As I've mentioned previously, I am currently working on an article on volcanoes, and the ways in which early modern and modern (for my purposes, roughly 1600-1800) perceptions of them were informed by classical understandings. I am focussing particularly on Mount Etna, albeit with a sideways glance at Vesuvius: a volcano which, in my period, Etna was generally seen as superior to, but to which it has arguably given over the greater claim to fame in the present day.

Meanwhile, in my spare time (hollow laughter) I have been working with The Scots Antiquary to get the Pathfoot Press, at the University of Stirling, off the ground. The Pathfoot Press is the proud possessor of a couple of traditional handpresses (one a huge, beautiful, Victorian Columbian Press, the other a newer, 'tabletop' Adana), and an overwhelming array of font and other equipment vital to the setting and printing of pages of text by hand. The Scots Antiquary and I have been printing together for almost as long as we have known each other, and as an early modern historian I adore it: painstakingly setting type and pulling impressions following more or less the same process by which the Gutenberg Bible was produced over 500 years ago.

However, I never expected my printing and my volcanic interests to intersect, as they have done so recently. I have just started reading - with great pleasure - Gareth Williams' just-published Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist. This traces the literary context and impact of Pietro Bembo's account of climbing Etna, which I wrote about on this blog a few weeks ago. Early on, Williams asserts that Bembo's published account was extraordinary not only in its content but also in its typography. Bembo's De Etna was published in 1495 by the Aldine Press in Venice, and his slim volume was the first outing for a brand-new font designed for the press. That font survived four centuries of changing typographical tastes to be revived in the 1920s as a modern 'Monotype' font, which went on to be used by publishing houses ranging from Penguin to Oxford University Press. This font was named after not its original designer, but the first author to be published using it: Bembo.

At the risk of becoming geekily enthused about typography, Bembo is a lovely font: serif (meaning it has lines at the end of letter-strokes, like the font for this blog, rather than 'sans-serif', like Arial or Calibri), clean but elegant. It is one of the three fonts of the Pathfoot Press: when your font is made of metal and comes in huge typecases, with a drawer for each individual point-size, rather than as a few kilobytes of electronic code, you can't have terribly many. I had printed with it many times, without making the association between it and Pietro Bembo: if I had thought about it at all, I imagined it was a coincedence.

So Williams' book made me look into the font with redoubled interest, and it was here that one of the questions of my nascent article - what distinguished or distinguishes one volcano (Etna) from another (Vesuvius)? - and the modern reception of typefaces collided. If you type the name of any font - Times New Roman, Cambria - into Google Images, one of the first results will be the Wikipedia infographic: a smart, two-tone box containing an alphabetic and numeric sample of the font, alongside its name, and a word deemed representative of the use, history, or flavour of that font. For example, Times New Roman, the most commonly-published font in modern history, is sampled with the word 'Publisher'.

One might expect, therefore, that the Bembo font might be sampled using the word 'Etna', or even 'humanism'. Instead, as the infographic below shows, it is instead advertised through the word 'Vesuvius'.

There are, of course, practical reasons for this, which as a printer I am very much aware of: 'Etna' is a short word, which does not provide a good sample of the font, and 'Mount Etna' would differ from the standard format of these infographics by offering two short words rather than one long one.

Nevertheless, for all that I am wary of reading 'too much into it', I had to smile at the serendipity with which this intersected with the thoughts and questions currently running through my mind. To what extent - in the early modern mind, in how I should frame my article - do understandings of 'Etna' and 'Vesuvius' truly bleed into one another? Are they utterly interchangable as two geomorphological features which behave in fairly similar ways? Or instead are they somewhat akin to, say, Bembo placed alongside Caslon: two old-face serif fonts, which are the same at first glance, but which to the eyes and a hands of a printer have utterly different natures?

