 Welcome to the second what we hope to be annual faculty author spotlight. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Melissa Tremontra I am the scholarly engagement librarian for the social sciences. And geospatial data. I have the pleasure of moderating our last of three wonderful sessions of this spotlight series. So sort of how today will run is that we have three pre selected questions will be asking of our faculty authors, and then have some time for questions and discussion at the end. Before I introduce you to our authors so I do want to thank Amanda more or less Courtney Kearney and Alan Valeskas for all of the work they've done to make this celebratory event happen. I'm thrilled that we are able to continue this event this year, despite its challenges. My favorite thing we're just chatting about this about this event is that it brings faculty from across campus and across disciplines together, and one place to sort of share and discuss accomplishments. I know that doesn't always happen for most of us. That being said, I do want to introduce to you today's brilliant faculty authors. So joining us today, we have Michael Brombog from the Department of Classical Studies chatting with us about their work titled the new politics of Olympus. We have Charles Figley, who is the chair and disaster mental health from the School of Social Work chatting about combat social work applying the lessons of war to the realities of human services. We have Elizabeth Gross from Tulane Honors Program. And with this body that lightning show, we have Jenna Lipman from the Department of History chatting about their work titled in camps Vietnamese refugees asylum seekers and repatriates. We also have Felicia Felicia McCarron from the French department chatting about one dead at the Paris opera ballet, which is I think my favorite title. I don't know if you buy us but it's great. And last but certainly not least, we have Jonathan Morton from French as well, live from Berlin. And the title of their most recent work is, and Dr. More and you say it much better than me and your beautiful video but the Roman De La Rose and 13th century thought. You can share the much more beautiful pronunciation if you'd like. But I'm going to stop sharing my screen in this moment so I can see all of your lovely faces again. And then we have a few pre-arranged questions to ask all panelists, and then we'll have time for questions from attendees at the end, because this is the zoom webinar platform. All attendees are muted so we encourage you to if you have if you want to chat amongst yourselves obviously use the chat feature during this time. When it comes time for the Q&A please use the Q&A function. It'll allow us to better manage the questions so that we may address them in a more, a more manageable fashion, I guess. So I'm going to jump right in and you can I'm going to ask the question, and then you all can just answer. There's I'm not going to go around and call on anybody don't want to put any pressure if you don't feel like answering the question you don't have to If you're like yeah I don't really like that one I'll wait for the next one. That's totally fine. Informal discussion and fun like I said the last thing we want to do is to celebrate your work and then make this also feel like work. So the first question is how and why did you choose your book or research topic. I can start things off. The book that I wrote is about ancient Greek hymns, which are songs of praise and how they work in a political context and the reason I chose that topic is because in the ancient Greek world. A very important part of social life political life religious life was song. It's something that we don't maybe necessarily think about as much because we have a lot of other types of entertainment and media in our lives. But for the ancient Greeks song was really really dominant took up a lot of their attention, especially in within a lead culture and hymns in particular are ways of praising people. What that does in addition to making you feel good is it helps define what the socially acceptable standards and norms are within a community. And so when you praise someone for doing something you are reinforcing and setting the ground rules for the rest of the community about what praise worthy behavior is. I've been studied in in some sort of formal literary ways but the social and political ramifications of that kind of praise, hadn't really been explored in too much detail. And so I thought that would be an interesting topic to look into. And particularly I look at how it works in these sort of new emerging authoritarian regimes. And when I started this project, a decade ago, that seemed more abstract than it seems today. And so the tail end of this book was was finished during a very different political climate in the US. And it gave me a lot of insight into thinking about how norms can change rapidly. And suddenly in a way that, you know, a lot of your society thinks things are very fixed and static and then all of a sudden things can change in surprising and unexpected ways. And so that was a really kind of interesting moment in our own lives that informed some of the underlying assumptions that I was working with my book. I can, I can go I can so my, my book, my book topic. The reason I chose it was because I got bullied by a bigger boy. And so I, this is so my book is called the home on the rose and 13th century thought a commemoration home on the rose. And this is the, this is the second book that I've done. This is an edited collection. It's a collection of essays that came out of a conference. So I'd already written one book on this topic. And what happened was, I was at a conference that I'd organized talking to a very, very senior guy in the history of medieval philosophy. So I'm a medieval specialist. And I may have had, I might have had like one glass too many of fruit juice. And I had. And I basically said to him, why does everyone, why do all like medieval philosophy people when you study when you look for literature that's interesting in the Middle Ages, why do you always look at Dante and the divine comedy, which is like big 14th century, 13th late 13th century Italian work. And I said, why don't you talk about the home on the rose, the romance of the rose, which is the thing that I