It's Been Awhile

I haven't written anything on this blog since I was in Turkey. After I returned to the United States, I chose not to write anything more because I thought the purpose of the blog had been fulfilled; I no longer had any travels to recount, so there was no more reason to write. Yet I really enjoyed posting about my life; and even though I'm now back in Princeton and my life isn't nearly as exciting, I still want to keep friends and family abreast of what has been happening in my life.
Why don't I start where I left off? Avkat was a success. Preliminarily, I am on the list to return next year. We submitted the visa application for next summer about a month ago. This may not work out due to a summer dissertation-writing workshop I have to attend in Princeton, but given the opportunity I would love to go back. Along with a fellow graduate student, I purchased the complete Pimsleur language program for Turkish, which even used costs a whopping $180 (to be fair, that's a lot less than Rossetta Stone or a comprable program). I'd never used a purely audio approach to language-learning, but I have to admit it's useful thing, at least for my purposes, to know several hundred phrases and how to use them rather than having a comprehensive knowledge of the grammar of the language. A recently purchased Routledge grammar fills in the grammatical gaps where needed.
Classes have been over for almost a week now. This last semester I took three courses: Medieval Rural History, Byzantium in the Eleventh Century, and Intermediate Classical Armenian. I also sat in on John Haldon's undergraduate Byzantine History class. In terms of coursework, this has been my best semester at Princeton; all three courses were excellent. I'm writing my required second-year research paper right now, an analysis of an eleventh-century Byzantine general's letters and how they can contribute to our understanding of the state of the Empire's eastern frontier in the middle of the 1000s. The letters are written in Classical Armenian, and only three have been translated into any widely-understood modern language; three or four more have been translated into Modern Armenian, but not many scholars in my field (Byzantine History) can read Modern Eastern or Western Armenian, nor do they have easy access to much of the secondary literature which is published currently in Armenia. Therefore his work is almost never cited when scholars write about eleventh-century Byzantium. His work, in addition to other contemporaneous authors, could be the basis of a reevaluation of our understanding of mid-eleventh century Byzantine history. So I'm quite excited about that. Who knows, could even be a dissertation topic.