to note that I hope to have the next vote of the A...
2022-05-02 15:46:45 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is April!
The past month has been a bit of a blur. As you might imagine, I have been trying to keep track of the current conflict in Ukraine (if for no other reason than the students in my Global History of Warfare class ask about it regularly) as well as everything else.
But we do have some positive news on the research front: article II (on Roman mail armor) ...
2022-04-01 18:37:19 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is March!
You know, I had an entire Patreon update drafted last Monday (February 21st). No need for it to go to waste, so I'll include it below this newer update. In the meantime, of course, events have conspired to remind us all why military historians are a thing our society needs.
To give you all a brief sense of where we are going: I wrote an ' 2022-03-01 16:07:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Amici! It is now February!
January has been a bustling but useful month. Article II is reformatted and back out, hopefully to better luck this time in the review process. The reformatting process isn't entirely trivial: every academic journal typically has its own format expectations. Sometimes these are very strict, sometimes they are relatively broad, but in any ...
2022-02-01 16:02:31 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! Happy New Year! It is now 2022!
December was frankly less productive than I had hoped. The early part of the month was eaten up by the normal end of semester rush to grade final exams and so on, which stretched longer into the month than normal because both of my finals were scheduled fairly late in the final exam period. It's always a bit funny when students - fo...
2022-01-02 02:24:58 +0000 UTC View PostAmicii! It is now December.
November (and early December) is always a busy month as the semester comes to a close, assignments come due and have to be graded. It is also the crescendo of the job market process. It cannot have been difficult to notice from the blog's publication schedule that I have been more than a little busy!
Nevertheless, there has been some pro...
2021-12-01 17:06:25 +0000 UTC View PostSenators!
The second Q&A Referenda ad Senatum post is going to go up this week, which makes it a good time to both solicit a second round of questions (though there are still a few from the first round that I haven't done yet) as well as give you all a chance to vote on the next topic to tackle after we finish the Fortification series (which is itself partly response to Maxwe...
2021-11-19 06:42:56 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now November!
I am going to try to keep this update brief (we'll see if I succeed); as you might have guessed from the last few weeks on ACOUP, things have been quite busy. October is always a substantial 'crunch' month as midterm exams and papers start coming in at the same time that applications for academic jobs are due and the interview proce...
2021-11-01 17:52:04 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now October.
Classes are now in full swing, with midterms and papers coming in so I have been plenty busy. Because of COVID, this is really the first in-person semester for both my freshmen and my sophomores, which leads to the feeling of having two classes of freshmen all struggling to figure out college classes. That, alongside the difficulties of...
2021-10-01 22:00:42 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now September!
And what a frantic August it has been. The first week of the month was spent making a big push to finish the chapter I have been writing on the organization of the Roman military food supply for a proposed Companion volume on the ancient military food supply of Greece and Rome. I was finally able to get that done (about 10,000 words) and submi...
2021-09-01 20:11:44 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now August!
August is always a busy, stressful month as we get ready for classes to start again. Syllabi have to get written, assignments crafted, schedules made and so on all before the first day of class. This August may be a bit more compressed than normal; the combination of in-person classes resuming bringing in more students with the hiring freeze of t...
2021-08-02 03:57:12 +0000 UTC View PostOur first open thread for the posing of potential Q&A questions by the ACOUP Senate. In future Senate Open Threads, my plan is to put a poll up here for topics from the last open thread that were a bit too big for a Q&A response, with the winning topic getting a longer post on it.
My plan for the Q&A posts (which naturally will be titled Senatus Consultum 2021-07-01 16:58:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Amici! It is now July!
First, an announcement. By the consent of the Populus Paedagogorum, I have added a new tier to the Patreon, the Patres/Matres Conscripti at $8. Patres Conscripti, "Conscript Fathers" was a common way to refer to the members of the Roman Senate (who were 'conscripti' in the sense that their names were writ...
2021-07-01 16:29:47 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now June!
May was a month of happenings and not happenings. On the not happening front, various articles in stages of editing or review discussed last month remain stuck there, so I don't have any exciting new written things to tout, save for ACOUP itself.
On the happening front, I was able to attend an actual in person conference again. I am ...
2021-06-01 17:09:09 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now May!
Apologies that this is a bit late, it has been a busy week. My last lectures were this past week, my students take their finals next week, so the semester is wrapping up. This has been a tough semester to get through. Not only am I exhausted by the zoom teaching, it's clear that my students are too. I am myself very interested to see the...
2021-05-02 04:13:07 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now April!
This semester feels as though it has slipped by faster than I would have liked (how that is always the case!), but at least this month saw a bit more progress than last month. The essay I mentioned on Greek and American stasis finally appeared in Foreign Policy (here: 2021-04-01 15:33:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Amici! It is now March!
