Field Notes Zero: Re-walking Ireland and Britain

There is a slightly strange relationship to time and space which I like to imagine applies to all scholars who must live in one place and research another. The requirements of the job, community and family tie us to one place - teaching, grading, the grocery store, the gym - and yet we devote so much time to studying distant landscapes from afar. Our chances to be there, to walk in the spaces where our subjects stood, to research in the repositories where their writings are stored, are limited. Money, time, environmental impact, all conspire to make our experience of our research areas constricted, spatially and temporally. For many medievalists I know, it seems so frequently like some sort of high holy yearly assembly: grades submitted, funding secured, over to Europe, packing in as many necessary archives and sites as possible. Then Leeds.

I’m thinking about all of this today for two reasons. The first is that I am a graduate student whose research focuses on landscapes which are quite far away, and over the last year I’ve found myself flitting between many places, trying to make the most of time and space as I bring an (ideally) cohesive dissertation together. The second is that I am a human, who grew up in certain worlds and have moved around quite a bit myself, and the relationship between myself, my communities, and our landscapes is ever-present in my mind.

I posted my last piece of writing on this Substack nearly fourteen months ago, sitting in an airport after the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, wrapping up the third year of my degree. In that academic year, I had presented at conferences both near and far, completed my comprehensive exams, and written (and re-written, and re-written) a dissertation proposal that was theoretically supposed to help guide me in my next years of research. That summer, I traveled around Ireland, Scotland, and England for months, learning (and teaching) archaeological methods, visiting early medieval and ancient landscapes, and finally presenting my own work in Belfast. In the following year I dove into my research and writing, trying to bring together cohesive chapters out of the mess of ideas.

Trying to make sense of all of these places and things, and bring them into some sense of accord with my reading and writing, has been a surprisingly robust chore. This series on the blog - Field Notes - is designed to help me to go back and re-walk, in my mind, the places I traveled last summer, and to share those mental wanderings with you. Along with photos and memories of that season, I want to also explore how it has impacted my research in the following year, and what I hope to get up to in the next one.

If that sounds up your alley, or if you enjoy learning more about early medieval landscapes, make sure to subscribe to keep in the loop!