 Okay, so I want to welcome everyone to the second annual faculty author spotlight. Thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is Melissa Chimintra. I'm the scholarly engagement librarian for the social sciences and geospatial data Howard Tilton Memorial Library. I'm super excited to moderate our first of three live chats of this virtual series we will have another tomorrow and Wednesday with two other groups of faculty authors that will share their work with us. So today we've got a really great bunch of faculty authors I'm sure you have been enjoying our candid chat so far. It's been really nice to sort of just chat off the cuff with all of you and sort of shake some of the semester stress away. So today we have with us, Rana Berger professor of philosophy, who will be sharing their book with us nature law and the sacred essays and honor. Actually, this is really special because this was written in honor of Rana. That's something that I haven't heard of before. So I'm excited to hear more about how this happens. I know it's something that's kind of specific to philosophy from what I understand. We also have Dr. Dennis keyhole professor of classical studies. They'll be sharing with us their book titled Roman lot and economics volume one institutions and organization. We also have Dr. Chris Lane professor of history. With their work. Potosi if I'm saying that correctly the silver city that changed the world. Dr Nancy Mabidi professor of political science with glass and gavel the US Supreme Court and alcohol, which I'm also excited to hear more about. Dr Adam McCallan professor of medieval and early modern studies with their work fortifications and it's discontent discontents from Shakespeare to Milton troubled in the walled city. And lastly, Dr Ezra Oscar professor of communication with their work mainstreaming of the headscarf Islamic politics and women in the Turkish media. So as I mentioned that we have a few pre arranged questions to ask all the panelists, and then we'll take questions from attendees if we've got time at the end. So I'm going to jump right in with the first question and y'all can unmute yourselves and answer as you'd like if you all want to answer the question. That is absolutely fine. If you don't want to share that is also okay. And the first is how and why did you choose your book topic. I don't want to start. Yeah, I don't want to call on anybody I don't want to be that kind of person. I'll start with this one because my book is probably the most unconventional in the sense that it's the most popular oriented, probably of our of our scholarly works. It's a history of both alcohol and alcohol law, specifically with respect to the US Supreme Court in the Constitution, but it's also a history of alcohol in American political culture and particularly cocktail culture. So it's a fusion of two of my interests, frankly, I'm a scholar of the US Supreme Court and of constitutional law and of judicial decision making, and I'm also interested in social policy and law. But I'm also a cocktail enthusiast and an amateur historian of alcohol in the United States. And so this book was an effort to put together two interests of mine, and also to try to find somewhat of a more popular frame for talking about the history of the Supreme Court to make it more accessible to a broader audience. I guess I can also answer my book sort of chose me because I was, this is a big two volume collection of essays that involves scholars from law economics and ancient history, writing about Roman law and economics. And I was originally a contributor and I know the person who came up with the idea fairly well, but it soon became pretty obvious that he would need a great deal of editorial help, especially adapting the people who were not scholars of the ancient world to talking about the ancient world so that's how I got involved with mine. I'll go ahead and answer the question myself. This, my book fortification and its discontents from Shakespeare to Milton. It was the classic case of unanswered questions in the first book. I did not set out in life to be a one of the only people who does military cultures and literature in the early modern world I kind of fell into that as I think a lot of young scholars do. There's something I could do. I mean I my dissertation was on aesthetics, you know I do with pictures and poetry and the illusion of images in writing. And I was recalled and deployed and suddenly it seemed a no brainer to write about soldiers and poets in the process of doing that research. And I was running into this statement that was made the scholars we get used to hearing these common places that need to be questioned talking about. Well, of course, the new age of warfare because the city walls were now torn down and armies, etc, etc, etc. I love to do archival research and I love to do in situ research I go out there and I find the old rocks I write better surrounded by the old buildings. So there I am in Quebec, in the West Coast of Africa, looking at buildings that when they were tearing down walls, it seemed to me they're actually building new ones. So I wanted to know what this was about and I sort of discovered that changes to military cultures and militarization as a concept we're forcing radical and widespread rebuilding of the of the European environment. During the periods when the walls