work on. And the thing that my book was on my first book was on philosophy and the romance of the rose. And so he then, I didn't think anything of it and six weeks later, I got an email from him saying, I was thinking about what you said, that's great, let's organize a conference together. And so I had, so I was like a very junior postdoc, and I had like the biggest name in medieval philosophy which okay it's not a big thing but you know in the small pond he's like a reasonably large size fish. And he said let's do a conference together so I kind of had to say yes. And so. And so we brought together loads of people who are specialists in philosophy and people are specialists in literature to make them talk to each other. And. And so my kind of revenge for being bullied into organizing the conference that became this book was to make loads of philosophers do something they didn't want to do, which was think about what happens when words can mean like five different things at the same time. And philosophers really don't like that so they had to get so basically we made all of these poor historians of philosophy read this incredibly weird obscene philosophical French poem. And when we finished right wiping up the tears, we persuaded them to collaborate and bring out this volume so what happened was, I thought I was the expert in this topic like I'd written about the romance of the rose and philosophy. I thought this is my thing and at the conference that then became this book I realized they either were all of these things I was so far out of my depth, which was really exciting. And so the result is this is like a book. Okay, one other thing I did I bullied everyone to reference my book in this. So there are loads of references to me, and they had to do it because I was the editor and so out of politeness at least there are loads and loads of people who are quoting me. And so that's what happened that's how I ended up doing this book which is this one. That sounds terrifying. You make it sound so great and they're you know you tied it up for the this nice bow towards the end where you, you know now you have this thing in which all these folks reference you but you know being bullied by the bigger boy. There are no doctoral students attending right now, they might just be scared. Happy to go but I feel like Felicia you should go next I feel like the French theme could continue do you want to jump in and then I'll go after you maybe. Okay, if you want. I'm not going to be bullied. Um, you know I think when you've written a lot of books you forget actually why you've done it. But this particular one came from the fact that as a historian of performance I've been thinking a lot about the way the stage. So talks about difference right talks about gender or race, or diversity human diversity. And in particular, all of my work has been focused on choreography so when people on stage don't necessarily play human roles but they might play wordless roles, representing power fauna right, and then this idea that that sort of biodiversity that you see on stage in choreography, in particular in the French tradition can really speak about human diversity. So that's what I was working on and then it just so happened that I came across a recent staging of an old ballet from 1866. That is kind of unbelievable and representative of a whole genre of so called Orientalist ballets right, but it had two key things that were very, very current still right. It had a kind of stereotypical representation of others and in particular Muslim others right, and there's actually a knife attack in the ballet from 1866. So there's also a narrative about the green world and actually there's a kind of environmental crisis at the end of the ballet. So, when they restaged this at the Paris opera in 2011 and then 2014 it was incredibly current right. So these are things that France is struggling with very much today, and I was able to start thinking about what in French is called decolonizing the stage, thinking about minority representation in a way that only now is really starting to happen in public discourse. As you may know in France it's actually illegal to gather data on racial or religious or ethnic identification. And so there isn't really a public discourse about this and my argument is that the stage even the ballet stage opens that up and really starts to address these questions that are so urgent right now. Thank you so much. I mean I have to say it's just great to hear about all my colleagues work. I feel like it's wonderful to hear about our intellectual work and not just about, you know, administrative COVID details. So, welcome to everyone. My name is Jana. I'm a historian and I teach us 20th century history and US foreign policy and immigration. And I look at issues of migration and race and always really different than Felicia. But my recent book is called in camps Vietnamese refugees asylum seekers and repatriates. And it comes out of some research I was doing about Vietnamese refugees who were in a small base camp in the United States in Arkansas. And I started doing research about this group of Vietnamese who left in 1975. This is the end of the Vietnam War. And I found these just remarkable photographs of Vietnamese refugees who are brought first to Guam, before they are brought to the United States. And while they were and Guam, a small group begin to protest, because they don't want to be resettled in the United States. In fact, they wanted to go back to Vietnam. And they start marching around with pictures of Ho Chi Minh. And if you know about anything related to Vietnamese refugees in the United States, you know, the majority are identified with anti communism. Many of them supported the United States during the war. And so I was really struck as a historian of the Vietnam War and US foreign policy to find these images of people who did not want to come to the United States, who wanted to go back to Vietnam. And this would have been in, you know, May of 1975. And I was like, I don't think I'll find anything about this, you know, this story will be a dead end will be an interesting, you know, anecdote. And what I found was massive amounts of material. