#writing a research paper about the renaissance

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

a self-esteem guidebook: learning to embrace your imperfect self (1992) - kenneth a. beavers

"exploding you with my mind"

[reiderwriter]

Hii! Could you write a Spencer x fem reader, she's extremely confident & forward and Spencer gets all flustered, shy and overwhelmed at how forward she is with flirting with him and complimenting him (even tho he loves it), thank you:-)

A/N: This was such a cute request, thanks for sending it in! I love shy and oblivious Spencer he's so silly and cute ㅠㅠ

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female Reader

Genre: pure fluff

Word Count: 2k

Summary: Spencer Reid is a genius. But if he hasn't noticed you've been flirting with his for a week straight, he must be an idiot. Non-BAU!Reader.

Warnings: Alcohol intake. Kissing. Slightly suggestive ending.

Here's my masterlist, requests are open! 🎉

Working with the FBI as a consultant on a case was practically a dream come true for you, but what was even more dreamy was the man you got to work with whilst consulting. You’d arrived bright and early, really eager to help with the case you’d been called in for. On the phone, Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner had asked for your help decoding some documents that the team thought had something to do with the Literature you were teaching as part of your course at a local university.

In all honesty, you were a massive fan of detective novels, an early love for Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of mystery making you entertain an idea in law enforcement before you decided that really wasn’t for you, so you were eager to help out in anyway you could fathom.

“One of our Special Agents, Doctor Reid, has decoded most of it, but he says there are some key areas he may be missing and he wants to pick your brains, to see if you can help him come up with something,” he said, guiding you into a small sideroom.

Having previously heard that Doctor Spencer Reid had achieved no less than three PhDs and three additional Bachelor's Degrees in varying subjects, you weren’t quite sure to expect when walking into the room. You certainly weren’t expecting one of the prettiest men you’d ever seen in your life to be sat reading through a pretty thick tome at an incredible speed.

“Reid, this is Professor Y/L/N, she’s here to help you decode the cypher. Professor, this is Doctor Spencer Reid.” Hotchner introduced you, but as soon as you picked your jaw up off the floor, you instantly stepped forward.

“Please, call me Y/N. It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you… Spencer was it?” You smile and stick out your hand. You notice the flush on the man's face and your grin grows even wider as he hesitates to take your hand.

“I’m sorry, I don’t really shake hands, the number of pathogens passed during a handshake is staggering. It's actually safer to kiss.” He stutters through the words, almost struggling to get them out, but you don’t falter for a second.

“Kiss me then,” you say smirking up at him and you realise that the other agent had since left the room, leaving you alone with the object of your affections. Ignoring your response, but face tinged such a bright shade of red that you knew he was effected by it, he dives into the facts of the case.

“We think that he’s using some kind of cypher based on some books you’ve been researching recently at the University, which means we think he could possibly be a student of yours. I read through your PhD thesis this morning, and there are certain commonalities that suggest you could be the key to solving some of our unknowns.”

“You read my thesis? What did you think of it?” you ask, moving to sit in the chair directly next to him, scooting it a little bit closer than was polite.

“I don’t have a degree in Literature of the Renaissance Period, so I’m not sure how much value my opinion really holds in this scenario,” he looks at you and you’re pleasantly surprised at how genuine he’s being.

“Well, you’ve seen mine, can I see yours?” you allow the cogs in his brain to keep turning for a few seconds then continue. “I’m sure with three PhDs to your name, you’ve probably got a few research papers floating about, right?”

“Oh….” he blushes again, turning his eyes away from you and doing his best not to make eye contact. “I’m sure I could send them to you after we’ve completed this case if you think they would allow you a deeper insight into any of my fields of study.” He coughs a little to hide the way his voice pitched up as he spoke and kept his eyes trained on the book in his hands.

This consulting role was going to be the most fun you’d had in weeks.

–X–

A week later, you found yourself sat at a bar, surrounded by the members of the BAU team celebrating another case closed, but you couldn’t find it in yourself to fully partake in their merryments exactly. You’d assumed, after an entire week of flirting very openly with Reid, that when he’d asked you to the bar that evening to celebrate wrapping up the case, he’d meant just the two of you. Alas, you had discovered over the week that not only was he the most adorable man you’d ever met, he was also the most oblivious. Impressive for a man with an IQ of 187.

You couldn’t complain too much. Your help on the case had meant the rescue of two young girls, two of your students in undergrad courses nonetheless, so you’d at least made a difference. You had nothing against the rest of the team either, having become fast friends with Garcia, and enjoying your twenty minutes of small ltalk in the morning at the coffee station with Prentiss, Morgan and JJ as well. Hell, you even loved Rossi, who gave off the fun Uncle vibe that you found rounded out the team well. But you couldn’t curb your disappointment still, so you distanced yourself from the table a bit and removed yourself to the bar to grab yourself a new drink. You stayed there for a few minutes to nurse it.

“Hello, beautiful,” the man sat at the barstool next to you leered down at you, “you looking for some company in the bottom of that glass tonight?” He winked at you and your skin crawled. It wasn’t just his creepy smile, and the disgusting way he dragged his eyes over your body, it was that he was also very likely older than your own father. Some people were into that, but you certainly weren’t

“Not today, thanks,” you said, hoping that would be enough to get him to leave you in peace, but of course it wasn’t.

“Hot piece of ass like you, you need a real man to take care of you.” He pushed his hand out and for a split second you were convinced he was going to make an attempt to smack your ass. Before he was able to make contact, and, perhaps more importantly, before you could be arrested for aggravated assault, a hand was wrapping around your hip and pulling you away from the man, your back colliding with a firm chest behind you.

“Y/N, Special Agent Hotchner is about to leave and he wanted to thank you for coming to consult for us. The FBI is always really grateful for conscientious citizens like you willing to help us keep the streets safe.” Spencer turned you around and said, emphasising words to make it clear what his job was, speaking loudly enough that you knew the words were only for the creep behind you who’d thought to lay a hand on you.

“Thanks, Spencer,” you said as the man downed the rest of his drink and made to leave the bar, obviously embarrassed and threatened by Spencer’s arrival. He made to loosen his grip on you as the man left, but you through your arms around his neck, not letting him leave. If this was your last opportunity to make him realise what you wanted, you absolutely weren’t going to let it get away from you.

“I wanted to thank you for this week as well, Spencer. Hotch said it was you that recommended me for the consulting role.” He blushed and stood there a little awkwardly, but made no move to leave, his hands unmoving from your hips. It reminded you of your middle school prom, in all honesty.

“Oh that’s no big deal. It worked out pretty well in the end, though, right, with your students and everything.” You nodded and thanked him again, but you were still pretty reluctant to see him walk away, back to the table filled with his closest friends and colleagues.

“So, are you looking forward to going back home? I’m sure your boyfriend or husband or whatever will be really glad to see you again.” He mumbled and you felt your heart stop for a second.