were supposed to be coming down. So I decided to focus on that. I can chime in to. I mean, my book is about Turkey and Turkish media I'm interested in the country I will I grew up there born and grew up there. And I was interested in understanding the recent history and politics since 2002, and especially in 2002 the current president came to power and since then the country took an authoritarian direction. And the book is an effort to understand how this happened why this happened, and what is humans role in it. So it was it was kind of an effort to understand what happened how did this happen because this authoritarian turn wasn't expected at the time. Nobody could see what was coming so that was, that was an effort to to to understand what changed after 2002. Yeah, I can just say that it's really great to be here and I appreciate you guys putting this together it's really, really wonderful. And I can see with our panel we have as a historian pretty great coverage of time periods, going from ancient to the present. And I sort of fall in the middle, along with Adam, I guess it's the middle. 16th and 17th centuries. And I sort of fell into this book project. After realizing that I just was really ignorant of the big scope of my topic. And I was working on something very pointed and definitive about a great fraud, a gigantic fraud that occurred in the 17th century. But I felt like I needed to have a sense of the big scope of time and so the place I study put to see Bolivia was the most important silver producing region of the world for several hundred years. And it altered global economics and and and as a consequence many other things but starting with economics. I wanted to globalize Latin America I guess that was my initial desire to take a part of the world that's often seen as peripheral and secondary and often victimized by other places, and try to put it at the center. And so I did have an agenda. That was to kind of promote this place and say globalization is nothing new and in fact Latin America was front and center. So that that pushed me along. As Melissa was saying, my this is, it's great to have your book that you didn't have to do all the work to write. I've written books. This is very nice. It is. It's not just philosophy Melissa but there's an all it's really I think probably from German academic world. The feststrift, like a celebratory writing, and it's usually a collection of volumes for a mentor or a scholar, typically you're 65 or 70 or 75 years old somewhere in that range. And it's meant to show the influence of that person's work by students and other scholars. So, as I think in one of those videos I said, I've actually been at Tulane for 40 years. And my first PhD student right at the beginning. And I think that's why I put this thing together. And there are other graduate students from different cohorts over the years, and friends and colleagues. Richard hopefully you know he's got a really beautiful essay on lessing in here. And I think that the hard part was, when you do the volume like this a collection. You're just doing it by the people who studied or influence. I don't know for sure if it'll come together as a whole. And I think we were all really excited to see how much this did. And the theme the title sort of was what pulled it together those themes that conflict of the tension between nature and convention. And then the way that relation is connected and turned with the sacred. And that reflected my work especially in ancient Greek philosophy and the Bible, an uneasy relation of the two roots of our whole Western tradition. So it was exciting to get this and I think it's a way beyond what I could have done myself. I mean the essays go all the way to Kierkegaard and Descartes and Boccaccio and Dante and my monadies way beyond my own narrow sphere. So it's a, but you hear, you see the resonance of your ideas and themes over history. So it's really coming very satisfying. I can imagine that's not it's just, it just seems so special and rewarding, you know, and obviously very well deserved so. Thank you all for sharing your answers to our first question. I'm going to ask the second, which is what was the most difficult and or most rewarding part of writing this or editing this publication. In terms of like the process or. Yeah, your process. Well I guess. For me the most rewarding thing was to be able to bring a help bring a project that I didn't really start but I was part of at the beginning, through many twists and turns to a final and I think from what other people have said, a very stressful conclusion. And it was partly because it involved scholars, some of whom are quite famous from law and economics in my humble field. So you know it was a challenge to make a work that actually had some kind of unity to it in terms of its intellectual reach. So, and it was a lot of work. So the most satisfying thing I guess was when I got the volumes on my front porch and Jim showing that it was actually done. I'll go next. Just save that this may seem like a strange answer but the answer is it hasn't happened yet. Maybe who are listening or attending the panel or not in the business, you'd be surprised to learn that we don't have millions of people buying these books, you know. So a lot of times the influence of what you do doesn't manifest for a decade. And you don't, you know, like