Chris Tilley

I heard this morning that Chris Tilley died last night in Brighton UK. A shock of loss and then sadness at what has gone, and also what might have been — he had just always been there, after so much we shared when we were much younger. Intellectual and collegial companionship at its best. From…

Mike Pearson – theatre/archaeology

Mike Pearson died last week. He was a performance artist, theatre director, theorist and philosopher, scholar and teacher. And, as composer John Hardy said, Mike collaborated and connected – visual design, architectural stagecraft, poets, playwrights, composers, experimental jazz musicians, dancers, disability & gender specialists, comics, community art conveners, museum curators, traditional Japanese theatre performers, Patagonian farmers,…

Studio update – Spring 2022

This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…

insignificants

A marvelous talk today at Stanford from Tim Flohr Sørensen (Copenhagen) about his project – Insignificants – [Link]. So much in a short report on such a beautifully simple experiment. Archaeologists often pride themselves on taking up what is overlooked, insignificant, discarded as irrelevant, detritus, mere traces, garbage. But what does this involve? What happens…

rubric for a doctoral dissertation

See alsoA personal learning manifesto – [Link]A learning manifesto – pragmatics – [Link] Two members of my studio/lab at Stanford have successfully defended their doctoral dissertations this year. Congratulations to Anne Duray and Anja Krieger with their research into the history of archaeological approaches to the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in Greece (Anne), and the…

Reconstructing Classics – voice

Part 2 of a review of Confronting Classics, by Mary Beard [Link]. Some tactics for challenging the orthodox monologue of academic Classical Studies and opening space to hear other voices. What is Classical Studies about? Mary Beard argues that Classics is not about ancient Greece and Rome at all, but about what happens in the…