“Spencer, I don’t have a boyfriend. Or a husband, or any kind of partner for that matter. I’m sorry if I made you think I do,” you saw his eyes widen in panic a little, and you relaxed a bit yourself as he started to talk again.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed that someone as pretty as you couldn’t be single.” He stuttered every single word out, and you didn’t quite register his words for a second.

“You think I’m pretty?” you ask looking up at him and he gapes down at you, realising this conversation is just him shooting himself in the foot over and over again.

“Shit… what I mean is…Y/N you have to know you’re gorgeous, right?” It was your turn to blush then, feeling the sincerity in his words.

“You know, I thought you were asking me out on a date tonight.” You tell him, watching his entire face crumple again in distress.

“But I told you we were going out to celebrate finishing the case!” He spoke in his defence.

“Spencer, what were your exact words?”

“Y/N, do you want to grab a drink tonight? It would be nice to celebrate now that the case is closed and- oh. OH.” The realisation dawned on his face, and you enjoyed the little look of devastation that played out there as his blush deepened.

“It’s fine, Spencer, really. If you’re not interested in me, you’re not interested, I get it.” You sighed, finally moving to let him go, resigned to your fate now.

“Wait, Y/N, that’s not what I meant!” He grabbed you by the hand gently, not quite as close as you were the moment before but still standing notably close. You realised you probably had an audience for this.

“I didn’t realise that you’d want to go on a date with me, you’re so beautiful and smart, I just never thought you’d be interested.” Your brain almost exploded with that, and you had to make a conscious effort to not have your jaw drop to the floor, but apparently the man wasn’t finished. “I just assumed you had a flirty personality, and like, really look at you and then look at me-” you absolutely had to cut him off before he said anything else, so you did.

Crashing your lips up into his was the most sensible thing you’d done since stepping into the bar that evening. He was statuesque at first, unmoving while your lips pressed against him, but he warmed up to it and began kissing you back with equal fervor. You moved the hands that were holding yours to your waist, then moved your own hands up to tangle in his hair, playing with a few curls at the base of his neck.

After a few minutes, you finally pulled away to see a dumbstruck expression on his face.

“Oh. Oh, I see now,” was all he could get out, unable to form more words as he panted into the space between you,

“Yeah? That’s good. I’ve been flirting with you all week, so it’s nice of you to finally notice.” You giggle up at him slowly, and he tightens his grip on your waist.

“What should….what should I do now?” He asked, obviously a little bit unsure of himself, and happy to let you take the lead.

“Well, you can either take me back to your place now, or you could start with asking me out on that date?” He looked like he was seriously weighing up his options for a minute, before he looked you in the eye again.

“Can I do both?”

--X--

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[dresshistorynerd]

kinda random question but how do you go about researching? I’ve wanted to get deeper into fashion history than just watching youtube videos, but I don’t really know where to start.

ps. thanks for making such detailed posts. they’re really interesting to read.

Thank you! I'm really glad you've found my posts interesting!

This is great since I've kinda answered this in replies couple of times, but not properly. I very much understand the struggle. Dress history is a relatively new academic field and there's not that much reliable sources available and so so much unreliable sources everywhere. Internet of course has this problem but so does a lot of books too.

I thought this would be a short one and yet, here we are again.

Disclaimer: I'm writing this from a western fashion history perspective, since that's what I know best, but especially reading up on academic research and doing primary source research applies to non-western cultures too, though often it's harder to find sources for non-western fashion.

Getting started

Imo the best place to getting started is to read a book that gives a general timeline of fashion through history. I'm not sure if that's just how my brain works, but it helped me a lot of when going deeper into one period or another to understand the broader context and what roughly came before and what after. However these books are inherently difficult to make well, because there's so much nuance and variation in every period of dress history and if you're writing about the whole timeline through thousands of years and keeping it book length, there will need to be a lot of simplification to the point of inaccuracy. There's many popular fashion history timeline books with illustrations made for the book, but I would avoid those since non-contemporary illustrations often give a distorted image of the fashion, especially when it's about earlier periods in history. I've seen some really inaccurate illustrations depicting Middle Ages and Renaissance especially.

Costume and fashion: a concise history by James Laver - I'd recommend this as the starting point. James Laver was a art historian, an important pioneer of fashion history and curator of Victoria and Albert Museum, which has one of the most extensive costume collections now. The book is therefore based on serious academic study, but being a pioneer means you'll be outdated, when the field is more established, which is partly the case with this book. There's some outdated parts, but the images are primary sources and it does give good historical background. It should be taken as a starting point, not as the end point.

A History of Fashion by J. Anderson Black and Madge Garland - This is another similar book. It's more recent, but it also suffers from some outdated parts. The writers are not academics, but it has more primary source pictures which does help (at least me) understand visually what's being said.

Books

In a given subject I'm researching I usually start with seeing if I can find a reliable book on it or related to it, if I haven't already read much on it. Often what I want to research goes deeper into details than what a book usually does, so it will work as a starting point. As said it can be hard to find these books that are actually reliable, but here's couple of reading lists to help with it.

Here's a reading list by a retired professor of dress history from Helsinki University. It's very extensive and has a wide variety of books and papers listed. There's a bit of leaning towards Finnish sources, but most are in English and about more international western fashion.

Here's a reading list by @clove-pinks, who is excellent and writes a lot about the Romantic period, especially men's fashion here on Tumblr. These are all books that can be read free on Internet Archive, which makes the list even better.

Internet sources

There's a lot of bad sources floating around in the internet, but also some excellent gems. As dress history is such a new field, there's a lot of unexplored spots and lacking research still, but some troopers in the internet have done some great legwork in going through primary sources and gathering them together. These can be excellent especially when trying to research a specific garment, since often these blog posts are by historical costumers, who are detailing their background research in reconstructing a specific garment. It's not always easy to find them, since they might not come up in the first page of the google search, but I often find them through pinterest, where the blogs are linked into the primary source images and images of the reconstructed garments. Though be sure to look with blogs like that with critical eye. The best sign that it's reliable is when each image is given a source.

There's some more general sources too that need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Fashion History Timeline - This is a page with entries to the whole timeline of fashion as well as entries of specific garments. It's very well sourced and has usually pretty good image sources too. I will say though that it often gives a pretty limited description of the period focusing on some specifics, without giving a good overall picture, especially in the Medieval sections. The medieval sections are honestly pretty useless. It's at it's best in 19th century imo (I haven't checked out the entries to 20th century since I rarely research vintage styles, but I'd assume they are pretty good too). But since it has great sourcing it is usually informative. It just shouldn't be relied upon to give full picture of a period.

Wikipedia, History of Western fashion - In some ways this is the opposite of Fashion History Timeline. Wikipedia has articles on each period. The sourcing on these articles is often quite lacking and the information shouldn't be taken at face value. Especially the terms for the garments are often used in these articles in very questionable ways. However what these articles have is pretty good primary source image collections, and what is nice is that in Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern periods they are often divided into regions, and they often have images of working class clothing, which are for some periods really hard to find. These articles often don't either give a full picture of the period, but in someways the basic picture of the period is easier to grasp from these than from Fashion History Timeline. I use these mostly for the primary source images, and the texts of them should be taken with a bucket of salt.