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. And so I decided to start following the stories of Vietnamese who leave Vietnam I ended up not just looking at those who leave in 75 but I look in the late 70s the 80s and the 90s. I began to look not just at the initial group of Vietnamese who left in 1975, but those who left later, you found themselves in other refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. And I write about their stories when they are in between the United States and Vietnam, and the experiences and political movements that they participate in, in those places and in some ways like Michael. And I began this project, you know, more than 10 years ago now. And so there have always been questions about refugees and immigration in America, but it was a different political climate. And so as I was continued to do research, it, in many ways resonates with contemporary debates about refugee admissions about having asylum seekers who are now detained in the United States, particularly in Louisiana which has a huge number of people incarcerated who are asylum seekers here in our state. And so, while the work is very much about Southeast Asia and Vietnamese in 1970s, 80s and 90s. I think it really resonates with contemporary questions about asylum seekers refugee status and migration today. Thanks. Thank you. Anybody else want to add. Yeah. I'm poet and my, my book that came out in 2019. This body that lightning show is my first full collection of poetry. So the role of research in that process is very different, especially since this body that lightning show is is a fairly autobiographical work. A lot of my research involved living my life and specifically connecting the traumatic events surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to personal traumas both sexual and physical injury that I was also going through at the same time and became inextricably linked in my own imagination and my own emotional processing and and that's kind of the origin of the work that said there, there is some research in in the book. It, which it contains what I like to call irresponsible translations from Sappho. I do read Greek, but most of that Greek is gone anyway so I'm going to do what I want and what serves me with it now. And, and also there's a central poem in in the book that's a little, that's longer, called Amazon amici. This is an Amazon amici a battle of with Amazon women, and I did some some research into various names of mytho historical Amazon women warriors as I was working on that poem. It's hard to remember the details because I first wrote that poem in 2008. And this book was first written as my mfa thesis in 2010 and 2011. So it was a long road from writing the book to publishing it. Well, in terms of the role of research in my creative work, though, there are a number of other topics that that kind of touch on things that have come up in other faculty topics in this panel. My second as as yet unpublished full collection is began as an erasure of Shakespeare's merchant of Venice and then expanded to include narrative and almost documentary poems about working with refugees in a camp outside of Thessaloniki grease. So that's what I've been working on more recently. And, and in terms of active research for creative work. I'm also working on a libretto with a composer here about an environmental activist orca whale, J 35 and looking into that that research goes in lots of different directions including how to write a libretto which I've never done. But also a little a little bit about Wales, a lot about the indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest. And, and it's also a kind of version of Antigone so so my classics background just keeps coming can't can't keep it down. Okay, so our next question is what was the most difficult and or most rewarding part of your most recent work. And you can speak to the process or whether it was the research or the outcome in terms of how it was received. Any or you can take that question. Anyway you want. Yeah, I think that strikes a chord because I had the three of us were editors of combat social work which is the book. And I'm not a social worker marine, and they don't have any social workers in the Marine Corps unfortunately. One of the challenges that I had was enabling those who are writing their own combat stories as social workers to to share that and it was a challenge for a number of people and there are some that actually just, you know gave up, and I'm hoping we'll catch them the next time we put a volume like this together. It's interesting with combat social workers, you have to be an officer. You start as a captain. So it's like three ranks up from the very beginning of being an officer. So they come in right away as being an outsider. We have, we kind of laugh at this in the book, you'll see if you were to pick it up and look at it. So combat and social work seems to be inconsistent, if you will. And there were a number of people who were in the army or Navy or whatever the branch and there were three of them I remember very well that explicitly wanted social work and nothing else. And some of them got that and particularly because they hated the war, as I do, that this would not work out for them. The lovely thing about their stories is that it's really a story of our country of trying to come to grips, especially with the Vietnam War in particular and I guess country was won over by that because we haven't really protested since that time unfortunately. But it was interesting two of my colleagues are also senior professors one still in the military and getting out soon. So both of them have ambivalence about the war, and but not about those who fight the war, those who serve like social workers. We're totally committed to the troops, but not to tactics. And the book that I wrote that's coming out next year that went into press before this one really focuses on that and I'm happy to talk about it if you want but that talks about psychiatric and about the horrible things that the military has done outside of war to people who are different and who are not specifically like the typical military personnel. So there are a lot of stories that are untold, but these 13 combat social workers really did a great job of articulating where they were at the time. Many of them were not really prepared to go to war but they were in the reserves and so they had an opportunity for that the