Alex! I love this piece. I noticed the link for Mitreo delle terme di Mitra, which made we wonder - when you travel somewhere, do you look in to the history and do research on the location beforehand? Or do you just do a spontaneous adventure and happen upon these landmarks? Would love to experience this through your perspective! -Lauren
Lauren!!! I’m so sorry for not responding to this comment sooner. I have been out of my Substack groove for quite a while due to work and personal reasons (why does life have to be so busy all the time?!), but I never forgot that you commented on this post. So THANK YOU for your engagement! You pose an excellent question here, and I honestly had to take a beat before answering. I hope what I write here doesn’t sound too pretentious 😂
When I travel, I think it’s a subconscious mix of both. I say subconscious because I’ve only traveled to Europe, the UK, and Ireland in my full-fledged adulthood, and those trips have by and large been either for professional/academic reasons, or as a direct result of my research areas (early modern/seventeenth-century literature). In a place like Rome, where I’ve visited extensively (and lived for 5 weeks one summer), it’s more than likely that my visits to these sites are spontaneous or because I want Brandon to see them for the first time.
When I’m traveling to other, less familiar places, I tend to go back to my research knowledge. Is there anything related to the time period that I study there? If so, hell yeah! Let’s make sure to prioritize that alongside some of the more standard visits. An example of this in action is when we visited Dublin last spring. I was there for an academic conference, so our base was of course in the city. However, the ruins of an English estate that was once governed by Edmund Spenser (one of the authors I wrote about in one of my dissertation chapters and the subject of my MA thesis over a decade ago) still stand in County Cork. We know next to nothing about Spenser’s life beyond his literary works and his time as an imperial colonizer in Ireland. I had visited his grave in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, but beyond that marker, we have no other records of where he lived or worked, save for this plantation in Ireland. Because of these contingencies, I knew I *had* to visit the ruins in rural Ireland because there are so few physical places where we can pinpoint Spenser. It’s those moments of _locus in loci_ (studying/discovering a location in the very location where one stands) that I strive to replicate when I travel, so on the one hand it’s inspired by history, but on the other, it’s a pretty “spontaneous” version of history in that my own lived experience as an academic, a nerd, etc. ends up intertwining with it somehow!
Reviving this comment! I am embarrassed that it has taken me this long to come back here! Life really is too busy sometimes. I am absolutely fascinated by the concept of "locus in loci," and the intertwining of your experience with history. (Love brainstorming about the metaphysics of it all.) As an aside, your post re: John Mulaney has my gears turning. Hopefully you will continue to write and share your knowledge, find solutions and continue to humanize this world! It brings so much inspiration.
Alex! I love this piece. I noticed the link for Mitreo delle terme di Mitra, which made we wonder - when you travel somewhere, do you look in to the history and do research on the location beforehand? Or do you just do a spontaneous adventure and happen upon these landmarks? Would love to experience this through your perspective! -Lauren
Lauren!!! I’m so sorry for not responding to this comment sooner. I have been out of my Substack groove for quite a while due to work and personal reasons (why does life have to be so busy all the time?!), but I never forgot that you commented on this post. So THANK YOU for your engagement! You pose an excellent question here, and I honestly had to take a beat before answering. I hope what I write here doesn’t sound too pretentious 😂
When I travel, I think it’s a subconscious mix of both. I say subconscious because I’ve only traveled to Europe, the UK, and Ireland in my full-fledged adulthood, and those trips have by and large been either for professional/academic reasons, or as a direct result of my research areas (early modern/seventeenth-century literature). In a place like Rome, where I’ve visited extensively (and lived for 5 weeks one summer), it’s more than likely that my visits to these sites are spontaneous or because I want Brandon to see them for the first time.
When I’m traveling to other, less familiar places, I tend to go back to my research knowledge. Is there anything related to the time period that I study there? If so, hell yeah! Let’s make sure to prioritize that alongside some of the more standard visits. An example of this in action is when we visited Dublin last spring. I was there for an academic conference, so our base was of course in the city. However, the ruins of an English estate that was once governed by Edmund Spenser (one of the authors I wrote about in one of my dissertation chapters and the subject of my MA thesis over a decade ago) still stand in County Cork. We know next to nothing about Spenser’s life beyond his literary works and his time as an imperial colonizer in Ireland. I had visited his grave in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, but beyond that marker, we have no other records of where he lived or worked, save for this plantation in Ireland. Because of these contingencies, I knew I *had* to visit the ruins in rural Ireland because there are so few physical places where we can pinpoint Spenser. It’s those moments of _locus in loci_ (studying/discovering a location in the very location where one stands) that I strive to replicate when I travel, so on the one hand it’s inspired by history, but on the other, it’s a pretty “spontaneous” version of history in that my own lived experience as an academic, a nerd, etc. ends up intertwining with it somehow!
I write a little bit about the trip to Ireland in this post here, but I intend to write about it in much more detail soon enough! https://mcadamsphd.substack.com/p/that-one-time-i-stumped-john-mulaney
Reviving this comment! I am embarrassed that it has taken me this long to come back here! Life really is too busy sometimes. I am absolutely fascinated by the concept of "locus in loci," and the intertwining of your experience with history. (Love brainstorming about the metaphysics of it all.) As an aside, your post re: John Mulaney has my gears turning. Hopefully you will continue to write and share your knowledge, find solutions and continue to humanize this world! It brings so much inspiration.