Academic papers

Going deeper into something will inevitably require reading up on some academic papers. I'm lucky since I get access to a lot of academic publications through my uni, but JSTOR (my beloved) gives free access to 100 papers per month (you'll just have to make an account). Through google scholar you can search for papers on a given subject, or if you don't have access to other publications, you can just use JSTOR's search engine.

Primary sources

If some MVP hasn't already combed through primary sources to gather them on a give subject, you can do that too. It's not necessarily an easy task though. There's thankfully a perfect guide for that.

A Handbook of Costume by Janet Arnold - Janet Arnold was a legendary dress historian, who really defined the modern field. This book details the process of researching dress history and how to analyze primary sources. And it's free on Internet Archives.

I'll give some basics here though.

Extant garment

Most of us who are not academic historians don't have physical access to extant garment, but many museums have nowadays excellent digital archives of their costume collections. Here's a list of the most well known ones. MET and V&A has sometimes great descriptions of the clothing and their history, but not for every item.

MET Costume Institute

Kyoto Costume Institute

LACMA

V&A Costume Collection

Palais Galliera

Extant garments are of course the ideal sources to study, since they are the actual garments and not just representations or descriptions of them. Sometimes the collections even have pictures of the insides of the garments, giving invaluable information about their construction. However, extant garments have limitations for research, since there's a strong survivorship bias. Firstly, they heavily lean on later periods as textiles deteriorate relatively quickly. You won't find extant garments from Middle Ages, at most fragments of them. Secondly, they are mostly clothing of the upper classes. Lower classes used their clothing till they broke down, and even then often salvaged any fabric that could be salvaged for new clothing and other textiles. Upper classes didn't necessarily have to do that, so what survives is usually very expensive formal clothing that people would wear rarely and rather preserve than salvage the fabric from it.

Photography

Since camera was popularized in early Victorian era, you don't get photos before that. Photography is a great source from the times it was available, since yes it's still only representation of the clothing, but there's less artistic interpretation than in paintings and illustrations, though importantly, there still is artistic interpretation. As long as there has been photography, there has been photoediting. They of course used it for creepypasta purposes by editing them holding their own heads and editing ghosts into backgrounds, but also editing their waists smaller. Basically the exact same way photos are still edited. So no, this is not really how small the waist got in Edwardian era, since this is edited.

Another obvious limitation for early photography is that it didn't have colors, so popular colors of a given time period and given styles have to be found through other means. A great thing about photography though was that compared to painting, it was relatively cheap, and therefore a lot of lower class people were able to photograph themselves. We even get people outside in everyday situations not posing.

Photography can be found with search engines like google and pinterest, though they should be always sourced then. You sometimes come across very Victorian looking photos that are actually just modern photos that are well edited. And also it's important to date the photos, which might not be easily with photos just randomly floating in the internet. Libraries and museums sometimes have good digital collections of old photos. For example:

Digital collections of New York Public Library (NYPL) - It has a wide variety of collections including photography, fashion plates and other illustrations. I haven't found a great way to search through the collections, but the best way I've come up with is to search images within the Clothing & Dress topic, put some limiting filters, then click some right looking image and then go to the collection it was from. I bet there's an easier way but I haven't figured it out.

Paintings

A great thing about paintings and statues is that they date basically through whole history of organized civilizations. Paintings are more delicate so even with murals in antiquity, you'll get more surviving status from that time period. But because of the strong artistic interpretation inherent to these art forms, there's some tricky parts to them as sources for historical fashions.

You'll find a lot of paintings by just searching for fashion or paintings of a given period in google and pinterest, but it's sometimes tricky to source them to figure out where and when they were painted. Therefore I often check from Wikipedia a list of artists from a given time and place, and search their paintings from digital archives of museums. It also helps when you choose artists who were specialised in specific type of paintings. What kind of paintings depends on what you're researching and the time period.

Portraits are of course great sources. They depict the actual clothing an actual person wore and if the person was historically important enough you can find out who they were and gain a lot of context for the clothing. However, they are usually all rich people, though not always. Another thing to keep in mind is that sometimes portraits portray the subject in a costume. This became a pretty big trend among nobles in 18th century. They had costume parties and would have their portrait painted with their costume, but also there were trends of costume that were not even worn for parties, but only for having a portrait. Sometimes the painting would be painted like a scene and not like traditional portrait. Van Dyke costume (first picture below) in first half of 18th century paintings is one such example. It referred to mid 17th century fashion that was seen as timeless at the time. Peasant costume (second picture below) is another example of a popular costume for nobles to wear in portraits. Costume balls continued to 19th century, but after the popularization of camera they were mainly photographed. People would continue to dress up in costumes for portraits, but it wasn't as big of a trend as in 18th century.

Genre paintings were a genre of paintings that became popular first in 16th century Low Countries and then In Netherlands/Belgium area during the Dutch Golden Age (from late 16th century and thorough Baroque) and during Baroque's popularity all over Europe. Genre paintings depict normal everyday life of peasants, working class people and the bourgeois. During Baroque they often had elements of idealization, symbolism and even sexualization of the subjects, so they should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do usually depict accurately the clothes the people wore. Rococo era had a lot of these types of everyday scenes about the upper class. During the Romantic era peasants were heavily romanticized in genre paintings, but there was also a lot of genre paintings of bourgeois thorough 19th century that was wasn't as strongly romanticized. These scenes were sometimes also depicted in portrait form. Realism brought another interest into the genre and Realistic genre paintings often focused on the working class. They did the opposite of romanticism though and often exaggerated their subjects to look more wretched.

History paintings depict events and scenes that were for the time historical too. They became very popular in 19th century, when Historism was the dominant in arts, but they have existed long before. There's even some from late Medieval period, and in those earlier history paintings, the historical figures are usually depicted in contemporary clothing and there's no attempt at recreating historical styles. In later periods, especially during 19th century Historism they very much tried to recreate historical styles. This is why it's important to always source paintings. I've too often seen Victorian paintings used as images for Medieval fashions.

Religious paintings have sometimes a bit of the same issue. They were very popular during Medieval and Renaissance eras, and usually the biblical figures would be depicted in contemporary fashions, though not always, sometimes in vaguely "biblical garbs". Religious paintings also have the issue of often being highly symbolic, so sometimes the characters in them are not dressed for the situation, or a character that in the biblical canon very poor is depicted in upper class contemporary fashions.

Illuminated manuscripts

Medieval manuscripts with illustrations are invaluable sources for Medieval fashions. They are usually commissioned by royalty and detail historical narratives, so they mostly depict royalty and nobility, but some illustrated scenes depict commoners too. You often find images of the illustrations floating around in pinterest but they can be hard to source when the source is not linked (which is quite often). The illustrations can be spotted by the quite consistent style (though sometimes they are not from illuminated manuscripts but some other rarer illustrations like playing cards).

