I will here collect over time various papers that are not published, but which may be of interest to readers.
• An introduction to the life of the book in antiquity. If you’ve ever wondered about what a bookroll (“scroll”) was like for the Greeks and Romans, this is for you. It is designed for a general audience of bibliophiles, as part of the Mellon-Sawyer seminar at the University of Iowa on Manuscripts in Eurasia. There are lots of images to help you begin to see these materials with an expert eye.
From Bookroll to Codex: the story of the ancient book in Greece and Rome
• A collection of occasional remarks having to do with Duke Kunshan University. In Fall of 2014 I was one of the inaugural faculty at Duke Kunshan University, 昆山杜克大学, the new China campus that opened Fall 2014, in partnership with Duke, in Jiangsu province, just outside Shanghai. I also had the honor of serving as the first Chair of Faculty at DKU, and in that role I spoke both at the convocation that opened this new university, and at the closing ceremony for the inaugural class of students.
• A talk I gave on the film Agora. In the piece, I look into the way that our attempts to imagine Greco-Roman antiquity are inflected through the imaginings that we know from Hollywood, and that that in turn is influenced by paintings from the art nouveau period. This movie is a great vehicle for thinking about how we go about imagining the past.
Imagining the Great Library of Alexandria: Cultural History and the Reconstruction of Antiquity [COMING]
