Hello out there on August 20, 2014

Hello! It's exciting to set up this blog. I've never done this, but - as I am working out a one-on-one course with a student, and might assign a blog as a project component of the course, thought I'd better see how blogging actually works before I require a student to start one. It seems easy enough, so far. I am a Historian, and it is in that role that I am putting this blog together, and teaching this Directed Studies course. The course will likely be about identity in medieval England - an excellent topic. My own specialization in historical research, though, is trauma, survival, memory and self in Early Modern and Modern European and British history. This is the field of study in which I spend most of my time, really - it's fascinating. It doesn't hurt that I am someone who has incorporated the reality of PTSD in my own life, having survived molestation by a family friend as a child, and rape as an adult. Counselors have determined that I am 'high-functioning' as a person with PTSD, and I agree, but 'functioning' is really such a wildly subjective categorization, I think. In my professional life, I love challenges, and research, and teaching. As the Chair, or Head, of an academic department at a university, life is full of challenges, seldom identical to anything I've encountered before, so it sometimes seems like every single day is a completely new, unfathomable, thrill-a-minute amusement park ride. I'll be posting items here that somehow connect to trauma, memory, PTSD, and perhaps other matters, as things arise. I had better get along now - I'm at work, after all!