challenges they had of imagining themselves being in war. They're the struggles that they had in leaving their family behind because all of them were you know relatively mature with master's degrees at least. So it isn't just simply a war story and duck and shoot this is human service professionals who are doing what social workers do in New Orleans and everywhere else, way far from home in a combat zone in which people are shooting at you. So I thought it was a good idea that we finally devote a book to this kind of phenomenon and hopes that it will encourage other social workers to consider that as a career. So that was it. Am I supposed to say anything more. That's fantastic. I guess I'm sort of in awe of all of what you said and the fact that you, you know, mentioned that there's no social workers in the Marine Corps. I just, I didn't know that and it sort of baffles me. Well, it's in the Navy and the Navy takes care of the Marine Corps. So I guess that we could, you know, attend to them but I've never worked with one. Wow, okay. So in this work. I think that there there's so many challenges right I mean they're the challenges of language I wrote a book about Vietnamese refugees not speaking Vietnamese which in some ways is an act of hubris. And yet, I decided there was enough oral histories that have been done some in English some in Vietnamese that been translated that I was able to use the research of other scholars. And also, for those in terms of I do really sort of archival research and I'm particularly interested in archives that are not easily accessible I'm particularly interested in archives that are in what are seen as peripheral locations. And this is both my favorite part of the job and in some ways the most challenging part is the part that I find really exciting but for example, as part of this project, I was able to go to the Philippines and Malaysia, those were separate trips, and I visited the places where the refugee camps were in the 80s and 90s. And there are archives there. And there are sort of private archives or public archives. There are, you know, old English ESL, so English as a second language manuals and boxes that are sort of sitting there. There are people's photograph collections there are people who have newspaper collections. And so for me, one of the most exciting and yet also the more challenging parts of the work. Is doing that type of research on the ground going to archives and really trying to think about how do those stories of the refugee camps fit into larger stories of US foreign policy and larger political narratives. And I'll just say this I don't have the other colleagues feel in this room it's always hard to write in terms of least for me you know figuring out how to tell the story. And then shaping it and so that hopefully it's compelling to a large readership so that it actually is storytelling with real people and people's stories so that other people can connect. Jen, I totally want to emphasize a couple of things that you said first of all travel to archives right I think several of us working archives that are in other countries, and we have to get there and we have to get there at a time where we can have a series of days, not everything is digitized you know and in fact, some of the stuff that hasn't been overly studied isn't digitized and so it's really worth travel to archives. And then bringing it back I mean I wonder how many of us on this panel experience what I experienced which is like that it's, it's another kind of work another huge amount of work to try to bring that research into the classroom right. Of course it informs who we are and how we teach, but we don't always get the opportunity to teach it right. So, kind of this ongoing, you know, teaching and research, and trying to to negotiate that balance is is really really tricky very difficult to write while you're teaching right. So, I'm, I can talk about I think probably what the most rewarding thing about doing my doing the book that I did was. And the thing is it's the most like the most ivory tower, like ridiculous pastiche of academic life and in comparison to say looking at social workers and the military and thinking about the legacies of trauma and Katrina and murder at the opera. And it's, it feels completely ridiculous to me so I'm going to make a case for the absurdity of a certain kind of academic life that was incredibly rewarding, even though on the face of it it looks completely pointless, which was the conference that I organized with a with a with a two weeks that this book came out of when we did it in. I know it was definitely it was 2016 because it was just when Brexit happened and so I was like really completely all over the place. So that was I mean that's separate. But so the conference took place in this 17th century. And it's a really big private house that was taken over by the French state on this little island in the center in the middle of Paris, and it's a place called the Institute for advanced studies. And it's like gorgeous it's got really like tasteless gold chairs and like red carpets, it's ridiculous. And we so we organize the conference bringing all of these specialists to look at this incredibly obscure stuff so like medieval French literature and philosophy that was taught at the conference but only in the 13th century. And then so then we sat around and talked for two days. They were maybe 30 people in the room and just sitting there and talking about the same things that everyone had worked really hard on and everyone was out of their depth at different times, and just learning from each other was incredibly. It was, I think it was probably one of the most exciting, rewarding academic experiences I've ever had. I mean, was it how how how much it changed the world, I don't know. But I should probably try and tie that somehow. And so one way. Okay, one lesson maybe which I've taken from that is, oh my God, I can feel a moral coming on. Okay, one lesson to take from this is I think none of us had computers open really, or looked at screens much and we're just talking with one another in in person at length. And I guess that's something we don't have right now but it's something that in the age where we're all kind of connected through screens and the Internet and so on. It's really valuable I think