when my first one came out. It was not, I don't think it was very well received at all. It was a lot of fun of me. Within 10 years, though, two books, just like it came out, you know what I mean, because you're breaking new ground, you're talking about something no one's talked about before and other scholars follow you and now I look back on it and say, that was satisfying like right now nobody except me is talking about fortifications and literature in the 17th and 16th centuries on it. So I'm going, someone will ask the same questions and, you know, they'll look at my book and say, you know, he's got some good ideas, but not great ideas. I think I've got great ideas I'm going to build on those. And then all of a sudden you see, like, wow, you're actually in enlarging knowledge so I look forward to the satisfaction by suspect it will be five, 10 years from now. I'm sharing that I think it's a good reminder to all scholars and, you know, budding scholars, you know, to pursue those passions and that you might not see, you know, these accolades come through immediately and it's not always about like the short game right but what you actually contribute overall. I think that's a great reminder. Let's see, I wanted to add something. I've gone kicking and screaming into each new technological development. But it really is so interesting to me because my, you know, experience for so many decades what Adam just described. But now with these sites that I never thought I would do but academia.edu and these videos we do that get, you know, I mean, it's interesting I'm finding out people in, you know, Turkey and all over the world are reading your work you can find out where they are. And I don't know it's interesting to me it's very different world in the last, and especially with our, you know, current virtual distance learning all that. I think my work has gotten more widespread quickly than ever before, because of all these new developments that I resisted. I could add to that I just last summer my book came out just before I was traveling when it was still possible to travel. I traveled to Bolivia, and I took a bag with, you know, as much weight as you could put in it a disposable bag with books just copies of this photo see book, because I was going to a conference and in photo see and I wanted to give copies to the people in the archives and everybody there, even though most of them are like, let us know when it comes out in Spanish. This is nice but we can't read it. I actually carried these books across a swollen river and, you know, had this experience of, you know, I'm actually like in the colonial period, hauling books to the periphery to to distribute them so I guess the most rewarding thing for me was that experience of getting the books to the place that the books about. And then if everything else is fine I don't care if the reviews are positive or negative. I don't care. Did you take pictures of yourself with the swollen river because I just I love this idea of like, I've got to get these books to the archive man. I have pictures of my very wet lower half yeah holding a suitcase on my shoulder. It's too late for the jacket photo. It's extraordinary. I'm not sure if everybody gets that experience, you know, I mean, I don't recommend it right like swollen reverse side of being able to bring you know this piece of work to the actual place that it's about I think that's, you know, potentially once in a lifetime I don't know hopefully not but you know very rewarding I'm assuming I have no idea. So I was at a con conference one time and it rained. So I guess that would be. It's pretty much the same thing. Yeah, I mean, I want to know did you keep a journal like at the night like tonight the swollen river stopped us from the passage but fortunately my the great book delivery I'll write that story for the New Yorker. It's like a Geary and the wrath of God. It was closer to that. No, but I will say the review process very much as Adam said it's it's a slow thing and so you kind of you're tempted to keep checking and then you publish a review yet. And finally when they come out, they usually, you know, they're like oh they got it or no they just didn't get it. They didn't see what I was trying to do. I had a review like that recently where it was clear that the author of the review just either missed my point entirely or was writing about a different book I couldn't tell. The review came out just a little bit later and it was just like oh man that's exactly what I had in mind I'm glad it worked. Why is it that it didn't work with this person. You never know. This is true. Yeah. Everyone has their own version of your book. You know to to speak about the front end of the production right we're talking about the reception and things like that to think about you know what are both the challenges and the rewarding things in the production of a book. I would say in the case of this book I had I had a couple of, you know, challenging but ultimately rewarding experiences. One is just the experience that I'm sure you know Chris can identify with any historian can identify with and that is searching through an archive and finding. Ah, the gem, the evidence that you needed to make some connection. In my instance, it was between a particular chief justice and a particular favorite cocktail. Since that's one of the motifs of