My teaching of Ovid always involves a discussion of Persephone's act of resistance to Hades and the ancient belief in the contraceptive properties of pomegranates, so central to the story. I also mention how much I love this fruit. And so my students gave me a pomegranate today.

My Mount Etna figs are doing so well in Baltimore. Got this tree seven years ago when it was a little sprig. With patience and love (and fighting off ravenous squirrels) I have been cultivating this tree that reminds me of home. I love my summer morning ritual to harvest some figs for breakfast.

The beauty of Lake Michigan.

History on the hammock and soccer on my mind.

Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic. Egotism is a despot in a devastated creation.

Liebe ist die Mitherrschende Bürgerin eines blühenden Freistaates. Egoismus ein Despot in einer verwüsteten Schöpfung.

Friedrich Schiller, Philosophical Letters 1797-1798

A little fox (maybe a puppy?) resting in a driveway in our neighborhood.

Lovely, stimulating, and productive conversations at the Mitteleuropa and Central Europe workshop conference at the University of Toronto. Many thanks to @ivan-kalmar.bsky.social for the generous hospitality.

As the semester is wrapping up, a former student who now works in the building stops by to thank me for my courses on Homer, Joyce, Ovid, and the Phoenicians. Overwhelmed by such gratitude, I realize I don’t have a vase for these beautiful flowers. Our department water bottle came to the rescue.

Hi, there. I am new here. This is how I spend most of time, reading in German and Austrian literatures and cultures, as well as Italian and Sicilian fiction. I am interested in how literary texts imagine cultural and political communities across Europe and the Mediterranean.