I still I found like that, having that that connection which maybe we can look forward to in, you know, the not hopefully to this the future. I think to connect the challenge and the reward. Not, not so much about the writing of my first book but the publishing it I've already mentioned it was a very long time from writing the book to publishing it and that itself was a challenge. And particularly, because of some of the personal and traumatic nature of the material. I found that I was completely. I kept I kept working on the manuscript after completing my MFA after it didn't rest at the thesis manuscript but by 2013 two years later I did not. I found myself just changing punctuation and then changing it back and realize that I was completely emotionally locked out of this subject matter and like it I had brought it as far as it could go and I couldn't do anything more with it in any meaningful way and I continued to invest in sending it to publishers ever more selectively as that is an expensive and brutal process in poetry publishing, but, but had basically went. So, had basically given up on publishing my first book as my first book. Which happens all the time. I still believed in the book. And I had, I had been a semi finalist for big things early on in the process so it's, I had, I had that kind of external validation as well that it was good enough to fight for to keep going, trying to get it in the world. But when I submitted to the word works. Who ended up publishing it. I was submitting to that press for the third time and at least who knows if I would have held to this, but in my heart I was submitting it for the last time, at least for a while. Because I had just completed on another manuscript and it, yeah, both financially and emotionally it was too much to be sending both out at once. And so it was extremely serendipitous that that that submission. Like it was the last time it turned out for a different reason than what I thought when I was submitting it and then also to have it selected by Jericho Brown was incredible. And I had to jump in I was I got the news while it was at a friend from grad schools wedding on Lake Michigan and I went in underwater and screamed. That was that was definitely a particularly rewarding moment for me. But also, having had that experience of feeling locked out from the book I wasn't sure what it would feel like to put it in the world and then, like, give a reading tour, for example. And the other really surprising reward for me of the whole long story of the publication was the work that I was able to do with an editor at the works, word works, bringing, you know, the manuscript had not changed since 2013. And it didn't change in really major ways but in in small important ones and to work through that process with another person from the outside. It's, yeah, I hadn't I hadn't had that experience before. And, yeah, it really, it really changed my ability to put that work in the world and feel good about it. It's kind of been sort of a common thread between these last few days is like trying to find that home for your work. You know, many of the faculty authors over the past few days have talked about, you know, trying different places and finding a home. And that like serves as I mean personally for me a point of encouragement when I think about the on my own ideas. I'm starting to formulate those and thinking about that process and it's a very vulnerable process to like put your work out there for other people to critique and accept or deny and that's, you know, can be a bit of a point of in its own, I guess for some people so it's been very refreshing and confirming to hear that that has been the experience of so many folks. So I appreciate you sharing that. I guess I'll just say really quickly to echo what what several of my colleagues have have already said, you know whether you're doing creative work or you're doing, you know, non nonfiction. The process is is messy right the subject that you're dealing with is complex, it's large and there's lots of different ways you could tell the story and going back to what Jenna said, you know a few minutes ago, finding a linear path through that big constellation of material is very, very challenging and I think for me was probably one of the hardest parts. In a lot of fields, the work that you're doing is not going to be repeated there's not going to be another book that comes out on this topic, maybe ever. But at the same time, your narrative that you've chosen to tell is not the definitive way to tell the story and so making sure that the work you're doing is going to advance the conversation, not stop the conversation is also a really important consideration and thinking about how you want to push the envelope enough so that people will respond to your work and and do more and add on. And finding the narrative that will do that in an effective and responsible way is is a really huge challenge of doing sort of a large project. I should talk again. David, I this particular book on combat social work, it was the strangest set of events. I actually proposed the book. And there was there were publishers that were interested but they were not. They were interested in other branch or other profession, psychologists, that sort of thing. Family therapists, etc. We kept pushing and we acquired had to another editor we acquired someone else. And each time it failed we told the, the, maybe four or five that were with us, what happened, and they all stuck with us, and even at the end, when Oxford University press picked us up, and, you know, provided everything actually that we had wanted and hoped for as a book. Things started coming together but I think that the hardest part was the contributors and what they had the right in terms of their own individual chapters because all but three of them had never published anything. They had never mentioned something about themselves. So there was a tremendous amount of, of anxiety, I think, even, you know, among most of them I would say, but there was a tremendous amount of satisfaction I know all of you feel this way, and you've seen this in your students. And it is, it just is so great. And in particular, those that are have gone through the most horrendous experiences. I think did among the best in sorting it out and finding New