my book. And so among the things I did was weighed into judicial papers which, as many of you know, who work with archives are often not very well organized and so you're just sifting through all kinds of processes and getting an impression of a life that that was really fun for me I don't typically do that kind of work because I'm a political scientist, but it was immensely fun. And I would love to do more of it. And then I suppose the others this is may seem pretty prosaic and mundane, but some of the most rewarding episodes for me were securing the permissions for images that I wanted to use. I mean you wouldn't, you wouldn't believe some of the hurdles one has to surmount and everybody I believe in copyright law sure but you know there are. There are sometimes obstacles that you don't know will be there both financial and otherwise and for some books images are really critical to capture, you know, an epic or to get a sense of a person. And when I secured a particular image that I wanted having to go through a deceased artists family. Well, I was like yeah. So that was kind of a that was kind of a run of the mill production level reward, but I think it made the book stronger. Wow. Can I ask what fate what the favorite cocktail was. Oh, oh, I have to ask. Can I get too deep in the weeds. Well this was Chief Justice Harlan Fisk stone, who was known to be a great wine lover, and who served essentially during World War two he had a pretty short tenure of office. I knew that that was a period in which rum was really, really popular as a beverage, again was really, really popular in the United States, partly because of the legacy of prohibition when domestic production had been shut down and so consumers in the United States and so this had amped up a real taste for rum. But everything we knew about stone was that oh that you know he disdained cocktails, but I found a hand typed recipe that he had saved for a rum based cocktail. So it just validated for me everything about his era, and things that we didn't necessarily know about this former professor, who was supposedly a big wine and cheese fan, but also partook of the things that were popular in the time. To think what I'm going to send Nancy if you don't know there's a website of cocktails named after famous scholars. I'll send you the link later it's great. But I also on the image issues and getting permission, the press kind of covered up my image with the title but this image. I had picked for another project, which I heard in the classics. It's a great lecture it's Jiro Europus, and there's a, it's such a fantastic time with the Greek and biblical Hebrew and Greek. So this is the temple of Solomon with Greek columns and everything. It was an amazing for me to discover the image was so great. It really was about Athens and Jerusalem which is my world. It was a struggle to get permission to use it. And, but at the end it turned out it wasn't from my book it was someone else, you know, it was taken over for my editor here. This whole topic maybe it'll, maybe it'll spawn questions but you know what with Ronas earlier comment about technology copyright laws and what it used to be either. I mean, in the case of someone who owns the photograph is still alive but certainly what you know Chris and I work with there's no one left alive. But so sometimes if an archive owns that image, if it's actually a digital high quality digital image that is that someone else owns you're allowed to use theirs without permission. Yeah, that's a new thing. And I'm I don't even know how I feel about that. I mean, that's not necessarily what we're talking about today but just sort of the way the writing in the scholarly writing has changed. We can now use images without permissions. And it's, I feel like some part of the book is lost if I don't get to say, you know, I want to express my gratitude to the National Archives and Dublin, as if I've been there they know me, you know what I mean. And now I don't get to do that, because I can just take it from someone else who has it. You can still, you can still shout it give a shout out to the National Archives of Dublin. Yeah, I advise my graduate students to plan on another year, getting their permissions together. It's almost an extra book, even though things as Adam says they've gotten a lot easier, it just takes a lot longer than you imagine, even with email and PDFs and documents that you can sign without sending them, you know, through the regular mail, it's still really tough. This cover image in mind for from the very beginning, because it encapsulates the story of the book. It's the mountain. It's the Inca, and the pillars of Hercules that stand for the Habsburg World Empire, and the silver in the middle is actually visible on the original image and there are llamas and people on the mountain. But this image belongs to an Irish baron. And, and I had to write to him personally and, you know, I didn't know exactly how to address him like your grace, your mercy. Was it your most humble servant is requesting this use of this image but he said just call me Sean. So Sean allowed me to use this message or this image he sent me a handwritten permission and said no I'm just glad it's going to be on the book that's great. But it's that reminder that it is a collaborative project even though you know we take credit my name is on there as