A lot of illuminated manuscripts have been digitized and British and French libraries have quite extensive online collections of them which are linked below. The manuscrips in those are mostly English and French of course but there's manuscrips from other places in Europe too, I've seen quite a lot of the German speaking area especially.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) The British Library

Fashion plates

Fashion plates became a thing in 1780s, so they are not useful for periods before that. They are basically illustrations that show the latest trends and they were published in fashion magazines. They don't reflect the way everyone dressed, since as they did show the latest high fashion and the people who would be wearing that were mostly young rich fashionable people. However, fashion at the time had a little different meaning than today as it was linked to dress code, and to be respectable you needed to follow fashion. So everyone, even working class people, would follow the new trends to an extent. This is especially true when we get to Victorian era, when mass industrial mass production and the emerging middle class made clothing cheaper and more available to more people. They wouldn't maybe follow every new trend or with every detail and with as much extravaganza or with the most expensive fashionable materials.

While the fashion plates didn't necessarily depict specific existing clothing, they were based on existing clothing and they were often used as guides for dressmakers. Kinda like you might go to a hairdresser with a picture of a famous person's hair or hairdressers sometimes use pictures of famous person's hair to show what they might do. And the people who might not afford something as extravagant as shown in a fashion plate, might still show it as a guide and get a simpler version of it made for them. People of the middle and lower classes especially would also use them as guides to sew themselves fashionable clothing.

Fashion plates are quite easily found on the internet, but as with other things, if you don't go straight to some organized archive, it might be really hard to date them accurately. Many bigger museums and libraries have fashion plates in their online archives, for example NYPL which I mentioned earlier.

MET Fashion Plate Collection - This is a pretty extensive collection.

Regional costume illustrations

When genre paintings became popular, artists didn't necessarily have the change to go and see what peasants wore in the places they were setting their genre paintings in, but because the whole point of them was to depict authentic real life, there was a need for illustrations of regional dress around Europe. And some artists would travel and create costume collections for resource to other artists. These are really invaluable to us today, though they should always be taken with a grain of salt, because sometimes the artists who created these drew dresses for places they never had even been in. For example some of these collections include non-European dress and they should all be probably disregarded as fantasy costumes basically. You can usually assume that the closer the region which dress they depict is to their own place of origin, the more accurate and based on reality it is. It's also good to try and google the artist and see if you can find information of where they actually traveled, because sometimes we know that pretty well.

These collections can also be found in the digitized archives of big museums and libraries, again there's some in NYPL collections.

British Museum's collections by Hippolyte Lacomte from 19th century

A collection from late 16th century on BnF archives

Honorable mentions

There's many other primary sources in different periods that can be helpful, but the ones I've mentioned are the major ones and easiest to access, when you're not doing academic research with institutional resources. I thought I might mention couple of other sources that have become handy to me as examples.

Magazine and news paper ads became wide spread in the Victorian era and from that onward is a great source. They advertise specifically ready-made clothing, so clothing that was much more available to a regular person and therefore can be really helpful to understand what a regular person might wear. I don't know a great source for them though. Many libraries have digitized old papers and magazines so going through fashion magazines is perhaps the best bet, but it's definitely a lot of combing though. Some people have though gathered ads in blogs.

Satiric comics can be surprisingly helpful for researching sort of alternative styles and seeing what trends garnered backlash. For example I've long been obsessed with Aestheticism and the other counter-cultural movements related to it, and there's quite a lot of women's Aesthetic extant garments, photos and paintings available, but very little of men's Aesthetic fashion. But then I found that Punch Magazine (conservative satire magazine) loved mocking the Aesthetes and therefore drew a lot of comics with men in Aesthetic fashion. Caution should be taken though since satiric illustrations do often exaggerate for comedic effect. For example the idea that 1770s ladies made ships out of their massive hair comes from a satiric illustration mocking the large and elaborate hair of the time.

Runaway ads of slaves and indentured servants are bleak, but can be helpful source for the clothing of poor people during 18th century. This is specific to US, but because of the colonialism poor people there would often wear at least similar clothing as those in Europe, especially Britain and France, which had the most colonial presence in that region. The clothes were described in great detail in these ads for identification purposes. These runaway ads can be also found in news papers of the era, many of which are digitized in archives of bigger US libraries, but it's definitely even more combing through. Though again some people have done some of that work already and documented it in blogs.

[all-inmoderation]

"About the Blogger" Meme

thanks for tagging me <3 @razielim

Star Sign(s): Gemini sun (Libra moon, Libra rising)

Favorite Holidays: Eid, and my birthday hehe

Last Meal: Cereal

Current Favorite Musician: Well, Kendrick Lamar was in my top artists for spotify wrapped this year because I listened to his latest album a lot, so I guess him

Last Music Listened To: First Person Shooter by Drake ft. Jcole lol

Last Movie Watched: omg I watched the movie Nimona and loved it! and before that I was obsessed with Across the Spiderverse for months.

Last TV Show Watched: Just started watching Blue Eye Samurai. its soooooo gooddd. and before that I watched Arcane (i'm late) and I also loved that. and before before that I watched The Bear (wow thats a lot of shows in a short period of time i dont usually even have the stamina to watch shows ngl). Has anyone noticed that Caitlyn Kiramman and Mizu look very similar ? lol

Last Book/Fic Finished: omg THE sydcarmy fic "Fundamentals for the Fun and the Mental" by @bioloyg

Last Book/Fic Abandoned: damn idk, maybe the academic books I have to read for my intro to islam class. those thangs are hefty im not reading more than what is assigned

Currently Reading: Islamic Feminism in Iran by Fereshteh Ahmadi. it's research for my final paper in the intro to islam class. very interesting and enlightening tbh

Last Thing Researched for Art/Writing/Hyperfixation: see above. my topic for the paper looks at how iranian muslim women have reconciled with their religion as it was being used against them pre and post-revolution. there's a lotttt of material out there on the topic. despite what we've been led to believe in western culture, my professor stresses that iran is actually the most secular country in the world. and when you look into the history you can clearly see why that is.

Favorite Online Fandom Memory: meeting my friends during the atla renaissance <3

Favorite Old Fandom You Wish Would Drag You Back In/Have A Resurgence: the atla fandom was/is so obnoxious but in its height in 2020 it was fun seeing a really rich meta appear on the dash for every 5 dumb opinions. everybody was making gifsets and art and fics and it was so much fun. now its slowed down a bit and the only parts of fandom still kind of active are the shippers lol

Favorite Thing You Enjoy That Never Had an Active or Big "Fandom" but You Wish It Did: more like a fandom within a fandom- im glad that the "zukaang" ship stayed pretty niche within the atla fandom. like it wasn't so tiny but we stayed in our own spaces (and rlly won the idgaf war when it came to the hate) and it was just full of mature wonderful people writing THE best meta and fics and just genuinely enjoying the show, which was rare in the fandom (ironically enough)

Tempting Project You're Trying to Rein In/Don't Have Time For: so many. i have so many ideas and fics that cross my mind whenever i watch something new but i never have time for them :(. i started a spiderverse miles x miles42 fic and never got to finish it :(((. maybe after finals 🤞

Tagging: @squippy-lemonwhore @enosimania @thefudge @currymanganese @thinkingisadangerouspastime @catty-words @bioloyg @praetorqueenreyna @lady-tortilla-chip @irresistible-revolution @donkeylauncher @unseemingowl as well as ANYONE ELSE who wants to.