As mentioned in a previous post, I have recently had the great good fortune to take up a position in the School of Classics working on (what else?) a mountains project. I started in July, rather naively equipped myself with a Greek for GCSE book and a copy of J.C. Stobart's The Glory That Was Greece (though the latter was at least 50% for the gorgeous binding), and prepared to prepare myself for my adventures in a new discipline.

Since then, I have had a busy but very satisfying time working with my collaborator to get the project off the ground (we have a website now!) and delving into a topic which I have always wanted to look at in more detail but have never had the chance to before: volcanoes. I first became fascinated by volcanoes when I realised, halfway through reading for my MPhil thesis, that seventeenth-century European natural philosophers thought that there was no difference between a 'normal' mountain and a 'fiery' mountain other than that one was filled with either empty space or water, and the other with fire (it was generally accepted that the earth was full of 'hollow spaces').

This had a thrilling implication: a mountain could become a volcano, and not just in the sense of a dormant peak rumbling into activity. I still can't put my finger on why, but somehow this remarkable image - of all the world's mountains as potential volcanoes - struck me as emblematic of the strange (to modern eyes) and marvellous assumptions of early modern natural knowledge. But, of course, I then headed down the byways of mountain aesthetics, and, even though I could have argued, based on the above, that 'volcanoes' rightly belonged to the early modern category of 'mountains', I really didn't have the space within my 80,000 words to explore these explosive members of the family.

So we come to this project, and my research for what I hope will be my first article towards it. Over the past few months, I have noticed many differences between classics and history as academic disciplines - more than I expected - but one of the most freeing is the apparent lack of anxiety about chronological boundaries. In the context of history, I felt that I was stretching things a bit with a thesis which spanned a couple of centuries, but classicists seem to take for granted the process of studying a text or an archaeological site from 600 BCE, and then tracing its reception all the way forward to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

I had long suspected (well - it is hard to miss it when my seventeenth-century natural philosophers began every other sentence with "according to the antients...") that many of the most prominent early modern concepts relating to the form of the earth, and by extension the nature of volcanoes, dated back to classical times. So I have taken great pleasure in treading back to the first century CE, and the poem Aetna, once attributed to Vergil but now of uncertain origin and, unfortunately, a somewhat corrupted text. Then, on the other hand, because both classical and early modern ideas (and classical through early modern) influenced later perceptions of volcanoes, I have taken rides with such eighteenth-century travellers as Patrick Brydone and William Hamilton.  I suspect I would make a certain type of historian squirm with my century-hopping, but I think I have something, at least, interesting to say about Mount Etna.

And yet, and yet - the boundaries between disciplines are not so easily hopped. These are by no means social or professional barriers: I couldn't have asked for a warmer welcome from my new colleagues. However, there is a barrier - which I think is probably overlooked from inside a discipline, but of which I am increasingly aware as one entering from outside - of a sum of knowledge and a set of ways of thinking, which catch-up reading can never really equal.

I was forcibly reminded of this twice over last Friday. First, I spent my afternoon reading a series of articles by classical scholars on the poem Aetna: articles which interrogated the structure, the use of particular words, the semantics of the text in a way which I recognised as incredibly rigorous, but as quite different from the way I, as a historian, was trained to 'read' a text. They also contained multiple passages in Greek, which I of course skipped over, and one contained a word which stopped me in my tracks: Gigantomachy.

The Gigantomachy refers to a mythical battle between the Greek gods and the Giants, or Gigantes (apparently themselves offspring of gods), a battle which ended - according to some tellings of the legend - with the giant Typhon trapped by Zeus underneath Mount Etna. Or, to put it another way: Zeus chucked a mountain at him, and the giant inside the mountain is the reason for its unearthly convulsions. (This 'fable' is one which the poet of the Aetna sternly dismisses).

In some ways, the term is so easy to translate - you could almost deduce it if you picked the word apart - but, still, it gave me pause. I had come across the myth before (virtually every piece of writing on Aetna, from the classical era onwards, seems to delight in citing it as an example of the 'superstition' that more recent eras have overcome), but not its name. What a silly, tiny thing: but a thing to learn.