York, and, and making that connection. So, even though it was a hardest project and it took longer than any book that I've ever worked on, I'm, I have almost 30 now. It's the most satisfying because of the reactions of those who wrote the chapters. So, that's it. Thank you all for sharing. We have one last sort of pre arranged questions for you all. And then we'll open it up to folks to ask some questions and that question is and some of you have already sort of touched on this so if you don't want to repeat yourselves that is fine. Anything you learn while researching the topic surprise you. And if you didn't, you know if you were an editor. Maybe you can share something that surprised you while you were either editing or like it just engaging with the material again maybe with like a new lens, or something to that effect. And I think that's the whole point is to write about things that surprise you. I mean I don't want to write about something that I already know about and that seems waste of time. And so one of the things that I mean as I started with explaining like how I came to my book topic it was very much the images in the documents that I was not expecting that are the ones that drew me to the story and that I wanted to follow. And like during the course of the research I learned so many things that were surprising. For people who are interested, you know, I did not know that 100,000 Vietnamese were returned to Vietnam. And those were largely who did not want to go back to Vietnam between 1990 1997. I learned a great deal about the ways in which Vietnamese American activists had different techniques of trying to support Vietnamese who wanted to get refugee status. I learned all about Malaysia which I knew nothing about not all about but I started to learn about Malaysia right, and I learned about the variety of sort of politics in Malaysia in the 1970s and 1980s, as it affected questions related to refugees and immigration. And so, I mean I would only say that I'm only in some ways interested in the stories that surprise, because those are the stories that are complicated and as Mike was saying that are, you know, maybe nonlinear or maybe unexpected but those are the stories that are worth writing in some ways that's what I think our jobs are is to sort of find a new story and hopefully be able to explain why it's important not to tell stories that we're expecting to find. So those are just a few of the examples. I think in my project. I write about and study and think about ancient Greek poetry and we have the texts right and we have them and you can order them online and they exist in little books. But most of the work that I tried to do is to try to take those texts and reconnect them to the world that they came from. That is very difficult because most of that world in an ancient context is missing right we have little tiny fragments of it here and there. And when you aren't a specialist in all of the different areas where the evidence comes from. You need to know what the state of knowledge is so for instance, you are going to draw an evidence that might be from coins right and so coins from the period might help tell you part of the story. Pottery from the period might help tell a different part of the story but no one is going to be an expert on all of the different evidence. And so it's very often the case that you don't know what you don't know. But is available to to be found right so a lot of us who focus on literatures sometimes fall into the assumption that oh we just can't know that information it's permanently lost to us. And so we're not going to try to dig it up. In the process of writing this book of trying to test the limits of why haven't we been asking certain types of questions is it because it really is inaccessible, or do we just have to get more creative about how we find answers to those questions. So that was very interesting and so I learned all sorts of things that I never imagined as a poetry specialist I'd be thinking about like where, where is would coming from in the third century BCE where are they chopping down trees and, and what's it used for it's all going to make ships and so a wooden statue which is not necessarily a very expensive item under normal circumstances, if what is in high demand to make ships all of a sudden the simple wooden statue has an entirely different significance and value than it otherwise might. And so there's a poem about a wooden statue and, and that sort of dramatically changes the social significance of discussing that object if you realize that there's wood shortage because of more needs and things like that so I learned lots of interesting little niche facts and details that really reorient the landscape of thinking about something that we've had codified in books for a really long time. Yeah, I want to thank Michael and Jenna for what they've just said you know I think oftentimes research in the humanities gets, or even social sciences gets typified. You know, it's not, it's not scientific research it's not medical research right especially on our campus research seems to really mean what happens downtown right and we have to really emphasize that we're also asking questions right the question is the question that inspires us and that we're working on right, and that we're we don't know the answer right we wouldn't write the book if we didn't if we already knew the answer right, so it's a it's an exploration, and it's very exciting to be alive right because we can now work really across disciplines and we can really work across archives and across modes of thought and you know even very very different kinds of disciplines. It's it's an incredibly exciting time and to see the work that's being done around us and on our campus uptown as well as downtown is you know is is actually surprising not surprising really but it's it's very rewarding and wonderful. And so I want to just emphasize, you know, thank you to the organizers right because we don't always all get a chance to talk about our own work on our own campus. And that might be surprising, but it's really fantastic to have this opportunity. Thank you. Yeah, I want to I want to echo that and also say there's so much that I found resonant and what in what you all have said. I think, particularly in response to this, this latest