[exhibit-of-the-century]

Checklist For Writing Essay:

Masterlist

BUY ME A COFFEE

More of a person note for me, when polishing off an essay to double check the criteria.

Times New Roman

Size 12

10% of word count over if needed.

Italicize works of art.

“_” for chapters/books.

Name of Artwork, Artist name, Date, Size, Location

Try to find images of the work with people/in the gallery space.

Spell out any number below 100 (eg. Three dimensional)

Double Spaced

(Not cheating to share your work with someone on the course and discuss)

Must use Footnotes, MHRA refrencing style

Footnotes sometimes count in word count DOUBLE CHECK

Footnote numbers should always appear after the full stop at the end of the relevant sentence, even when they refer to a point made midsentence.

When writing visual analysis, consider closing your eyes as someone reads back what you’ve written about the artwork, and consider if you can clearly visualise in your mind from what you’ve written.

Paragraph organisation by: Intro/ paragraphs on separate ideas/ conclusion

Online walkthrough gallery. Make arguments/convince when writing, of what you see/ how you understand it.

Talk about materials used.

Space it inhabits and effect on observer.

Academic sources must be used.

Short comings in the essay/academic paper to be discussed and evaluated.

JSTOR

Website and access to academic papers usually needed to have uni library sign in. Some museums have sources too. Browse library or articles in library database.

Find interesting texts, then use and write about it. Footnotes included in work count.

Museum repository, Wikipedia to start.

WHAT IS MOST SIGNIFICANT TO YOU?

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

London Metropolitan Archives picture library, aka 'Collage' - all things London

London Metropolitan Archives youtube channel

BFI Player film archive - shorts and features from the BFI, national and regional archives

BFI Player - Britain on Film, with searchable map

RibaPix - UK's largest architectural photo library

Pathe Newsreel - great way of quickly diving into historical news items, and fascinating for the visuals as well as the thorough textual transcripts

British Cartoon Archive - 200,000 British editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons covering 200 years

Black in the Day - A submission based archive documenting the lives of black people living in the UK

Wellcome Library - not all but many items are digitised

For those students with a particular interest in museums and museum studies, check out our very own Mapping Museums website:

https://museweb.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/home

Researching Online: A Guide

Below are worked examples of how to do an essay or research project using only online resources.

Don’t spend ages looking for one article or book unless it is really essential and even then, you may not be able to get it, but you will find something related.

Vary your search terms, e.g. for the examples below: early modern, renaissance, reformation, sixteenth century might all be relevant.

Follow links in articles and on collections – often, footnotes in journals online may be hyperlinked to the item (especially in more recent publications), you can see similar items, or who has cited that work. For primary sources/collections, catalogues may suggest similar items too.

There will be dead ends and frustrations but persevere – there is lots of material out there.

Save things using a citation programme like Zotero or Mendeley

If you find something interesting and potentially useful for another topic, bank it for later

Be creative and use sources you might not have thought about before, for example the sound archive in the British Library and think across period and geography.

Google Scholar and on JSTOR/other platforms, Project Muse which is another very good platform with loads of open access material.

USTC: the USTC is a database of early modern printed books across Europe

Interesting source:

[xtruss]

Meroë Marston Morse joined Polaroid just weeks after graduating from Smith College—and quickly rose to become one of the iconic company's most visionary leaders. She's seen here in a test photograph taken by Polaroid laboratory staff in the 1940s. Polaroid Corporation Records, Baker Library, Harvard Business School

Meet The Woman Who Made Polaroid Into A Cultural Icon

Meroë Marston Morse, an Art History Undergraduate, Led and Transformed the Camera Company into a Brand Beloved by Photographers to This Day.

— By David M. Barreda | March 27, 2024

Polaroid. The iconic camera brought photography into the hands of millions beginning in the 1940s. It made anyone a photographer with a push of a button, developing the pictures right in front of your eyes.

At a time when camera innovation was led almost exclusively by men, Polaroid was different in another way too: During her relatively short time at the company, a young art history grad named Meroë Marston Morse was one of Polaroid’s most important visionaries, ultimately rising to be director of the Special Photographic Research Division with 18 patents to her name.

As a senior photo editor at National Geographic, I have had a lifelong love for photography. Since I was a child, I remember watching family members use Polaroids to record the mundane moments of a vacation, while I used a Nikon camera with 35mm film. But when a photographer friend later showed me how to use a toothpick to push the dyes of a Polaroid that was mid-development—resulting in a more painterly, more impressionistic final image—I became a fan.

I know a fair bit about Polaroid and its founder, Edwin Land. But when I read Morse’s name for the first time recently, I was intrigued to learn more about role she played during her two decades there.

A New Kind of Camera Company

Morse joined Polaroid in 1945 just weeks after graduating from Smith College, having studied art history with Clarence Kennedy. A friend and associate of Edwin Land, Kennedy often recommended his best students to work at the camera company.

American scientist and inventor Edwin Herbert Land demonstrates his instant camera or Land Camera, manufactured by Polaroid, circa 1947. Photograph By Sam Falk, The New York Times/Redux

For Land, Morse became “a soul mate, a work mate, and a protector,” writes Victor K. McElheny in his biography of Edwin Land, Insisting on the Impossible. Morse was a natural to the Polaroid method, which McElheny quotes one of the company’s inventors as saying was, “to propose the hypothesis, to test the hypothesis, to modify the hypothesis, to test with another experiment—a sequential train moving at high speed, several hypotheses and experiments per hour.”

A few short months after her arrival, Morse was managing the black-and-white film division, where she led her team through round-the-clock shifts to transition the company away from monochromatic sepia prints to truly black and white Polaroid films.

The process was full of challenges. Not only did the crystals in the darkest areas of a print become reflective, but the paper they used collected fingerprints easily. Perhaps worst of all, some of the prints would fade after a few months. Chris Bonanos, whose book Instant documents the camera company’s history, writes that Land called the creation of black-and-white film “among the toughest things Polaroid ever pulled off.”

And Morse was at the center of it all, former Polaroid employees John and Mary McCann told me on a recent call. Morse’s team would analyze tiny incremental variances from a standard exposure Mary said, and Morse herself “had an eye for these differences” thanks to her art history training. “She and Land built it from the first experiments in the lab, all the way through the billion-dollars-worth of film they sold,” John adds.

A Marriage of Science and Art

John McCann tells me his time at Polaroid reminded him of the Renaissance, when “the best scientists were the best painters, and they did everything.” Artists at Polaroid were integral to science and experimentation, and their perspectives were as important as those of trained chemists.

