My starving blog is crying for food! It seems incredible to me that the flow of posts has completely dried up since August. But piles of work this semester combined with increasing eldercare responsibilities have taken all the time that I could stay awake every day. Luckily, there’s a lull in the action — a couple of conference announcements are on their way!

Ms Fr 12420. From Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus

Where have the months gone? I was surprised to find that I last posted as long ago as October, but I suppose that teaching, grading, a research trip, and the supervision of several independent study and thesis students account for how I spent my time well enough. This semester, I’m fortunate to have a sabbatical leave, with the goal of writing up various strands of my research in order to weave them all together into a coherent whole. I’m hoping that this research, along with my usual posts about Tolkien, medievalism, and teaching, will provide more reading material in the coming months. We’ll see how it goes.

Clearly, I underestimated how time-consuming it would be to set up a blog and a Twitter feed for my university department at the same time that I was trying to do the same for myself. But now that I’ve got the department project running smoothly, I can turn my attention back to this blog. I’ve got all kinds of conference news, calls for papers, and reviews and reports to post in the next few days and weeks. Please check back here soon!