Fifty Seven Years in a Cage: A Story of Psychiatric Disability from the late Puritan Era
My historic work is not about famous able-bodied men, battles or presidents as many think of when they think of history; it is about women, epidemic disease, art, slavery, mental illness, reform and disability. It is about those were marginalized, the ones lost to history whose stories have been long forgotten or never told. The
A life is made of critical appreciation
The curious thing about the arts is how they flow across geographical limitations like no other stream of study or career. Art has an organic capability to mold itself in the vision of its audience no matter what its origins were. The story of a French boy who finds an extremely spherical balloon that has
Adventures in academic-land
No one likes to come off as stupid (or not smart enough) at a gathering, big or small. Right now, you might be disagreeing with my statement and telling yourself or whoever is sitting beside you, “That’s not true! I don’t mind being ignorant because not everyone knows everything. At least, I get rid of
About being a well-meaning, presumptuous neighbor
She asked me, “Is it true? Do your people wear loin cloths on a daily basis? Also, what about snakes? Do they slither around everywhere, like on the streets and stuff?” Having heard that, you’d expect me to be apoplectic with rage and indignation. You’d expect me to rant about India being a developing nation
The Fertility of Miró
I have never quite gotten surrealist, post-modern art. (Left to my own devices I happily spend my museum visits floating around the impressionist era.) I look at abstract symbolic paintings and feel that I miss the intended emotion or meaning—as if the painters and their devotees speak a language I cannot understand. That changed when
Perils of Click-Bait Science Communication, or There’s Many a Slip ‘twixt the Cup and the Lip
Science communication plays an integral role in bridging the gap between academia and the public. Science writers have the tricky job of distilling complex ideas into digestible pieces, and explaining highly-specialized experiments in a way the public might find interesting. Research highlighted in the media can become part of a larger cultural conversation and have
Austen & Darwin, Love Doctors?: A Valentine’s Day/ Darwin Day Tribute
A few months ago my Google Scholar alert for mate choice turned up a paper not about insect courtship behavior or sexual selection, but Jane Austen.[1] The only time previously I had ever thought about Austen and evolution together was while I wrote lab reports and wished I could watch Pride and Prejudice instead. However, as
A Scientist Walks into an English Blog: Language, Gender, Feminism, and the Science of Sex
I spend my day thinking about sex. Mostly, sex between male and female fruit flies. I am curious about what happens after they finish doing the deed and sperm move through the female reproductive environment on their journey to the egg. Interested in the changes that occur within the female after sex, how her body
The Greatest Show on Earth!: The Historico-Biblical Epic, Excess, and the Sublime Historical Experience
A few weeks ago, when I published my post on Game of Thrones and its theory of history, one of my colleagues asked me about the nature of excess–of violence, of sex, of things (clothes, sets, technologies)–that typically stand as one of the hallmarks of the epic genre. At what point, she asked, does excess simply overwhelm the
History’s Fiction Problem: “Selma” and the Value of Fictionalized History
In a recent piece for Salon, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg take aim at both Selma, the newly released film about the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Through Selma, they critique Hollywood more broadly for its lack of anything truly meaningful to say about history. In the process, they also dismiss seemingly all (or at least most) historical fiction. They suggest