Within Morse’s lab, there was a strong dedication to making technology to suit artists. She served as the liaison between scientists and the photographers who consulted for the companies—building relationships with fine art photographer Minor White, color art photography pioneer Marie Cosindas, and landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

Photographer Ansel Adams consulted with Polaroid in various capacities. In a letter to Morse in 1953, he complained about the company’s ads, which he said had, “served to place emphasis on the casual, amateur use of the camera and process which has, I think, minimized the more important aspects. Most people think of it as a semi-toy.” Photograph By Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images

Adams was already a well-established, large-format, black-and-white photographer by the time he began to consult for Polaroid in 1948. His image, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, made in 1927, had landed him on the photography map. Yet Adams was very interested in Polaroid’s technology, particularly the cameras and the black-and-white film that Morse was developing. The two were in nearly constant contact.

Adams helped establish a process that photographers in the field used for feedback long before the advent of the digital camera: He would take a Polaroid to test the composition and exposure of an image before making a final image on the negative.

Legacy

Morse died from cancer in 1969 at the age of 46, before Polaroid had expanded into a global brand and cultural touch point, before the toy camera craze had peaked, and long before Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

In a companywide memo announcing her passing, Polaroid executive Richard Young wrote, “To those who knew and loved Meroe, our lives were enriched and enlarged. Her kindness, concern and interest in everyone were exceeded by her generosity.”

By the 1970s and 80s, other camera companies started to emulate Polaroid’s point-and-shoot approach and aesthetic. In the late 2000s, photographers around the world went into mourning when the last Polaroid films hit their expiration dates after the company’s bankruptcy.

"9-Part Self Portrait," a collage of large-format Polapan prints by artist Chuck Close, is displayed at Sotheby's during a preview of The Polaroid Collection, a collection of fine art photographs that Land launched in the 1940s. Morse was key to building the company's relationships with artists in the collection. Photograph By Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images

But in early 2008, as the last factories were winding down, Polaroid enthusiasts Florian ‘Doc’ Kaps and André Bosman raised over half a million dollars to rescue the factories, the film, and most importantly the chemistry knowledge of the company—and eventually they brought Polaroid film back to market.

Today, in a photography world where digital is king, the spirit that Morse and others brought to the company still lives on for photographers everywhere.

[qqueenofhades]

Out of curiosity, how much do you know about the ancient Near East, particularly the religion? I had the idea for a novel that started off in Akkad (and goes through a five-thousand-year-long love story/drama about an immortal woman and a man who remembers all his past lives, and how they keep finding and losing one another, and eventually come to break the curse). But I don't want to necessarily rely on the old "use the sources from the Wikipedia article" method of research. There are multiple historical (and a couple of future) settings in the novel, but I haven't nailed down much yet except that it starts in the now-lost city of Akkad during the reign of Naram-Sin.

Mainly what I'm asking is, do you have any recommendations for places to start doing this kind of research? If I do end up writing this, I want it to be an accurate picture of what these societies were actually like, rather than a shallow Google search that might be glaringly wrong.

Hmm. This is, unfortunately, quite far from my usual area of expertise, so I can't give you any subject-specific resource or database recommendations. I will say, however, that "use the sources from the Wikipedia article" is not at all the worst strategy in the world. There are obvious ones that you can filter out, like the link to people's personal websites or random 19th-century newspapers and obviously outdated scholarship (the reason you see the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 cited so much is that it's one of the volumes in public domain and thus accessible to read for free, but to say the least, scholarship on most issues has advanced since the Catholics in 1911). But most quality Wikipedia articles will have a lengthy bibliography/reference/extended reading list with genuine scholarly resources of relatively recent vintage, and I myself often use this tactic as a general starting point. You also aren't expected to give yourself a PhD in the subject to write a historical fiction novel, and nobody's going to read it expecting an accurate anthropological report, but yeah, of course it's always good to do some work and research.

Other places where you can look for resources, some (but not all of which, alas) will be free and offer most of the text online, include:

JSTOR (the original). Last time I looked, they had a pandemic-era provision where anyone could read 100 articles for free in a year, but I'm not sure if they're doing that anymore. It can quickly get expensive to pay for access to individual papers, so obviously we want to avoid that if we can, but JSTOR also has reasonable monthly subscription rates, wherein you can pay for one month, go in and get what you need, and then end if needed.

Google Scholar, which searches specifically for scholarly papers and publications, rather than just whatever some random peon has decided to slap up on the subject. Also, academia protip: if you discover something that looks really interesting, but you don't have the credentials to read it, search the author's name, see if they have a current email address, and if so, contact them directly and ask if they would be willing to send you a copy. I have obtained multiple papers that I couldn't get elsewhere via this tactic, since academics LOVE to share their work and to hear that people are actually finding it/requesting it/wanting to read it.

Google Books is also a place to find at least some useful titles, though it's everything published in any era and may or may not be current, scholarly, or relevant. However, there are usually good chunks of chapters or articles that can be read for free, and it's worth browsing through.

The University of Chicago Press website hosts subject-specific journals in multiple academic/humanities fields, including anthropology and archaeology, history, medieval and renaissance studies, and general humanities. You would also find it useful to have a click through, search for some keywords, and see which articles turn up. This is a case where it would be useful to have university credentials to get access to full text, but again, if you find something that looks interesting, try to find the author's contact information first and see if they will send it to you.

Anyway, I hope that is somewhat useful, and happy researching (and writing!)

[the-unseen-servant]

Fantasy Race: An Essay

You can read this post on my website here

In high fantasy, we have this idea of a peculiar little thing called "race". We don't use the term in the same way as in the real world, we're instead talking about Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and any other more original races that authors come up with.

In this post, I'd like to explore what fantasy race is, looking at both its history in the fantasy genre, and its real world "counterpart" — ultimately to try and figure out how we should present race in fantasy.

Heads-up: This post was born out of a pet interest I had a while back, and it isn't the most well-researched or academic. It's just some ideas that have been floating around in my head that I would like to put to paper.

Race in Fantasy

Before Tolkien, before George MacDonald, and before the Brothers Grimm, we didn't have the genre of fantasy. What we had was folktales — stories not told by any singular author, but instead passed down through oral traditions; stories which are intimately linked with religious beliefs and cultural practices.

In folklore, there aren't fantasy races. There are spirits: Fairies, Yōkai, Jinn, Nymphs, Yakshas, Angels, Demons, and so on. These spirits aren't parallel civilisations to humanity; they're beings that comprise entirely separate cosmological groups. They're not seen as people, but more so as things that are to be, in some cases, revered, and in others, feared.

In the Renaissance, folktales began to be written down. There were collectors like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and that's not to mention the other writers who adapted the style of folklore to spin their own tales. Through them, a new genre was born — the literary fairy tale — a genre which later writers like George MacDonald expanded into the genre of fantasy.

But race as it is found in modern fantasy didn't really begin until Tolkien. Earlier writers still talked of elves and fairies as spirits, but Tolkien took those spirits and slotted them into his world as parallel societies. They still have different fundamental natures to humanity — Tolkien's Elves and Dwarves are connected to nature and divinity in a way that Humans are not — but he also gives them unique societies, languages, and cultures.

Tolkien's works use the term "race" to refer to this combination of cosmological nature and societal culture — and by being the prototypical example of high fantasy, they set the precedent still used in almost all works of the genre today.

