The Beldonstevens Blog

Jenny and I have lived in this building, "Castle Arms," since May 2021. We never suspected that the sign for our cross street, Howard,...

I was honored to prepare this translation from Marie-Hélène Lafon's "Les Pays," a beautifully observed portrait of a young woman's...

For anyone needing to reach me about matters academic (e.g., letters of recommendation, thoughts about scholarship, etc.), my longterm...

Inspired by conversation a couple weeks back with fellow h̶a̶r̶d̶-̶c̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶r̶d̶s̶ scholars of classical receptions in science...

A recipe for braided brioche with baklava-style filling.

Here are two of the three courses I'm offering in spring 2022; for each I give the description from the Courses of Study Bulletin and a...

Over the summer, Trinity’s department of Classical Studies—alongside History and Philosophy—has been moving into new offices in a...

This past semester I had the great pleasure of teaching, for the first time, a course I'd long imagined on "Ancient Worlds in Film & TV."...

A week into social distancing, March 16 2020, I wrote: "A thousand years ago, it was last Monday." Those first seven days felt so...

Perhaps I'm not alone in feeling it strange that registration for the fall semester has started? For me, at least, the ongoing crisis has...

A quick first-night-of-Passover post, on a Passover that is both strange and good--and, so, exemplifies the holiday's central feeling:...

The Jewish holiday of Passover (in Hebrew פסח, pesach) starts this week: at sundown on Wednesday 8 April in the 'Gregorian' calendar, or...

In a previous post, I wrote about how I've been thinking through the present situation with help from students in my course on "Ancient...

After a two week hiatus--the first week as scheduled for Spring Break, the second needed as my University, like most others, reconfigured...

"An hour a day, every day, for a year": that's how I answer whenever anyone asks me how I've managed to learn so many languages--and how...

For our final full day in Paris, Jenny and I had separate plans for the daylight hours before reuniting for a fancy dinner after dark:...

After the Louvre, Jenny and I managed--unusually on this trip, in a Paris in the grip of transit strike--to take the métro: it wasn't...

Thursday in Paris was devoted to two biggies, in different ways, the first absolute and the other relative to us: first, the Louvre, the...

As a third stage of our visit to Paris, Jenny and I combined more focused explorations of the city's histories of Christian and Jewish...

For our third day in Paris (Monday--eep, I'm really behind), Jenny and I aimed at more recent histories of the city--of-'about' and...