Later, still thinking of giants, I attended my first research seminar in the School. I had been to plenty of research seminars before, in history, and (though admittedly the quality does vary) had enjoyed hearing and asking questions about everything from medieval armour to eighteenth-century Sutherland salt pans. I don't think I could have asked an intelligent question about that evening's paper (which was excellent!) if I had been forced to. Several of my colleagues raised their hands and offered the formulaic, self-deprecating preface to their inquiries: “obviously I'm coming from a position of complete ignorance, but...” and I had to resist the urge to laugh. If you want to see what complete ignorance looks like, she’s five foot one and has long red hair.

But, thinking about it again, I have to admit I'm not completely ignorant. After all, I now know what 'Gigantomachy' means. And I know a few things about early modern history, and about mountains. Maybe if I keep learning one more thing after another about the classical past I'll know enough to bring them all together, and tell a few interesting stories. Maybe not the stories that classical scholars would tell, and maybe not the stories that a historian in a history department would tell: but, maybe, the stories that I can tell.

After an embarassingly long break, here is the fourth episode of my new podcast! (I recorded it over a month ago, but have been having difficulties finding both the time and - having used up several free trials - the technology to edit and upload it). In this episode, I attempt to answer a question I once asked my older brother about his job: just what exactly do you do all day?

You can listen to the podcast via Youtube, below, or download the mp3 from SoundCloud.

As ever, please let me know what you think, and if you want to subscribe / tick the 'like' button on Youtube then it would be very, very much appreciated!

I have spent the past week on holiday with my parents and parents-in-law, and (slowly) reading De Aetna Liber, written by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo in 1495. These two facts are not so very far apart as they might seem, for Bembo's Aetna took the form of a prose dialogue between himself and his father regarding - most certainly among other things - his recent ascent of the famous Sicilian volcano, Mount Etna. Reading it, I was reminded there are some aspects of human relationships which are amusingly consistent throughout time.

Pietro approaches his father, Bernardo, with perhaps more deference than a twenty-first century twenty-five year-old might address their pater familias (a shame, perhaps my own Dad might say!), but an exchange early on in the dialogue is all too familiar. Bernardo exclaims that he is glad to have Pietro back from Sicily, and his son agrees, but gently emphasises that he had a wonderful time during his two years away. Bernardo responds as many a parent of a young person might today - with the observation that "I thought as much when up to now you hadn't spared a thought for us."

Shortly after, at Bernardo's urging, Pietro begins to tell the story of his trip - whilst away studying in Sicily - to visit Etna. He starts by saying that the trip took place after he and his companion, Angelo, had spent fourteen months without a break studying Greek literature. Though the stereotypes of Western modernity would be astonished at such dedication among their youth (mark that I say stereotypes!), modern parents would probably provide a similar, fussy chastisement as Bernardo does at this interlude: "No wonder you looked different and lost your colour! We thought you had grown thin and pale..."

As familial conversations often will, the dialogue meanders for a brief while before returning to the slopes of Etna, including a long musing from Bernardo that in spite of all the benefits he provided his son in his upbringing - a good education, a moral code - Pietro will ultimately "blame" him once he is gone for not leaving him with wealth. Pietro protests, prompting an interchange in which you can almost hear his growing exasperation in the face of his father's placid responses:

Probably to young Pietro's relief, the conversation moves on, as, through his narrative, he carries his father up to the summit of the volcano. He discourses at length regarding the remarkable height of the mountain and the fecundity of its lower slopes, before reaching "a rough bit of road": the rocky, cratered summit of the mountain. He tells his father of belching smoke, streaming fire, and scorching stones thrown out from fissures in the ground. Bernardo, like any concerned father, exclaims: "I declare you make me tremble all over and terrify me to death with your story. And what about these stones? Were any of you hurt?"