question about surprising and like what motivates the surprises that motivate that research and also like thinking about as a person who also starts often with the ancient text. What I what I do from there is is is just absolutely the opposite of my call, instead of trying to trying to contextualize the work in its in its ancient context with with gathering what information can be found. I think I ex I try to export the uncertainty of the ancient world and use that as a lens to look at the contemporary world and make connections there. So just like inside out backwards but also starting from the same kind of stuff. But, but in terms of the surprises that come along in the work for me it's it's it's really very rarely information and much more often those surprises that stand out our connections, often just unexpected connections and I have an example from my book that's started as an erasure of Shakespeare's March into Venice and became also about narratives of migration, European migration from Thessaloniki and also an examination of my own Jewish identity in the context of all of that. So I was in the Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki and there was a there was a map on the wall of transport routes, migrants transport routes, and I just realized all of the ports are the same, all of the ports have always been the same the arrows are going in the different direction. There are the people who are are forced to migrate are fitting, checking different identity boxes but like this cross Mediterranean migration is not definitely not new. And, and that there's a there's a more direct connection between the kind of World War Two history of migration in that area and the, the current situation that I was in mostly working with people from Syria. And it's those moments of sudden unexpected connection that that for me can motivate an entire an entire book, basically. And also why conversations like this are so much fun. That was, that was really fascinating. I mean all of the answers, particularly that that last one, Elizabeth. So I've, I've read one thing that I discovered or learn. This is maybe like not quite as serious as as as it could have been. I think this is a recurring theme in my, my life and work. And this is one thing that that actually is I learned one thing I wasn't expecting to find out about was how people learned in medieval universities, which has ended up being a big part of what the work I ended up doing for the chapter that I wrote in this book. So I started looking at the teaching of logic and the teaching of how to think in in 13th century and 14th century universities. And so it ended up being a slightly self reflective exercise. And I looked so I looked at them, particularly I was really interested in the question of what a Sophism is, which is a specific. What Sophistry is, which is kind of in general when someone looks like they are saying something that makes sense but actually they don't, which is something that I identify with very strongly. And, and this was a really important tool for the teaching of logic in medieval universities so I ended up going down this rabbit hole and finding out about different classroom techniques. And one of the so you would get Sophisms which would be a sentence that looks like it makes sense but doesn't, or it doesn't make sense and you have to try and work out how the logic works in it. And there was one, one about donkeys which I didn't make it I just remembered thinking about it which I wasn't expecting to come across and it didn't make it into the book. But it's this logical problem. And so you're supposed to help you learn about grammar, and I'll give it in my, my, in Latin and then I'll give it in English and just be very, very quick. It's an omnis hominis sunt assini vel hominis, et assini sunt assini. So in English it's all humans are donkeys or humans and donkeys are donkeys. So that can, so that it has to be basically it's an exercise to make you think about how grammar works because either you can say, either you can say all humans are donkeys. Or men and donkeys are donkeys or humans and that doesn't make any sense and so you have to think okay well, you can say all humans are either donkey or human, and donkeys are donkeys. And so essentially what you have is a ridiculous classroom situation where you're doing really boring grammatical learning but all you're just talking about how humans are actually donkeys. And this is kind of fun. And then suddenly you're thinking about, I don't know, like Apuleus and the golden ass, or humans turning into animals which is a big thing in medieval literature. And so, and then you just get to say donkey a lot which I've just successfully done. And so it ends up being quite reflexive. And so anyway, I learned, I learned a lot about that was I was not expecting to find out about that and I had a lot of fun doing it. So the way the what's the moral is needs to be a moral is to be sensible learning spun. It's really exciting like doing the research, even if it's hard it is really hard and then there's always this like, I find anyway my work is like really fun moments of discovery along the way. Thank you for being so entertaining. I'm going to add toy with that probably longer than I should. Does anybody else want to add to our final question before we have just a few very short minutes for questions from others. So feel free to pop those in the chat. And like I said I always like to be mindful of folks time especially knowing how exhausting zoom can be. So pop questions in the chat, I actually, I'll, I'll start, I'll be, I'll be selfish in this moment I don't see any in the chat yet so I'll ask a question. Some of you touched on, you know, archives so as a librarian I'm obviously going to ask the question about archives and accessibility to that. So, in your opinions would you prefer archives to be more accessible which is something that librarians and archivists think about all the time and are constantly like working on, or do you feel like it adds an additional layer to your work that you have to visit the archives in person, because they aren't accessible. And how do you feel like that sort of either bolsters your work or maybe if the alternative has happened and when which it hinders your research like what are your, what are your