the author. There are a lot of other people that are involved in the production team. In this case, I was even really surprised when it arrived because they put kind of a silver lining into the book I never asked for anything but they kind of did a really nice job with the production and I was like man this is this is the best looking book I've ever produced I'm really amazed. So, when a press feels like they want to push your stuff that can be kind of nice. I'm going to move on to our last question and then we'll have some time for folks to ask questions any any of the attendees can ask questions or y'all can ask questions of each other. And then for the attendees. When you do want to ask a question, I think you have the ability to raise your hand and then we can unmute you if you want to vocalize your question or you can also use the q amp a. So our last question. Did anything you learn while researching the topic surprise you were there any big surprises or things that maybe you discover that you didn't expect that you want to share. Well, I had a big surprise. One of the papers and the thing I was editing was written by two economists and there to make their discussion of the ancient world, say more historically accurate. I wound up co authoring article with them, or a paper with them. And so I thought it was kind of cool that I work with two economists whom I never even met. And we have a co authored paper. So that's being interdisciplinary for you. I discovered Ireland. Well, and I said, I mean, if the others inviting questions on this topic. A lot of times, probably each of us has an area that's closely related to what we study that we have avoided, like, like, like, like the minds of Moria, if you follow the told me like this, this dark place that you guys don't want to deal with it because there's so much work that I don't know about. And for me doing British studies mean doing a lot with Elizabethan and Jacobi in England, and, you know, and, and also revolutionary England. I don't didn't deal with Ireland because I grew up with Irish nationalism as being such a dominating that whole world. And in this book I couldn't avoid it anymore. I had to like start dealing with Ireland. And so I did and discovered that in the 21st century. A lot of that, the baggage of that sort of fictional Irish nationalism and that weird Celtic racial identification is now finally giving way to something better and new, and sort of discovering the whole world of scholarship that I could get into and this thing that I've been avoiding dealing with. I just dealt with and it was so much fun exciting and I can't wait to do more. I can share a surprising point throughout my writing. So, in my book, I'm analyzing the columns of women journalists who support Erdogan, the, I mean, the guy who came to power in 2002 in Turkey. These are women who most who write in newspapers that that support him. But these women also before the Erdogan came to power. They, they were seen as people who would kind of contribute to the improvement of democracy in the country. So, when when I started working on their columns. I thought, okay, I mean these journalists probably they see politics differently for me and probably they. I mean, I, when I started writing, you know, I regularly observed concentration of power in the hands of Erdogan. And I had, I mean, I thought I was seeing something like I was seeing an increasing authoritarianism and concentration of power. But I thought they saw something different. So they didn't see what what I was observing they'll. When I started writing, when I started reading their columns, one by one, I realized that, oh wow, no they observe they observe the same things you know they observe more concentration of power they observe increasing authoritarianism they observe things are going wrong, but they still support him. And they will continue to support him and they continue to support him to this day so this was a very surprising point for me so that was something to think more about. I had a, I think I was present reading this book and receiving it. I knew that all of the modern thinkers would be new material for me and very interesting but new. But Adam said before there's something close to your word that you have avoided for years and it's a big gap. And that was the thinker xenophon the writer xenophon who wrote Socratic dialogues but is much less studied than play though. And it's really shameful that I've never really studied xenophon. So there's an Espa chapter this book on xenophon it was so he's so pressurously modern in a really interesting way and it was just a fascinating study. So I got excited about it and I'm teaching it this semester. So that was an influential surprise. I guess, among the surprises that I encountered in doing this book which I would describe as a fun book I mean I did it for fun was first of all just how much constitutional law throughout the history of the courts interpretation of the constitution and application to policy questions to legal questions, how much of that has concerned alcohol in some way, and how alcohol and its regulation, or questions about the right to use it or using it in certain circumstances, or commerce involving alcohol. How much of every step developmentally of US constitutional law has some alcohol related connection to it. And I suspected this at the