I’m just back from a weekend break in Croatia, a trip that was partly about the glorious food and excellent Zagreb craft beer scene, partly about the history and architecture, and mostly about giving a seminar and lecture at the University of Zagreb, hosted by Jelena Marohnic, and also being interviewed by the history students’ journal. The latter was especially nerve-wracking, with a strong sense of the risks of putting my foot in it inadvertently through sheer ignorance of local circumstances, without having had the opportunity to think about any of the questions in advance. Why are they so concerned about the chronological boundaries of ‘ancient history’? How does the ‘ethnicity in Roman Britain’ debate look from here – and was it a good or bad thing that I didn’t until afterwards think to chuck in a remark to the effect that Roman Pannonia and Dalmatia must have been equally multicultural? (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘open access’
Invisible Borders
Posted in Musings, Publications, Research in Progress, tagged ancient history, counterfactualism, Croatia, Europe, open access on October 31, 2017| 5 Comments »
Patterns of Publication
Posted in Musings, tagged history, open access, research on July 24, 2013| 10 Comments »
One helpful piece of advice that I received during my doctoral studies came from the late Keith Hopkins: when planning and writing the thesis, think of it in terms of the book that it’s going to become in due course. This shaped my approach in all sorts of ways, and I would say that it worked, both in helping me to produce a more readable and coherent thesis, and in reducing the amount of work needed afterwards to turn it into a respectable book (one reviewer claimed that it still looked like a published PhD thesis rather than a proper book, which I would dispute, and at the very least argue that it’s a lot less like a published PhD thesis than a lot of other published PhD theses…). It has occurred to me since that Hopkins was a rather odd person to be offering such advice, given that most of his own books were collections of loosely-connected studies rather than ‘proper’ monographs, but presumably this was one of those “do as I say, not as I do” things. It does mean that I was, quite without realising it, completely brainwashed into the humanities tradition of privileging monographs over articles, partly because I enjoy writing them (or, to be more precise, I enjoy having written them; the actual process can be a bit painful). Assuming that my forthcoming book on Thucydides and the Idea of History doesn’t hit any unforeseen snags in the production process, by the end of this year I should have as many books as peer-reviewed articles, which from the perspective of any of the sciences or social sciences is really, really weird… (more…)
Sphinx 