Race in the Real World

I find problems in how Tolkien writes his fantasy races, and to frame this, I'd like to look at it in context of what "race" means in the real world, to highlight how fantasy race is different. I am, by no means, qualified to explore this topic, and so I am leaving out a lot of depth here.

At its simplest, race, in the real world, is a category of people created based on perceived physical qualities, such as skin tone, eye shape, or facial structure. These are features which, on a biological level, have no significant impact on people's lives. They're as inconsequential as hair or eye colour is.

However, there is no doubt a cultural significance applied to these perceived qualities. This significance is constructed, often for some purpose. In the best cases, it's to allow people to create identities for themselves and find a sense of belonging amongst their peers. In the worst cases, it's to let people exclude and categorise others. To vilify, control, and justify killing and stealing from them.

The other consequence of race being culturally constructed is that different people will understand it differently; they'll categorise people differently, and see different traits as being typical of a particular race. How one person understands race is necessarily different to how people from other cultures will understand it.

Returning to fantasy, there are two ways the Tolkienian style of fantasy races are significantly different from this.

Firstly, Tolkien's different races actually are of different natures to Humans, both biologically and cosmologically. Elves live thousands of years and grow wise in their old age. They have a connection to magic and divinity, and cannot survive without it.

Secondly, Tolkien's races aren't portrayed as culturally constructed. He doesn't discuss how different people understand race, or why and how it's constructed as it is in the first place. Race is instead created and presented by him, the author. Race is almost god-appointed; impressed upon Middle Earth by a divine creator. Tolkien's races aren't quite spirits, but they aren't quite people, either.

How Should We Present Race?

With this in mind, fantasy races feel a bit iffy, to me, at least. I don't want to write fantasy race, which shares a name with the real world construct, as being other than culturally constructed.

The obvious solution to this dilemma is to cut off that comparison. Change the name; you can call it "species" and be done with it. This has been done in the past, and like, I guess it works. It's fine. But to me, it still feels icky to talk about different people having different natures, even if we choose to call them different species. Unless they're completely alien to the human experience, they still appear as people.1

So, in my worldbuilding, instead of disconnecting race from culture, I instead emphasise that it is culturally constructed, or at least culturally influenced. The main idea is to only ever describe race in the fiction as it is perceived by the people of the fiction. There is no god-appointed authorial description of race, only the mudded cultural perceptions of it.

In my worldbuilding project, Ittoril, I have four main "races": Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs. Together, I describe these as a single biological species, but the individual groups are constructions of culture. Of one culture in particular; that of the Leonid Empire. The Leonids use "Elf" as a term of reverence to describe the people of the seafaring nation that used to live on the Meridán. Leonids will brag about any slight Elven ancestry they might have to assert their superiority over other groups, calling themselves "Half-Elves" even when in most cases, the vast majority of their ancestors would've been thought of as Humans.

With this method, I can still have and explore biological differences, but only insofar as people in the world conceive of them — I portray these differences as culturally invented, or, when that's not possible, I maintain that the significance of those differences has to be culturally interpreted; Elves in Ittoril have demonstrably longer lifespans than Humans, but while The Leonids interpret this as making them glorious and powerful beyond the other races, other groups completely disagree.

And, at least for me and for my worldbuilding, I find this a better, more meaningful way to construct fantasy races, rather than just calling them "species".2

But like I said before, this isn't at all an academic essay, and I, frankly, don't really know what I'm talking about. You don't have to pay mind to any of what I'm saying; you can live your life how you want, and you can write your own silly little make-believe elves however the hell you want.

Footnotes

The polar opposite to this approach is to write fantasy race as analogous to the real world social construct, and abandon the idea of having races be biologically different. I dislike this, because it cuts us off from some interesting worldbuilding opportunities. Tolkien's Elves aren't like people, sure, but that means he can look at the ways they're different. He can explore how they are immortally tied to magic, and what that means, how that does affect people's lives. If fantasy races didn't affect people's lives, why have fantasy races at all? ↩︎

Tabletop RPGs further complicate the issue, because race also serves a game design purpose, in that it allows players to better understand the world and integrate their characters into it. It doesn't help that TTRPGs are derived from wargames, which require all things to be reducible to numbers and categories, including race. I think the best solution to this is to do something like what Pathfinder 2nd Edition does; combining species and race into "ancestry", which retains the benefits of being quickly picked up by new players, while also only giving suggestions of characteristics; never having it be absolute or fundamental. ↩︎

[otrtbs]

hello, hope you're doing well! not quite to do with your fics, moreso art history itself. uh, i know you're studying art history (as you've mentioned) and i (a curious student who must make decisions and who was rereading ahb! and decided that they miss the subject) wanted to ask what were the things you cover in your art history courses? like, what all is it that you study and do, i suppose. i did art before for my finals before dropping it when choosing my IB HLs (like a levels, i suppose) but i'm not sure how much of that is the same i guess. ANYWAY, i did some research but i thought i could ask someone who's as passionate in the subject as you are.

sorry if this is an inconvenience or anything else, lmao

not an inconvenience at all!! i’m so happy to answer/talk about this!!

so the way my university course was structured for undergrad, we had three lower division art history classes. (Core Art Studio 1, Prehistoric-Renaissance Art Survey, Renaissance-Contemporary Art Survey) where the survey classes were lecture style seminars where we went over major art movements, artists, and pieces of each time period. Like a giant crash course in art history over the course of human existence essentially.

Then we had to take three mandatory upper division classes. (Art History Politics of Display, (why/how we display art in museums and the implications of that) Art History Methodologies, (how to analyze art and the frameworks we use. like feminist, queer, postmodern lenses etc) And Art Historical Research (basically independent class to write a paper on an art history subject of your choosing. Like a mini dissertation or thesis normally the paper you’d submit for graduate programs when you apply)

And then the rest of our art history classes had to satisfy different regions and time periods. So you needed one European Art History class, One African or Middle Eastern Art History Class, One Latin American Art History Class, and then One Oceanic Art History Class or Arts and the Diaspora class

and then time periods you needed one prehistoric art history class, one classical civilization class, one renaissance time period, one 1800s, one modern.

And you could double dip so if I took class in exploring sexuality through Italian statutes in the 1500s class or smth it would count as a European art class and a renaissance class. (So you can check off an area and time period)

If you have any hour requirements that need to be met after you meet the above requirements you are free to take any other art history courses you want (this is how you can have an area of focus or concentration as an undergrad) so if I took a lot of modern art classes then I could say I had a bachelors degree in Art History with an emphasis on Modern Art

You span all time periods and regions of Art with an art history degree!! You tend to specialize in an area in graduate school or in your PhD program :)

I hope this makes sense!!! And wasn’t too confusing/too much!! <33

[grayravenartjournal]

Tutorial 3 took place from home due to my boiler braking and the cold making everyone sick. The bus strike is still ongoing, but I wasn’t able to get anyone to bring me in either because of illness.

Really articulate in group crit.

Positive experience.

Studio work

Really likes the photo arms in the collage.

