I've moved back.

After a brief interlude in which I moved my blog over to being a sub-page of my professional web site, I'm back in my old space.

This was my original rationale for moving:

I began blogging in the summer of 2011 as a way to compel myself to start writing on a regular basis and not in academese after finishing graduate school. I wanted to be able to think things through the way I do best, in writing, and I thought that knowing that there was an audience, even one in the abstract, would be enough of an encouragement that I’d go beyond keeping jotted notes and could really flesh out some ideas about my work and the profession. I originally set out to find a balance between “notes from the life of a medievalist” and writing about the Middle Ages in a way that would be accessible to a general audience. It has ended up being more the former than the latter, and even as I have lately begun to write a series of posts that drew connections between medieval and modern cultural production, it’s going to remain largely what it was in terms of audience and focus. 

That said, I’d like to post a little less frequently and a little more thoughtfully and content-heavily. That’s not to say that there won’t be the occasionalanecdote, quick photo of paper ephemera, pithy short comment or photo of my cat sitting on something professionally inopportune, but I’m hoping, largely, to be a bit more essayistic, a bit more careful, and a bit less reactive. 

I was going to be switching, at least partially, over to the WordPress platform for a nascent digital humanities project I am beginning, and so I decided to take the plunge and move my professional site and blog over here, too, to keep everything in a single platform. This seemed like a good moment, then, to refocus my purpose as a blogger. I have manually imported and backdated some of my old posts that I like best and think are most reflective of the direction I’d like to take. The old blog will remain up on the Blogger platform as an archive. 

This explanatory post will be what WordPress calls “sticky” for a while, meaning that it will stay at the top of the page. Scroll down below here to see new posts. I hope you’ll find the next iteration of the project to be fruitful as the last. I’m really ambivalent about leaving behind an old space that had become familiar and comfortable to me, but excited about letting the experiment evolve.

And the fact of the matter is that a lot of what I said about wanting post a little less frequently and with more serious, thoughtful content, still obtains. But at the same time, I was finding it paralytic to consider writing in my more conversational professional voice right next to all my black-and-white professional details. I've moved the few posts I wrote in the interim back here. The location doesn't change who might or might not be reading, but somehow, this just feels a bit more comfortable. So here I am.