First, before I pile into the updates, I want to note that one of you lovely reader/patrons has very kindly made a narrated version of the "Practical Case for the Humanities" Collections essay (here). Narrated posts is an accessibility option I've always wanted to offer, but never been...
2021-03-02 03:30:43 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now February! (Or perhaps it is March the 338th, 2020 as one person on Twitter grimly joked).
Classes have started back up, so the early part of the month was spent getting my syllabi ready and so on, along with working on the book manuscript and a couple of non-academic articles (one in editing, one draft I'm trying to get finished). And, in the grand tradi...
2021-02-01 17:08:49 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now (by the time you read this) 2021! Congratulations, we made it.
With the semester done, December was a bit more productive from a scholarly standpoint. Article II is now officially in review (though as I have noted before, I have first sent it to a high-rejection-rate journal, so it is very likely it will need to be resubmitted elsewhere). For those...
2021-01-01 05:57:31 +0000 UTC View PostAmici! It is now December!
I am sure most all of us are happy to see the last of 2020 slipping by. It seems generally concluded, on no unsound basis, that this has been an annus horribilis.
Most of my time this month has been consumed with teaching: the compressed COVID-19 sem...
2020-12-01 18:06:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Amici! It is now November!
October has seemed both too long and too short. We're now well into both job application season for the 'first wave' of the 2020/1 academic year job market (which I talked about in the August Research Update if you want a better sense of what that means), so along with blogging and teaching, I've been doing that. It has left terribly little tim...
2020-11-01 18:20:57 +0000 UTC View PostIt is now October and I believe that 2020 has been approximately 612 months long.
We're marching along our series on iron-production on the blog. I had planned that originally as a 3-part series, which then morphed into a 4-part series. It'll also be getting at least one addendum (on Indian crucial steel and Chinese cast iron in the premodern). It seems like there is als...
2020-10-04 20:59:18 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys, real quick update - the monthly update patreon post is going to be a bit late. I've got a number of deadlines I'm juggling (including Friday's Iron post) at the end of this week and one of them has to give way.
I should be able to have to September update post up by Monday. Hopefully no one minds the delay too much.
2020-10-01 04:04:02 +0000 UTC View PostIt is now September! And jeepers, it has been a month!
First off, your ranks continue to swell! I know I did this bit last month but there are (as I write this) now 311 of you, which is very roughly 310 more than I expected when I started this. I really am amazed and grateful at the level of support y'all have shown.
Upcoming on the Blog, I've got a 3-post series o...
2020-09-02 01:38:45 +0000 UTC View PostAmici et Amicae!
It is now August!
My heavens, there are (as I write this) more than 260 of you! I want to thank all of you for the absolutely incredible support you have shown me in this venture. I never expected to get this kind of response.
One thing of note: I am beginning to get the ball rolling on a new post-type for the blog which I hope you will all appreci...
2020-08-01 16:05:10 +0000 UTC View PostAmici et Amicae!
It is now July!
Looking back, June felt short and for a number of reasons was somewhat less productive than could have been hoped, but there is some progress to report. I'm going to give my standard updates on what I've been doing and then chat a bit about how universities are preparing (or not preparing) for teaching in the fall.
On to the Up...
2020-07-01 18:02:53 +0000 UTC View PostAmici et Amicae!
It is now June! When I think about my research, I'm fairly sure May was approximately 10 minutes long; when I think about anything else, I am reasonably sure that it was a hair short of six years. Apologies that this update comes a little late; I was in the midst of a big push to get a project to its next stage (see below).
Hopefully everyone is doing we...
2020-06-01 21:54:08 +0000 UTC View PostAmici et Amicae!
It's now May! Although it sure seems like the last week of March has just stretched out to slowly consume the calendar. Hopefully everyone is doing well.
For this month's post, first, a number of smaller updates on my research, and then I'm going to chat a bit about dating the spread of a given technology with archaeology, and one pitfall thereof.
...
2020-05-01 15:50:18 +0000 UTC View PostAmici et Amicae!
I'm doing a bit of an experiment this month - I've recorded by update as an audio file. I'm still quite new at that sort of thing, so I know it's a bit bumpy - truncating out the silences eats the back end of a few mumbled words and I need to train myself not to 'um' on mic (which is odd - I don't do it in a stand-up lecture. This month has been an education o...
2020-04-01 14:19:23 +0000 UTC View PostAmici et amicae!
Welcome to the first monthly research update.
These updates will normally come out on the first of the month, covering the month just passed, so while this is the March update, I’m going to talk mostly about what I was doing in February. My plan for the basic format here is a brief discussion of what I’ve been doing, and then a short descri...
2020-03-12 19:44:37 +0000 UTC View Post