• Different registers

○ Straight paper/arms/painting

• Brings in another language, the photographic, in relation to painted rib cage

Adding digital background still makes it different to it in situe

Everything gets flattened in digital space

Bringing it into space for crit brings physicality. A gentleness and vulnerability.

Being forced into home makes interesting work, but you need to stay aware of that.

There’s something about dis/assembling and moving around to make a new thing.

Need to work on writing to share the richness of ideas.

Tech document

Communication to a technician how things are installed if you’re not there.

Process of research.

Not just technical, the process of display often affects the concept - especially if you can see display

Display has different connotations.

Do you want it to be read as explicit or unknown? How does that add to the work?

What happens at the join? How are you putting together a hybrid? How does that affect display?

Renaissance sculpture that becomes more like reliefs rather than sculptures. Bennini - can’t be moved because they’re so fragile, movement.

Bodied, stone, earth and its relationship to the ephemeral.

[hard-core-super-star]

OMFG SORRY LMAO. I had just seen another pic of Hailee watching the game and I was two steps away from exploding, so I had to do it. Actually holding myself back from writing an essay saying why I liked this last fic you posted so much.

nooo, give me the star please, I won't get greedy! And well, about being overwhelmed all the time, I don't know what would be nice to say because “In this case stay overwhelmed, but with caution” didn’t sound good even in my head. Just take good care of yourself.

I'm starting to think that this thing about greek literature came way back when you said that you were also the greek mythology kid 🧐

Yes, at some point the dreaded math always appears, so all I have to say is good luck when the time comes, I hope you manage to do well and stay sane.

I don't know how to answer that last part but it made me smile jdhwjakk thank you-

– 🌟

whoah, whoah, whoah, nope, give me the essay! i would much rather read that than think about hailee rn! [shocking, i know, but i just woke up so it's way too early to think about something so…disappointing]

…fine, you can have another star, you deserve it: 🌟 [i know there are more star emojis but i just think this one’s cute, idk. and don't worry, your concern is honestly enough <3]

you would be correct! basically, it's taken me until university to bring back all my old interests in an academic way. last year i literally wrote a research paper about the renaissance painters [another old obsession] and the queer themes in their work so…👍

honestly, that's the perfect response, i’m glad it made you smile

[where-i-go-insane]

the urge to post my insanely specific academic papers i wrote for classes. who wants to read my papers about how the Renaissance perception of genre was vastly different than modern day and creates a different effect for tragicomedy in these time periods, an in depth analysis of the grotesque in Flannery O'Connor's depiction of southern etiquette, my research paper about how triple A and indie games have become almost incomparable in terms of content, rime of the ancient mariner and the effect of the industrial revolution on morality, my research project about how the standardization of the five-paragraph essay has impacted college students' relationship with academic writing.

guys please who wants to read my 8+ page monstrosities i promise i'm normal about them

[biglesbianbella]

nothing like a noble savage indian woman only introduced to provide some ''''wisdom'''' for our heroes later on

[eileennatural]

i feel like some people are forgetting that catholicism exists for only two reasons

1. to serve as the origin story of my chemical romance

2. for me to make jokes about

hope this clears things up!!

[odinsblog]

In 2017, a writer named Sinclair Jenkins published an essay for the white supremacist website American Renaissance titled “From Wide-Eyed Liberal to Race Realist,” which described a series of “political awakenings” that he had experienced.  

Jenkins wrote that his radicalization began in the Navy, where it angered him to see “blacks” be mean to his fellow white sailors. Later, in graduate school, he grew disgusted over the “ingrained culture of anti-white hatred” in academia. “Also, once I began paying attention to the news, I started seeing why so many people in my hometown took a dim view of blacks,” wrote Jenkins, who noted that he grew up somewhere in Appalachia. “After Ferguson and Baltimore, I understood that pumping money into the ghetto would never fix things.” Later, he said, he discovered writers like John Derbyshire and Anne Coulter, who shared his distaste for immigrants, and websites like American Renaissance and VDare, which shared his firmly held belief in the “biological foundations to race,” and helped shape his white nationalist worldview.

Near the end of the article, Jenkins noted that he was a teacher, an audacious admission to make in a white supremacist publication.

But “Sinclair Jenkins,” HuffPost has now confirmed, is really a pseudonym for Benjamin Welton, a 33-year-old Boston University history PhD candidate who, until this week, taught English, social studies and computer science at Star Academy, an elementary school in Massachusetts. When HuffPost contacted the school for comment, Welton was put on leave, and was fired shortly before this article was published.

For years, he has also worked as a freelance writer for major media outlets, including The Atlantic and Vice, for whom he published articles about esoteric spy and detective novels. He also wrote pieces for the The Daily Caller and The Weekly Standard, which let him make his racist sympathies clear in print.

He was meanwhile using multiple pen names to secretly author fascist screeds online, in some cases advocating violence to establish a whites-only ethnostate. 

“No mercy for our enemies. Do not weep, for they are not human,” Welton wrote in a pseudonymous social media post on March 31, seven months into his job as an elementary school teacher. “Treat those who want to abolish ‘whiteness’ with the same venom if not more. They deserve medieval punishments.” 

Like many conservatives, Welton has expressed anger about the teaching of “critical race theory” in American schools. Last August, shortly before he began teaching at the Star Academy, he tweeted under a pseudonym that a return to American greatness “requires defunding critical race theory.” It’s clear from his pseudonymous writings where his real objection lies: criticism of white people. 

“I now try to inject race realism into my working life,” he wrote as Jenkins in the 2017 American Renaissance article. “When I teach my students or write papers, I refuse to engage in cultural Marxism or in anti-white rhetoric.”

A group of anti-fascist researchers, the Anonymous Comrades Collective, figured out Welton’s double life and shared the details with HuffPost. Many nameless fascists today lead double lives, hiding behind avatars to promote their noxious beliefs online while holding down respectable day jobs in education, military, law enforcement, medicine or the government. But leading an extremist life online carries the risk of exposure and the fear that one day soon it may all come crashing down — something it appears Welton may have anticipated. 

Welton did not respond to HuffPost’s repeated requests for comment. After emailing and direct-messaging him last week, he deleted all of his pseudonymous social media accounts on Twitter, Poa.st and Gab — all of which he used to spew racist invective — along with his LinkedIn profile, SoundCloud account, two Substacks, a BlogSpot page, and an online magazine he’d recently launched for fascist fiction, non-fiction and poetry. 

But the content of those pages was already saved and archived by the Anonymous Comrades Collective, who earlier this month showed HuffPost evidence they had collected indicating that Welton was not only the man behind the bylines “Sinclair Jenkins,” but also “Jake Bowyer” and “Elias Kingston.” His writing had started to generate interest among major figures on the far right.

Welton’s career as a teacher didn’t begin at Star Academy. He has taught at the University of Vermont and Boston University during his postgraduate studies.

On his since-deleted LinkedIn page, Welton claimed to be currently “teaching grades two through five” at Star Academy, leading “seven classes a day, both online and in-person.” 

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