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A Mysterious Box, Part III
Last week I was reading Jo Catling’s translation of the late W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country. In it Sebald writes that: I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time . . . the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a…
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A Mysterious Box, Part II
Today I have returned to the box of photograph albums (see my previous post). The first album I open is another snapshot of the family at Davos: photos of snow, laughing young people, and warm hostels. There is a wonderful candour and freedom about the photographs here and elsewhere in this collection. When one thinks…
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A Mysterious Box, Part I
Several years ago, I moved into an office being vacated by a professor close to retirement. Our areas of interest were a few hundred years apart, but still close enough that he kindly gave me various books and runs of journals for which he no longer had any use. Along with these he also gave…
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The Scholar as Collector
I am always entranced by other academics’ bookshelves. Whenever I have the occasion to meet someone in their office, I find my mind wandering from the conversation at hand as I squint at the titles of their books and inwardly commend this or that especially intriguing-looking volume. Most often, the books I see are pragmatic…
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Letterpress: Art or Craft?
Anyone who has spent much time in the world of visual and material culture will be familiar with the so-called “art vs. craft debate”. Rooted in early modern and modern western European distinctions between (fine) “art”, e.g., Michelangelo’s David, and (not so fine) “craft”, e.g., a Toby jug, this perceived duality continues to echo through…
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Post-Book Pleasures
One of the nicest things about having submitted my book manuscript has been the suddenly-restored space in which to simply read, think, and tentatively write about new ideas. I’m already working on my latest research project – a study of carved stones in Scotland – but that’s both long-term and expansive in its remit, so…
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Week -4: The Book is Finished!
. . . and it’s away! Shortly before midnight last night I hit send on the e-mail which delivered a full manuscript of The First Scottish Enlightenment to my editor at OUP. Alert readers may have noticed that my actual submission deadline was the end of July rather than the end of August. They may also…
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Conference Season
It’s the middle of conference season, at least for me. While the book continues to occupy most of my time, I’ve also been busy with a few papers which I hope might be interesting and indicative of some of the new directions in which my research has been moving. If you’re there anyway, you might…
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Week 8: A Complete Draft
I began the research project which ultimately led to this book in the summer of 2014 and had been thinking about it for a year or more before that, so it’s almost hard to believe that last week saw me write the final chapter (an unexpected addition which I only realised I needed quite late…
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Week 13: The Best-Laid Schemes . . .
Burns’s “To a Mouse” (1785) is one of those poems so culturally ubiquitous – in Scotland anyway – that its lines have become verbal tics or pieces of linguistic shorthand like Chinese Chengyu. I was reflecting on this while mentally composing the present blog post. A little less than a month ago The Historian and I moved…
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Kelsey Jackson Williams 