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Highlights

Here are a few examples of work I'm proud of from the last decade or so, from in-class assignments to program development and public outreach.

La sfera Story Map

Both my teaching and my research involve a lot of data storytelling—that is, seeing patterns in the data (my source material) and explaining why they're significant or interesting, especially in ways that combine media. This is a StoryMap I put together using ESRI's ArcGIS technology when we were first imagining the Sfera Project as a larger project rather than just the transcription exercise it began as. It's also useful as an example because I often use StoryMaps as a final-paper-alternative for my upper-level undergraduate students.

Pandemic Pivot

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we were forced to move our teaching online, my students were no longer able to access the College library to work on final papers, so I divided the final project into a series of smaller weekly assignments that they could do at home, many of which paralleled their own experience with the experience of late medieval Italy during the Black Death. We accordingly named our class website Dispatches from the Brigata, after Boccaccio's group of young people in self-imposed quarantine during the plague.

Manuscripts in the Curriculum

In 2019 I organized an application for the College to host Les Enluminures' Manuscripts in the Curriculum project, a loan program that brings medieval manuscripts to small campuses that don't otherwise have extensive rare materials collections. Click here to read an overview of New College's MITC experience, and here to see the conference posters my students created as final projects.

Experience Points

Over the years, my students have enjoyed assignments that allow them to re-enact historical events, especially in cases of contradictory source materials. Here are some examples:

an mp3 of the 1066 Battle of Hastings done by my Normans class in 2005.
a YouTube video of the 1053 Battle of Civitate (Normans 2008);
a YouTube video of the 1097 Siege of Antioch (Normans 2011) and another from behind the scenes;
a poster from the 1084 Sack of Rome (Normans 2019), on my Teaching page;
a video from the crossover moment when students from Diego Villada's stage combat ISP crashed the Reformation Parliament (Henry VIII LARP 2019).

Program Definition & Coherence

Part of my work with the AHA History Tuning Project was to create a Program Overview that summarized what we do in the History program at New College, and what our students go on to do after New College. But my work to create equity and transparency in the program went beyond that, such as:

Creating a now-required course in Historical Methods as well as a Style Guide to help students understand disciplinary expectations and conventions;
Creating an AOC Worksheet to help students track their progress through the program;
Creating a rubric usable for almost any written History assignment aligned with both our overall program learning outcomes and the senior thesis evaluation rubric we use when students are defending their senior theses in their baccalaureate exams.

The Right Metaphor

When we were creating CYC (Chart Your Course), I was working with a couple of people in Marketing & Communications to create marketing materials for Admissions and current students about what CYC was and what we were trying to do with this new general-education curriculum. We had already come up with the nautically-inflected name Chart Your Course by that point, and one of the Communications people said something along the lines of, "Oh, I get it—CYC is telling students how to get from Point A to Point B!" My immediate response was "No! We're not telling them they want to go to Point B. It's more like we're giving them a map and a compass to figure out where they want to go." In the end, I was thrilled with the materials the department came up with that echoed that idea, using imagery of compasses, a ship's wheel, map calipers, and contour lines to reinforce the underlying "chart" idea.