outset that's why I wanted to write the book, but the findings were even more jarring I suppose that that this really is a motif that makes sense for understanding us political culture and constitutional culture. I think I could add that every time you sit down to start a project, whether it's an article or a book, not that we do books all the time. They take a long time, but, but it's a process of discovery. I mean you set out thinking it's going to look kind of like this and I suspect it's going to shape up like so and I have a pretty good working hypothesis I'm fairly confident in. And then as you're working it through its changes directions or at least in my experience. It's a process of oh okay I didn't know about that and now I need to fill this in or I see a gaping hole. You know as Adam and and run I have already said I see something that I missed and I guess I have to go into that now I have to figure that out. In a strange way, writing a book is more of a process of discovery for the scholar and then when you're done with it at a certain level you're kind of like okay now I'm on to something else. I've spent five 10 years working on that now I think I've got it figured out to my satisfaction maybe not to anyone else's, and I'm going to do something else now. That's satisfying even if you know our readerships are not huge. That's sort of the nature of the beast. And I really do appreciate to lane support, I have to say it's been a really supportive place to be a scholar. And, you know, all the way along with, you know, financial support. It's always a struggle I mean everybody has to piece things together but it's been a really good place to do scholarship. It's been a good advice for PhD students to write that it's not going to all be firmly fixed in the proposal you can remain open to new discovery. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to, I'm going to cheat I know that I said that that was my last question for you all but Chris made me think to ask. When you're chatting just now about, you know, you're already on to the next thing or thinking about the next thing. Would you all mind sharing like what that next thing is for you potentially if you have something in the works or that maybe it's just a little seedling in this moment if you wanted to share. This is a really significant question for me because I've been very slow 10-15-20 years I've played another 20 years on air so I move really hesitantly. And I've been teaching these courses at Tulane on Bible and philosophy. And in the academic world as we all know you stay in your own lane, right you develop scholarly skills and a background in training and connections. And it's not so easy to move out of that. So I myself have now it's number of years, probably another 10 years, moving toward wanting to write on Bible which I've been teaching happily but it's different to write on something to teach it. So, yeah, that's a really interesting experience I think some people are more bold and innovative, but just how academia can keep you, you know, rail, it's not so easy to break out of these alleys and move in a new direction. So, teaching can help with that too because most of us teach more broadly than our scholars do. Yeah. Anyway, that's what I want to do next. I have just completed another project after the book it was a journal project and I had an article in it about the alimony debates that took place in Turkey in the last year. And my next next project I think is to rest a bit and, you know, like, gather energy, experience life in, I mean other dimensions of life and then go back to writing but my next project is to gather my energy and rest. Well, I have a long term project on land and many different aspects in the Roman world, but I also, you know, I think a lot of us we get asked to write things. And so they always seem to come up first and so right now I'm supposed to be finishing up something on poverty in the ancient world for a more general collection on poverty, economic aspects of poverty. And then I have another essay that is sort of related to the land project but I was just at a conference for the other one just before this. And so there's always always seems like there's a lot of things to do. I'd like to return to something that that Rana mentioned and that's the the nexus with teaching. One thing that was generated by my work on this book was a special topics course I did a few iterations of, and my colleagues convinced me to entitle it booze drugs and the courts. It would sound more enticing, and I guess it was. But what it what it asked me to think about were some of the parallels in both regulation and rights debates over the saga of alcohol in American law and current debates over both the legalization of cannabis, and also the saga of narcotic drugs and other drug substances in the United States. And of course this recent election cycle we had some very interesting state referenda on these questions. And you know in my in my course I tried to put it all together into some sort of organized theme. But I learned a lot, and I learned that there are lots of directions that this work about controlled substances and intoxicants and the law could go. And of course the obvious debate to investigate is the saga of marijuana in the United States. And of course the current seeming you know move towards greater and greater