May 8, 2012

Pinteresting Books

I’ve joined Pinterest so I have a place to brainstorm about course readings. Seriously: it’s turning out to be a great tool as I plan for the fall term by pinning all the possible texts.

It was easy to start – I requested an invitation and received it later that same day. Now I have a couple of “boards” (i.e. subtopics) to which I can add images & links. So? Meet my history books lineup: mostly a listing of possibilities for the Tudor/Stuart senior seminars I’ll be teaching in Fall/Winter with a few other notes, here and there adding in a few prospects for western civ and the grad historical methods classes.

It’s a great way to consider a bunch of options at a glance – I can add and add to my heart’s content but I won’t be overwhelmed by long and unwieldy lists I fail to properly track for each course. And aren’t all those covers pretty? (Or at least most of them!)

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May 1, 2012

Out with the Old

Ding, dong, the term is dead. Well, except for one last grad course assignment to wrangle. I have to get the chair to sign off on the big survey class’s marks tomorrow morning, as well, but, really, it’s done. I taught two undergraduate classes, one graduate directed readings for two students (so two separate classes but we kind of mushed them up by finding common ground for this past term) and yet one other graduate class that actually integrated in with my senior seminar. Officially four classes on my plate with just over a hundred students between them all.

This term, I’ve also written two short chapters (well, solo-written one, and co-written the other) as well as prepared and submitted a research grant. I’ve edited so many chapters, I’m no longer able to keep count of those!

No time to rest: I’m already knee-deep in the thick of other projects. We’re copy-editing STar Wars and History (which is a fascinating process in and of itself), I’m back to draft-editing chapters for The Hobbit and History and putting in a few hours on my regular research agenda, each week until our July vacation.

Oh, and there are book orders for the fall. And a personnel committee meeting. Oh, and I need to follow up on that research grant application. And get working on the next one. And there’s the conference paper for the end of the month, I need to pull that together, too!

Oh, lordie. I’d better stop thinking right now. I promised Mike I’d take off a day or two. Maybe Friday?

How’s your May shaping up? Crazily busy with conference trips, grading galore and classes still to meet? Or are any of you wrapping matters up already. Take a break from the grind and let us know!

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Filed under academe, teaching, writing/editing

April 26, 2012

Mary Broadbent: a London Life

Over at London Lives, my Biography of Mary Broadbent is live and full of the sad details I’ve shared earlier on this blog.

Two elements that made it into the biography I never mentioned here was how I pieced together her family background a bit more through the website Family Search. I found her parents’ marriage in 1712 and her father’s remarriage in 1724 after a little bit of sleuthing. Her mother was born in the same parish in 1681: Elizabet5h was 31 when she wed and not even 35 when she died.

Another fascinating tidbit that I uncovered when I asked myself “why might Mary Broadbent suddenly resort to the workhouse in the winter of 1763?” I stumbled upon mention of a particularly brutal winter which I was able to document by accessing some historical climate data for London preserved at Historical Weather Events. All of northern Europe was afflicted by a terrible cold snap and a poor singlewoman of London such as Mary would have been particularly vulnerable to the winter’s chill.

So go and check out the latest additions to London Lives – there’s a lot of new history that we’re uncovering every day.

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April 24, 2012

Strange Medicine

Healthcare was largely a woman’s province in the early modern period. Diseases were fought and injuries treated at the home and it was women’s work to know how to treat all sorts of these problems. That’s why, when you venture into manuscript collections of the period, you’ll find a serious gender divide in what readers collected in their commonplace books.

A commonplace book was a collection of texts and tidbits appealing to its owner. I’ve studied many commonplace books over the years, men’s and women’s. Most of the men’s collections included witty epigrams and learned passages taken from longer works of scholarship. Women’s commonplace books are almost always very practical collections. We might call many of these “recipe books” although the recipes within weren’t always food for the table. Instead, they were recipes for the medicines these women would prepare and use to treat people in their household.

In 1639, Katherine Packer collected “Very Good medicines for Severall deseases wounds and sores both new and olde”. These weren’t evidence of idle curiosity as Packer’s next line indicated. Instead, these recipes were tried through “carefull practice.”

Here’s one example I transcribed a few years back:

To make childrens teeth grow with little paine hang about the necke anoules tooth that the child may red the goomes . . . when you make the first pape for the childe the mother must milke therein a little of her milke & let the childe eate * the teeth will grow wthout paine. Probatum est

Probatum est – “It has been proven”. Packer had either herself enjoyed success with this cure for a child’s teething pain or known someone who had done so. Fascinating, no?

