Learning to write in the tropics

 Human dignity is inherent to all human beings from the time of conception to natural death. There was a time some years ago that it became my job to find sources, whether historical, literary, artistic, eastern or western, that represented and explained this concept. After undergrad I spent a year working at the Catholic University in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and after that I moved to Mexico and then New York interning and working for an organisation called the World Youth Alliance. Their central aim is to put at the centre of policy decisions the human dignity of the person. I worked on reformatting their staff and intern training material, the ideas was to internationalise it, and for me it was important to structure it in what I considered a logical progression.  I spent 6 months exclusively searching and reading texts that dealt with the concept of human dignity understood as inherent. This part was important because there is another understanding of dignity that was more co...

The third year of my degree rolled around with all its intensity. We had been warned by students of previous years that it had the toughest classes and they were not exaggerating.  While the first year had been a year of adapting to the new system the second year had flown by with the now known rhythm of the classes but the third year brought a change in what was expected of us. We were now being taught how to produce history, how to use the archives and the methods to be used. All other disciplines have a history of how they developed but how do you write a history of history? It seems a bit redundant but it is not. The best way to understand it is through the philosophy of history. The history of the debates and theories that formed the discipline of history. History's history can be traced to Herodotus, a greek historian that lived in the Persian empire in Halicarnassus, it can be said that there has always been someone writing down the history of what is going on. Now the moder...

 A year ago I was in South Bend, Indiana for Shrove Tuesday and it was as unexpected as most things tied to the University of Notre Dame have been. There weren't the usual krapfen, pancakes or hojuelas of the several other places where I have celebrated Shrove Tuesday instead I was invited to a Mardi Gras New Orleans style party where I tasted gumbo (I hope I remember that name correctly) and king cake amongst several other sweet deserts more typical of what one associates with the US, like cupcakes.  This year I went Vegan at least in terms of sweets, I made some chickpea flour chocolate chip cookies from the Indian cook Vegan Richa. They really are quite tasty as much as the ingredients are unusual. I really love using gram flour, it is so easy to use and lends itself  to both sweet and savoury.  You may wonder what I would prefer. I don't really know. A delicious pflammkuchen (flatbread pizza Belgian style sold typically in Aachen, Germany) and a krapfen would at ...

 The toughest thing about lockdown has to be not being able to just chat someone up about research or to just go for lunch or a coffee with friends and chat about research.  Somehow zoom calling someone to chat, about research or anything really, is just not as satisfying. This is bizarre, at least in theory. I was just reading through a book I am reviewing, which is highly enjoyable and before starting another chapter I just had the urge to sit down and talk about it, talking helps me to figure things out. What are its connections to my own research? What would I have wanted to know in more depth that the author has not included? And I began wondering who I could zoom or Skype to discuss it with. And somehow it just doesn't work out that way, its just not satifying. I remember in college at Oxford I would just step out to our shared kitchen and somehow there was always someone there and I would just start talking to them and it would just work out. That spontaneity of being a...

Those of you who imagine 18yr old me living in a dorm or mixed college type of accommodation would be wrong. In fact I think few people would guess the type of medieval-like institution I lived in. Medieval in that the structure of a Colegio Mayor in Spain dates back to the late Middle Ages when the first universities were established and is similar to the early Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In Spain they still retain some of their medieval character usually housing university students of the same sex and sometimes hosting lectures as well as cultural activities. In Pamplona they had been founded to imitate as close as possible their medieval predecessors with each colegio having their own chapel, choir, and all the resident students taking their meals together. In Oxford the colleges had historically had curfew but that hadn't existed for a while, in Pamplona they were alive and well. To me it felt like what I imagined an all girls boarding school must feel like. My Colegio, St C...

Florence Nightingale has been creeping into the corner of my eye since the first time I visited Dusseldorf back in 2013. I was visiting my brother's brother-in-law who lived at the time in Kaiserswert, once a village now a suburb of Dusseldorf.  It also happens to be the place where Nightingale trained as a nurse. On that first visit David took me to see her bedroom, which is laid out museum-like in the corner of a still functioning hospital. As with so many other small mementos of historical moments that first year in Germany this visit left me with a sense of awe and a happiness at being able to see places one usually only hears about.  Fastforward to 2020 and corona-style seminars. The one positive thing of 2020 has been the availability of zoom seminars from all corners of the globe, time differences permitting. Through one of these I met an American midwife settled in Suffolk, England. When she found out my research into German midwifery she very excitedly told me of a pr...

 Pamplona is the capital of the historic principality of Navarra and the only place on this earth where I have a seen a university cafeteria selling wine at lunchtime. Navarra is naturally very beautiful with  valleys and high snow covered mountains. It is also wine producing country and a glass of homegrown grape juice is quite normal hence the option of wine or coffee with the daily meal. This was also true of our Sunday meals at the nuns residence and on Church Feast day's. But the biggest wine imbibing festivity   in the region is San Fermines. For years I found it annoying that the one reference people had, if they had any, of Pamplona was the running of the bulls. During the first week of July the sleepy university town turns into an international festival made popular by Hemingway, and then later word of mouth, amongst party tourists.  One year I decided to stay on after finals to see what all the fuss was about. Hemingway had been to Pamplona and to festiviti...