openness with respect to both medical and recreational cannabis as it's preferred to be turned. So that represents you know a huge opportunity and ability to co author and collaborate with people who are public opinion scholars and things like that. So I'm very excited about lots of different directions, and I continue to research historic cocktails of course and think about what should be our totemic cocktail for the Trump era. For me right now. It's a fun question a frustrating one some ways for British studies, especially because of the finally that the imperial shadow is withdrawing. It's, it's wide open again it's very exciting it's an exciting time to be alive and British studies I mean it really is. I mean, Ireland is, you know, you can actually do Irish studies without having to deal with Irish 19th and 20th century Irish nationalism. You can you can look at things like the Ulster plantation and without having to look at it as a 20th century problem, you know, sort of, you know, early 17th century problem that is wound up in 20th century politics. England itself is sort of looking at its own existence and questioning paradigms like, you know, it's isolation. I mean, I've seen wonderful scholarship coming out of England saying like England wasn't isolated. I mean, back then and Dennis can probably talk to this this more oceans connected land separated right getting getting from from ancient. What is now China to what is now Europe was really really hard to do across land but water connected things. I've seen British scholars even questing like what did what did people what are the Anglo Saxons look like, like what did people look like in England back in the 18th century AD. And the answer isn't they didn't necessarily have like red haired braids I mean they don't we don't really know I mean connections between Britain and Phoenician cultures wide open, but the same reason is wide open here and what I would love to do is talk more about those the idea of England in its past freed from the legacy of empire and you know, in some ways freed from the legacy of 20th century Marxist scholarship which merely recast the same paradigms of imperial thinking in an adverse way is bright wide open but what I would really like to do is go and look at this continent, especially looking at our are, you know, looking at people like red cloud and others as important American figures and and repositioning them in the dialogue. I just got out of, you know, Army War College this year, and I asked the question point blank to the folks which we could do is like, Why are we looking at General Lee. Again, why are we looking at red cloud. You know why are we talking about the tactics of General Jackson. Why are we talking about red cloud. I mean, those are, those are questions about that are vaguely early modern that would love to see us do it like reposition. Really look at this continent as a whole bunch of things and a whole bunch of people that also that contributed to it in ways that we haven't even started to discuss. Does anybody else want to add anything before I open it up. I have a few questions. It looks like we already have a couple in the Q amp a so a reminder pop your questions into the Q amp a which is different from the chat. We are using the zoom webinar platform so it's a little bit different. You should see a Q amp a button at the bottom of your zoom screen. So pop those in there and I'm happy to read those out loud. The next question is for Dr. Berger. Why do you think the themes of nature law and the sacred run through our whole tradition. Yeah, it's a big question I just tried to get really small. And it's often been said that philosophy begins with the question of whether the things that we all accept by convention, whether any of it is actually true by nature. Like every society has its own ideas of what's just and noble. These are the conventions and play those great image that's the cave that every society lives in, and philosophy is asking whether any of those conventions are by nature. It's the intention, which is really I think the, you know, the tool, philosophic inquiry runs through, I think all great thinkers. And then it's compounded or made complex by the biblical tradition or revealed religion. If there's a creator God if God is determined reality. Nature and fix nature. And how does the sacred fit into that dichotomy between nature and convention. And finally, the issue that I've really kind of wrestled with and what with other scholars about is, whether the Bible and religion can have this distinction of nature and convention. It's just an idea of nature, the reality and nature of those. So, yeah, this, there are big questions that doesn't surprise me to see the concrete ways in which it showed up and all these other thinkers, you know, from medieval to modern. But when you think about it, these are such fundamental questions that I think last for human thought. All right, and next question is for Dr. Ascon. The question is, I mean it's from Lisa Hooper. So she says it's so great to see you again by the way. She says she's a very good friend doing his PhD work on an American variation of what you have done. It's such intellectually and emotionally challenging work seeing the parallels and knowing plenty of others are looking at this modern American moment. I'm wondering what techniques you