In his turn, Pietro responds like any young person delighted with their own adventures, saying that instead they waited for the stones to cool and picked them up as souvenirs, "led on by our eagerness - or perhaps our greed - to see everything". Bernardo attempts to get through to his son once more, pointing out that this sort of "thorough" interest was exactly what led Pliny the Elder (a Roman naturalist who died during the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius) to an over-warm end. Pietro says he knew this, but that he and his companions "were so delighted with the spectacle, and filled with such amazement at the novelty of the phenomenon, that none of us gave a thought to himself."

The conversation then shifts from what Pietro observed to what Bernardo can explain, with the benefit of a classical education: precisely how the fires of Etna came to be and how and why they continue to burn. The passage is a dialogue, not a transcript, so it is probable (as suggested by Mary P. Chatfield, the modern translator of the Latin work) that Pietro is flatteringly putting into his father's mouth the explanations that he himself wants to give in a text written, as he explains at the very start, for the benefit of everyone who wanted to know about his Etna trip.

I believe this serves a further three purposes. Firstly, it enables Pietro to become the voice for the reader's own probing questions. Secondly, it provides a clear distinction between empirical, experiential knowledge (as expressed by Pietro in the dialogue), and scholarly, ancient, text-based knowledge (offered by Bernardo). However, in the interchange between the two - Bernardo keen to hear of Pietro's experience, Pietro eager to learn from his father - the dialogue also highlights that these two forms of knowledge complement and inform one another.

Beyond this explanatory passage, the dialogue comes to a rather abrupt, but recognisably filial end. Talk of a natural fountain on one side of Etna leads Pietro to begin speaking of local legends of Faunus, a horned god "wreathed in pine-branches, generally silent, but sometimes solacing his loves on a pipe." Recalling to whom he is speaking, however, Pietro stops himself, saying that when he speaks to his father, he "should be serious". He is not, however, entirely contrite, adding as he does that he thinks it is sometimes necessary for learned men to take a break from sombre matters and to speak of "those lighter subjects of legend".

This provides Bernardo with the opportunity in the dialogue - as well he may have in real life - to close the conversation with a fatherly moral to his son:

It may well be that Bernardo mentally included among the "countless forms" of enticing pleasure the admiration of a volcano and the ensuing forgetfullness of all danger; it may also be that Pietro, were he born today, would have been somewhat ruffled by the implication that in his mid-twenties he was not yet a man grown. For all of its compelling details, there is only so much that can be 'read into' the Aetna interchange, literarily constructed as it was. Nevertheless, it provides a touching glimpse into a fifteenth-century father-son relationship, and prompts a wry smile for the reader who might well think: some things change, but other things stay the same.

Another episode of my new podcast! This is a shorter, 'Beyond Academia' recording, in which I explain why a fantasy-themed trading card game makes me a better academic. At the very least, it makes me a more relaxed one...

You can listen to the podcase via Youtube, below, or download it from SoundCloud.

Please do feel free to let me know in the comments - either here or on Youtube! - what you think of the Academic Commute so far!

Hello everyone! Here we have the second of my new podcast series, 'The Academic Commute'. In this episode I talk about the academic career path from my own perspective: how did I get to where I am, and where might I be going? 

You can listen to it on Youtube, below, or follow this link to SoundCloud. If you would like to download the audio, just click on the icon with the three dots (below the 'write a comment' box) and you will be given the option to do so. As this wee project was originally inspired by listening to a podcast in my car, I wanted to be sure that any listeners out there could do the same without burning through their mobile data allowance!

On the subject of comment boxes, please do let me know what you think about the podcast and any suggestions you may have for everything from improving the sound quality to potential topics for discussion!

Apparently not content with a blog, I recently decided to start a podcast. You can listen through the Youtube widget below, or you can download the audio track from SoundCloud at this link.

