Archival Darlings: Vivia and Renee
In which a well-meaning uncle suggests an unorthodox estate planning strategy for two cohabiting women in the 1950s.
I recently got involved with Medieval Leavings, a new, experimental journal trying to give a new lease on scholarly life to shelved projects. It primarily publishes articles that were previously submitted elsewhere and capsized by the vagaries of peer review and editing. The journal is also pioneering an editorial model that is both inclusive of medievalists who do not have tenure-track jobs and humane for everyone involved.
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Paulette Nardal on Augusta Savage
A translation of Paulette Nardal’s “Une Femme sculpteur noire,” a profile of the American artist Augusta Savage.
I’m making available here my translation of the Martiniquaise writer Paulette Nardal’s 1930 profile of American sculptor Augusta Savage, who was working then in Paris. The profile is cited constantly in work on Négritude and Pan-Africanism, but I have been unable to find a complete English version, so I prepared this one for the students in my class on the history of African thought.
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Some Late Antique Exasperation
Two quick re-translations of disappointed letters by Ruricius of Limoges
I recently read two late fifth-century letters from an exasperated father to his good-for-nothing son. The letters are so personal, so biting, so familiar, and this intimacy is somehow expressed in the stultifying conventions of Late Antique Latin: its winding, rhythmic clauses; its recherché vocabulary; its dependence on obscure Classical references. The translation in which I found the letters managed to preserve all of these features when rendering the Latin into English.
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A note on the AHR's Note on Reviews
The AHR is looking into how to review more books outside of the areas of the U.S./Canada and Early Modern/Modern Europe. I compared three years of reviews between the AHR and JAH to try to find out what books aren’t getting reviewed in the field of sub-Saharan Africa.
I love the academic book review, at least at its best. Getting to watch someone with a lifetime of expertise interact with the product of a decade-ish of research and writing, seeing a conversation between two of the few people in the world who know so much about a topic?
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