Examine some of Packer’s medical manuscript thanks to the fabulous Folger Digital Image Collection (This is Folger MS Va 387 if you’re interested).

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April 23, 2012

A Window Opens

A brief grading window, that is – I just finished marking the last of the tutorials (and recording marks from the oral presentations) in my super-huge class of 80. My TA, bless her heart, is tackling a bunch of the other discussion portfolio material.

Tomorrow, at 9, the same class writes their final exam and the entire pile should be ready to claim at noon.

*headdesk*

Then the marking begins anew!

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April 20, 2012

Come to Potterfest 2012

I’ll be giving the keynote at Edinboro University’s 2012 Potterfest‘s Ravenclaw Conference focusing on the theme of human rights and animal rights. The conference runs October 18-20, 2012 and will feature both public and academic aspects. A Quidditch tournament! A chance to take in the National Library of Medicine’s traveling exhibit on Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic and Medicine.

I think this keynote invitation is a great fit given my contribution about women’s history to Harry Potter and History, “Witches vs. Women: What Muggles Could Learn from Wizarding History”. Trust me, there’s a lot more about the wizarding world that didn’t make it into print so there will be more to discover.

As part of Potterfest 2011, the organizers archived a selection of papers that is linked from the Potterfest main page – check them out. I’m reading one about Hermione Granger written by Sheila Gross, a graduate student from Gannon University, and happily anticipating what will come for the 2012 edition.

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Filed under academe, history, pop culture

April 15, 2012

Super Size My Seminar

I’m wrapping up the 2011-12 term this month. One aspect that’s felt luxurious has been my seminar. It’s both been a good class and a small class with under twenty in either term. (Pro tip to faculty wanting to shrink their course sizes: schedule your class for 8:30 on Friday and then have the registrar screw up the listing to suggest it starts at 8:00. You’ll scare all but the determined or the desperate away!)

Next year, the picture is bleak. Due to budget constraints and sabbaticals, we’re offering very few senior seminars: fifteen credits worth (or 2.5 full year options). Students with a concentration in history have to take twelve credits of seminars to graduate while majors only need six. Theoretically, fifteen credits should be enough but not when you factor in the large number of majors and concentrations history attracts. And I don’t even get the scary Friday morning time-slot for my seniors. This fall and winter, I meet my seniors on Wednesday mornings. (Grad students? Prepare for a Friday morning fun-fest!)

The crisis of classes and credits has become personal for me in the looming fall and winter terms. I’m teaching six of those fifteen credits offered in our program: seminars on Tudor Britain in the fall and Stuart Britain in the winter. Having crunched the numbers and chatted with others in the department, I safely expect to see a record-setting enrollment of more than 38, especially since some majors have ambitions of finishing up their 2012-13 coursework in the fall term by taking my seminar in conjunction with another scheduled for the fall. In the winter term, mine will be the only senior seminar into which a student in need of seminar credits can enroll (the other six credits on offer is a fall/winter course): also an enrollment booster!

Help?

I’ve told our admin that my ‘hard cap’ is 44. There are twelve weeks in the term and every student needs to make one in-class presentation the way that I run seminars. (I’m not willing to negotiate on the presentation component: I don’t consider it a seminar without students having to prepare and make a formal in-class presentation.) Week one won’t count for those purposes since I can’t get students ready to present before class has begun. So there are only eleven weeks left and I know that I can’t run a good discussion session in a three-hour class and take time for more than four oral presentations. The math is then simple: 4*11=44.

Gulp!

Now I have to come up with 44 presentation topics stretching from Henry VII’s reign through Elizabeth’s (with forays into Scots and Irish history along the way). I’ve used biographies before: these are very easy to generate as topics but also quite easy for students to plagiarize. Nothing demoralizes an educator quite like listening to your senior students read the Wikipedia entry word for word! I don’t want to use articles or monographs for presentation topics: these tend to turn into snooze-fests as most students do little more than summarize the contents.

I’ve toyed with the thought of having the in-class presentations be on historical events but I’m a bit staggered at the thought of coming up with so many topics that I can also equally and usefully distribute across the 1485-1603 period so that we’re not having someone present on an early Tudor topic when the discussion’s all about late Tudor wars! So wish me luck or give me suggestions of the almost four dozen topics I’ll need to nail down for Tudor history presentations before the syllabus goes to the press in late August. Please?

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