It's intended as a fairly casual project - I won't be scripting the podcasts (driving and reading: not a good combination), am recording them on 'the best dictaphone I could afford', which means it is cheap and cheerful and attached to my dashboard by blu-tack, and for the sake of my down time and my sanity I won't be doing any editing beyond trying to clean up some of the background noise. But my hope is that this will, in fact, make them a bit more fun to listen to - just as if the listener was there sitting next to me in my car.

Please let me know what you think!

In my last blog post, I wrote about setting up as a freelancer in the aftermath (and yes, that is the right word...) of submitting my PhD and moving house. In the end this proved to be something of a brief life phase as, at the start of May, I interview for and was offered a postdoctoral research post in the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews.

So, to my great delight, at the start of July I will begin three years of work on a super-exciting project on 'mountains in ancient literature and culture and their postclassical reception'. I will be working on the postclassical half of the project, which in other words means undertaking what is a beautiful sequel to my PhD research, extending my study of early modern texts relating to mountains into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on how these texts relate to much earlier, classical reactions to the mountain landscape.

As many of my friends will know, I have long been fairly divided on the question of 'going into academia'. At the end of MPhil, I dithered, anxious mostly about the effect of the academic career path upon my marriage (the charmingly-termed, 'two body problem'). Then I was offered funding at St Andrews, and the ScotsAntiquary gamely moved to Scotland with me without any prospect of employment for himself. A year later, he was offered a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship in the same School as me. This is, to put it lightly, a remarkably unlikely solution to the two-body problem. 

Two years into his fellowship, the Antiquary was offered another job, this time a lectureship in 'English Literature and Material Culture' at the University of Stirling (no-one is entirely sure what that job title means, but the ScotsAntiquary has managed to wrangle it to include hand-press printing, the lucky devil). This slotted in remarkably neatly, timing-wise, with the completion of my PhD, which marked a second moment of doubt for me.

When I chose to undertake the PhD, I was clear with myself from the start that I was doing it for its own sake, rather than with any absolute, instrumental sense of it as the first stepping-stone towards an academic career. If anything, this simply seemed a practical way to avoid crushing disappointment: the job-seeking experiences of ScotsAntiquary before his more recent successes had taught me a very clear lesson about the challenges of the academic job market. So I went through the PhD with an open mind and in the months after completion did my best to keep an open mind, whilst also - I must confess - investing a lot of energy and excitement into figuring out how to be gainfully employed outside of research.

Ironically, the advert for my new job came out at almost exactly the moment that I had started to feel quite confident in my self-employed circumstances. But it was also one of those opportunities - rather like the PhD - that I simply couldn't pass up. In the conclusion to my thesis, I had stated that I hoped - in challenging the traditional narrative of pre-modern mountain gloom - that it would open up new avenues for subsequent researchers. Somewhat selfishly, when faced with the advert for a job which pointed down such avenues, I realised I wanted to be one of the people to explore them. 

So, although it was not a prospect that seemed particularly likely three months ago, I'm extremely happy to be looking forward to another three years of research. Of course, I also anticipate that at the end of it I will have another existential/practical crisis about my future career. So with that in mind, I plan to spend the next three years doing a lot of writing, teaching, and publishing - to put myself in the best possible position to apply for subsequent academic jobs - whilst also continuing to gain experience as a developer and skills workshop facilitator, lest a return to the freelance life beckons. 

But, for the time being, it's back to research, back to St Andrews, and into a new School (!) and a new academic career stage for me. So watch this space for further updates!

The last time I posted on this blog, it was the 17th of June 2016, and I was optimistically adding to a series entitled "The Completion Diaries". As was probably predictable, the actual act of completing my PhD rapidly took over any prospect of further blogging. And then I moved house. And then I submitted the thesis. And then I started working as a freelancer. And then I had my viva. And then it was Christmas. And then it was 2017 and work and life continued to occur, and suddenly it is nearly the end of March. And today I thought that maybe I should update this blog.