thoughts and feelings on that. I mean, I'll start because I am interested in archives I mean, I obviously want archives to be accessible right I mean I mean there's no doubt about that, but I think it depends what you mean by accessible. And does that just simply mean digitizing, or does that mean sort of being sort of a place that people feel capable of going to both experts and non experts like, I think that there's, and no debates about what accessible means. I would say simply though that I, I mean whatever I'm an old school historian. I think that's important to actually be in the archive because it does matter how the materials organized it matters like, you know, there's all sorts of I mean you're an archivist you know it's not just about popping up the document on my screen. It's about the documents that are next to it it's about sort of thinking about how it's been collected it's about thinking about even the search terms. And so I think that there are all these different ways in which it's important for archives to be accessible and I obviously want them to be more accessible but it doesn't. Even if it's accessible doesn't mean that I don't necessarily have to go to it physically for my own purposes or my work and, and what I would say is that I mean this again is not original but there's all types of archives and I mean for me. I'm interested in thinking about formal archives and informal archives and my research. I like using state archives like going to the National Archives, whether it's in the United States or Great Britain, and then going to places that are less traveled, but where there are archives which are also there and are want to preserve materials and make them accessible and so I think that it's in some ways it's it's sort of an ongoing question, so I don't know if that answers your question but I don't think that accessibility is just about digitization. I would agree. Absolutely agree I think one of the most important things is to give ownership, I guess to those folks who's, you know those materials do belong to, and give them proper agency on how they are used and, and excess so. Yeah, so I think that's probably what I see as something that will continue to be at the forefront of archival work and I am like not a trained archivist obviously just just by proxy as being a librarian I know I know some things about archival work but I'm definitely not. I wouldn't say I'm an authority on that so I just kind of wanted to grab your opinions. I'll just add one thing to what John has just said. With with just colleague Emily Clark, our colleague in history I started a group, an international group that's based at Tulane that does work in various archives, archives of all kinds, looking for what we're calling histories extras right the people who got written out of the narrative. Sometimes people representing some kind of minority or diversity, but also I work in particular and people who who made it to the stage, and then one thing that we can do is we can create, you know, files dosier to constitute these people as characters themselves who then can be on offer to people doing creative work or staging or, you know, making films or whatever so it isn't just the archive right there's like a whole circular thing of what you find in the archive and then to what public you can bring it, and then what can be done with that. So it's a it's a very rich site and and I think yes accessibility is great but I also think we have to understand that there are different knowledges in different places in the world and we have to go deeper into trying to understand those differences. But something about archives basically I'm, I'm in all of librarians, I'm not just saying this to be to be to sweet talk you guys but it's you have like archives how it seems like an impossible at least to mutually incompatible functions of being of being responsible for an archive. So one is to make the material as open to as many people as possible and two is to protect the material. And to ensure that it survives. And the more people you let touch something, the less less time it's going to survive. And so that this is like an impossible conundrum and digitizing it seems to help. And still, then, I mean, at that point, it raises this like really interesting question which is if it's been digitized, does it matter if it goes, or does that mean that now no one can no one should touch it because it's been digitized. And this is something that working with medieval manuscripts is, which actually a pretty durable I mean they're more durable than paper. Things made a parchment on average and much more, they last a lot, a lot better than paper, but often the once as soon as a book has been digitized. That's it you're not allowed to touch it, unless you can, I don't know unless you have a really like an amazing reason to look at it. And part of the problem when you go into an archive is you never you never quite know what you're going to find and I think this is the genre mentioned. And the touches on things that other colleagues have mentioned as well. And so it's such a hard job for librarians to manage and like I've been at the on the, like on the receiving end of librarians work to protect their archives and being denied access to manuscripts, which is like it's not super fun. But it's, I mean I am just like when taking a moment to stop and think about it is incredibly. It's an amazing job that that that you guys do in libraries and with archives and super grateful. Thank you. I don't want to I know that we're, we're six minutes over. So apologies there. I, everybody seems to be a little quiet today we had a like a bunch of questions yesterday, but today I'll see any, any additional questions. So if you want to thank you again for all attendees and panelists for joining us today. Hopefully we will be able to continue this event and hopefully it's in person next year. Regardless of format though it is something that we plan to continue. It's a fun opportunity to be able to celebrate you all as faculty and as authors and get you all in one space together to chat in this way so again thank you so much and I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day and get some rest over this break. That is, is coming. Thank you for your care you all is great to talk to you today.