A quick word of introduction. I’ve been teaching history in universities since 2005 and researching/writing it in at least a semi-professional way since starting grad school in 2000. I don’t find academic history dull to produce or awful to read or I wouldn’t write it myself. But I hope this provides something a little different. A new venue, a distinct kind of outlet, maybe a different audience.

So I’m starting this blog for three broad reasons:

1. To talk about the historical questions I care about in a new way, and for a different set of readers.
2. To think aloud about the discipline of history, writing, teaching, and the academic world.
3. To test ideas about how these connect to events in the real world, whatever/wherever that is.

I’m new to blogging so the whole thing’s an experiment, but at this point I have no specific plans to post about my children or my cats.

Maybe the title of the blog, “Memorious”, sounds pretentious. It’s from a Borges story, “Funes the Memorious”, and I picked it — ironically? — because it was the only thing I could call to mind when the moment came to type something. But it works. A student of mine pointed me to the story and to the observation in it that “to think is to forget a difference” — which the title character of the story, with perfect memory of details, was incapable of doing. Like the adage that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it — but coming from the opposite direction — it’s a kind of warning.