Lone Medievalist Challenge: Place to Visit

The first travel that I did after I knew that my tenure bid had been approved was to take a weekend trip to the city of Zaragoza in between two conferences a week apart in Cordoba and Barcelona, early in the summer of 2017. This was a really meaningful trip to me because before I had tenure I struck a bargain with myself that if I kept my butt in my chair and got my work done, in spite of feeling like I was sacrificing having any kind of life, that I’d do things just because I wanted to once I was post-book and post-tenure. It was especially hard to keep up the first half of the bargain the semester that I was at NYU-Madrid, when I had planned to start on a new project at the National Library there and spend weekends tromping around Castilian castles; and I couldn’t do any of htat because the book manuscript still needed significant this work. This trip to Zaragoza, then, a weekend between two conferences in Spain and Israel, was the first thing I did to keep the second half of that bargain with myself. And so Zaragoza, medieval and otherwise, — well, I understand why people who live there complain about it, but — as a place to visit for me represents a kind of personal and intellectual freedom that was totally new.