could pass on to other researchers for separating and protecting yourself from your own research. Thank you, Lisa. I can't see you, but thank you very much for the question, which is a great question. I mean, these are very similar topics. I mean, when I worked on this book, I kept thinking about women supporting Trump. And also the last four years, like a lot of things prompted the reaction like I mean I saw this before. And so very similar processes are taking place in two different countries. And there are no techniques that I can think of. And I suspect there is none. I mean, these are not very, these are topics that make you nervous and I think they keep you nervous. Even after you are done with the book and everything you don't know where where it will land in. And so, yeah, I mean that's, I wish, I wish I could say something I could promote something, but I'm afraid these are topics that we have to deal with. And I wrote this book and now I have to deal with anything that it brings to me, right, positive and negative. And the next question I see is also about Erdogan. So, Erdogan regime is kind of they are even Erdogan before came to power. He has been and his party has been very critical of the regime promoted by Ataturk. Ataturk regime was based on a model of westernization. And so Erdogan came to power by constantly criticizing this different aspects of this project. So I mean it is, it is not so easy because Ataturk's project, I mean have been embraced by millions, but there are also social groups who fell outside of it. So he basically played those dynamics, but it is, you know, he is, I mean, his regime hasn't been very fond of the project brought by Ataturk in the first place. Thank you. It looks like we've got one more question in the chat. This might be our final question. It is a very important question. It is from Eric Weedig and it's for Dr. Mavidi. It is worth many of the Supreme Court justices bourbon drinkers. The answer Eric is yes. Bourbon drinkers, absolutely. And bourbon, you know, is popular throughout American history, right from the beginning of the domestic production of whiskey. And it's when it's produced in Kentucky and gets its name all the way up through the 20th century. And even now in, you know, the current revival of cocktail culture, etc. So probably, probably one of the most, you know, outstanding bourbon drinkers of the chief justices was probably Fred Vincent, who was a very good friend of Harry Truman. That's kind of how we got nominated. And Harry Truman was known as a bourbon drinker, loved bourbon. Washington nowadays, just so you won't worry, is not as hard drinking a town as it once was. People are much more moderate. I don't know, is that a good thing or not, who can say, but the, the stories you read about of mid century, last century. That sort of that sort of culture of alcohol and politics has been succeeded by very different, very different behaviors. And she did. And she had a favorite spirit, which was a party, which is an Amaro. And of course, Campari figures in various cocktails, including my favorite cocktail, which is the Negroni. Those are tasty. I'll go have one right now. I have a respectful panel here. If you weren't in New Jersey, I'd say be right there. A lot of fun. Yeah, thank you so much we have one minute left I want to be respectful of everybody's time so I do want to take a moment to thank everybody who participated whether you are a panelist or an attendee I do want to thank Courtney Kearney and Amanda Morlas and Alan Velasquez who were integral to putting this together whether it was editing or communicating with you all or reaching out and all of it that took to make this go and of course all of our faculty authors who without y'all this obviously wouldn't be happening. And this was extremely fun, and very lively so thank you for participating, especially through all of your zoom fatigue which I know we're all experiencing. And then a reminder we'll be doing this again tomorrow with a whole new batch of folks so if you want to pop in tomorrow. We welcome you all back to to hang out and do it all. I wanted to add one thing, you know, all of us and every all the faculty, you go to your conventions in your field and so forth you're a famous person they know you all around the world, and in our own university we don't really know enough, you know, about one another and it's just any opportunity like this to, you know, branch out and hear what other people are working on is a pleasure. Absolutely and that's one of our favorite things about this is as you know getting everybody across campus together because those opportunities don't often exist. So it's always really fun and there's so there's a lot of commonalities between the struggles that y'all face. You know putting this stuff together so it's interesting to hear the different experiences but also the connecting threads that throughout all of this so again thank you so much for participating. And enjoy the rest of your days hopefully it contains a negroni or two. Well thank you all for organizing this this is really nice. Thank you, thank you. Yes, thank you y'all it's been I've laughed a lot it's been wonderful. I've laughed a lot too but it's just been it's been great to just so you know. There is a long faculty meeting to start. Sorry. Negroni's after that. Bye everyone. Thank you.