So, first things first: submitting. You might remember that, in true obsessive style, I produced a colour-coded, week-by-week completion plan in April of 2016. I had even included gaps to allow for things like spending time with family, time to recover after completing a full draft, and so on. Then the excellent ScotsAntiquary (also known as my husband) went and threw a spanner in the works by getting a permanent lectureship at the University of Stirling, with a start date of September 1st. This meant moving house, the month previous to my anticipated submission date.

In the end, this proved less ridiculous than I had thought it would, although it is possible that I have just blanked most of the stress out from my memories. Packing boxes, cleaning our old house and repainting our new one proved to be pleasantly physical activities to intersperse between editing and polishing an 80,000-word thesis day in, day out.

And so it was that - in spite of the unexpected commute to get back to St Andrews to do so - I did indeed submit on the 30th of September, exactly as I had planned five months before. Submission day was pretty much everything I had hoped it would be. I went for a swim in the North Sea (basically an obligatory form of academic ritual in St Andrews), and drank an alcoholic milkshake for the sole reason that it was appropriately named 'the Matterhorn'. I spent quality time with excellent friends.

And then the thesis was... done, at least for a while. I tried to take a short break after submission, but was rewarded with a chest infection and, not long afterwards, a growing sense of stir craziness. I am not the kind of person who is good at sitting still.

So then I had to face the question which I had been putting off in the midst of writing up and moving house: what to do next, either in the short term or the long term? Before ScotsAntiquary's exciting news, I had nurtured various vague plans, all of which had been rooted in our Fife home: seek out casual teaching at St Andrews, promise my first-born child in return for a part-time job at Topping and Company, write a novel whilst enjoying the sea-view from our living room window in the East Neuk of Fife.

Somehow, although practically speaking most of these plans were transferrable, the sudden removal from their anticipated location gave me pretty significant pause. Certainly, moving away from my university strengthened what had previously been only a half-instinct: that I could do with taking a break, at least temporarily, from academia. I had been at university for eight years, and the academic job market was looking as challenging as ever. I decided that I wanted to see what else I could do with the raft of skills and experiences that I had honed in libraries and lecture theatres across the preceding decade of my life.

I initially toyed with applying for a 'real job', but in considering the prospect rapidly came to realise that one thing the PhD had done for me was to make me both very good at and very accustomed to working on my own. I had liked juggling dozens of different tasks - teaching, writing, organising conferences and seminars - and figuring out, independently, how best to complete everything efficiently. I also enjoyed the range of different types of tasks. I couldn't envisage a straightforward, salaried job - outside of academia - that would give me the same freedom and variety.

So then, in about the space of three days, I went from Googling 'freelance websites' to deciding I was actually going to set up work as a freelancer. I had previously worked on a very casual basis for a proofreading company that works with Chinese students applying to UK and US universities, and got my account with them set up once more. I started bidding on jobs on 'People Per Hour'. Thanks to the kind recommendation of a faculty member at St Andrews, I got involved with a (successful) grant application to provide research assistance to a newly-founded Scottish perfume company. I found myself engaged to run writing skills workshops as direct follow-ups to all of the organising and agitating which I had carried out during my PhD. I wrote an article based on my PhD for a popular magazine for which I was actually paid (an option which seemed unthinkable in academic contexts even in the midst of discussions around Open Access). I have been busy and have been using all of the skills of analysis, research, and public speaking which I developed during my PhD. It has been great fun.

And now, I have started dipping my toes back into the waters of academia with a postdoctoral job application, so maybe I'll be putting all of that back to use in a university context once again. Realistically, the reality is 'more likely not' and, in which case, I'm very happy to keep corresponding with awesome students from China, researching delightfully niche topics of history for unlikely purposes, and proselytising in skills workshops about the advantages of 'generative writing'. Odd though it seemed in the middle of it all, there really is life after the PhD...