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From the Observer: Why the Incas offered up child sacrifices | Science | The Observer
It’s possible that some of you will be aware that my undergraduate dissertation was about the Aztecs and rooted in a course that I took on ‘The First Hundred Years of the Spanish in America‘. I’ve never quite managed to shake my interest in all things Aztec, Inca and Conquistador, so this article in the…
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Wicken Fen
By far the most exciting visit we made on our trip to Cambridge was to Wicken Fen Nature Reserve. Apparently it’s the fifth oldest National Trust property and it was absolutely brilliant. I’ve liked dragonflies ever since I was a child, possibly because I see less of them than other insects, and Wicken Fen is…
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Cambridge Archives
I spent this week in Cambridge. I’ve not been back to Cambridge since I went to the folk festival in 1994, where I got showered in (someone else’s) beer when the Saw Doctors came on stage and everyone cheered. That was before I got my A-level results. At eighteen, I was offered a place at…
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Additions and Ornaments to the Bare Grant of a Living: Elizabeth Gaskell, the ‘Manchester Guardian’ and Cultural Value in 1914
Originally posted on misplacedhabits: When doing some research for a small project I am involved in, I came across this wonderful passage on the value of the arts in the Manchester Guardian, written in the context of a campaign to purchase Mrs Gaskell’s house for the city after her daughter, Meta, had died in 1913.…
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Juggling
Juggling, I have discovered this week, isn’t easy. I can only assume that this time last year I was so taken up with the prospect of moving house that the PhD took a back seat to packing boxes and playing with my children. I didn’t have my summer panel meeting until the middle of August…
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Psalm Culture and the Politics of Translation
This week I finally have something a bit different to say. I am aware, you see, that writing a blog about writing a PhD is a bit repetitive: “read some ballads, thought about the music, wrote about some ballads, went to a supervision meeting, did some more research, wrote a bit more, read some secondary…
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Summer Holidays
Yesterday, my three children broke up for the summer. This will have a significant, negative impact on the amount of work I get done, of course, but that was always part of the deal. My summer action plan contains lots of little bits of work that can be broken off part way through, like transcriptions,…
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Summer Panel Meeting
This week I had my fourth panel meeting, which was a very interesting experience. I wouldn’t exactly say I enjoyed it, but it was certainly stimulating and it wasn’t quite so scary as previous ones had been. I’d sent in a chapter on putting ballads back together with their music, a short piece of writing…
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There it was, gone
A funny sort o f week. Today I sent off all my work for my panel meeting, which is scheduled for next week. My supervisors certainly have plenty to keep them busy – my research plan, training log and chapter plan don’t take up too much space, but the draft chapter on combining music and…
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Day Trip to London
Today I’ve been to London and back for a meeting of the branches and members committee of the Historical Association. We finished earlier than expected so I spent an hour and a half in the British Museum. I had a look round the Mexican gallery, as always, as I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the…
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