Possibilities in the Past: The Challenges and Payoffs of Public Scholarship

"According to legend.” That was the best we could do to source the story of the Meroitic queen Amanirenas and the golden arrows she defiantly sent to Emperor Augustus. We had spent hours in the library tracking down books, hunting through primary sources, and tracing footnotes for a Season 1 episode of our podcast, Women Who Went Before. Surely the quotation splashed across the internet—in which the kandake (a title for a queen in the kingdom of Meroe) boldly threatened the Romans, “If you want peace this [bundle of arrows] is a token of warmth and friendship. If you want war, keep them because you will need them”[1] —had to have come from somewhere. But when we tried to locate an ancient primary source, we came up short again and again. It seems to have originated from a journalist’s book on the growth of Christianity into the official religion of the Roman empire, in particular from a chapter with a grand total of two endnotes. The story appeared with slightly different wording than that adopted online, alongside the qualifier “according to legend.”[2] Our quest to verify the tantalizing story reconfirmed an important fact: not everything public is scholarship.

This incident might seem to confirm the hesitation of historians to value forms of knowledge sharing disconnected from a peer-reviewed process. People are hungry to learn more about history, religion, and the ancient world, but they will often seize the most accessible sources—a TikTok, a “docu-drama,” a tweet. And in the age of AI, all too often for students “doing their own research” really just means Googling and trusting the algorithm to bring Wikipedia articles and YouTube links, if not AI-generated fictions.[3] In this article, we argue that, despite and precisely because of these real cautions, public scholarship can further three core academic responsibilities: teaching, service, and even research.

“Public scholarship” is generally defined as work produced by trained academics for non-academic audiences, the general public.[4] Depending on one’s field, this can take the form of writing op-eds, giving interviews on news programs, producing documentaries for public television (like Meet the Roman Emperor with Mary Beard, or Nobody Liked Paul with Matthew Larsen), curating exhibitions, writing trade books, creating educational YouTube series (like Religion for Breakfast and Crash Course), TikTok accounts (like @maklelan), and yes, producing podcasts. In many ways, it is a product’s intended audience that determines whether or not it is public scholarship. Forms of scholarship produced primarily for other professional academics, even when shared in open-access forums, fall under the scope of “traditional” scholarship. Perceptions within the academy of the value of publicly-engaged scholarship may be starting to shift, but it is by no means universal.

Critiques of Public Scholarship

Academics generally advance two major critiques of public scholarship: it is not sufficiently scholarly, and it does not produce new knowledge.[5] Then-president of the American Historical Association James H. Sweet articulated these concerns in a 2022 interview:

There is a move among some of my colleagues to expand the definition of scholarship, to change the way we assess scholarship,’.... ‘I worry there will be a move to de-emphasize the single-author manuscript: the book. Instead, anything that uses the historian’s craft or skills could count as scholarship. The most radical version might even include tweets, or at least blogs or essays online. How do you determine, then, what is political and what is scholarly?[6]

Despite the echo of fears over the diminishing professionalization of history, he raises valid concerns. But, since non-scholars will reach for the most accessible answers, it is all the more critical that scholars with the requisite training make their knowledge available in the public sphere.

Central to Sweet’s objection is the assumption that new media cannot be evaluated for scholarly rigor, but we question this conclusion. One can determine the intellectual rigor of a product. One of the first things we teach our students when preparing to write research papers is to determine a source’s reliability by asking questions such as, “Who said it? What’s their expertise on this topic? Where did they say it? And why?” These same evaluating questions can apply across media. This same formation is also why in our podcast we prioritize giving credit to the expertise that we draw on; we built a website that gives full episode transcripts with footnotes and source lists. The guest’s biography establishes their authority on the given topic. Written transcripts are also important for the hearing impaired, and the website ensures accessibility of knowledge—anyone should be able to trace our sources and learn more about topics that pique their interest. In the changing professional landscape, we will need to develop ways of evaluating how these new media communicate appropriate scholarship, but we do not necessarily need to develop new criteria for determining what counts as “scholarly.”

Multiple fields are exploring ways to formally evaluate the academic contribution of new media scholarship. For instance, a 2008 report by the Imagining America Tenure Team Initiative (TTI) developed a toolkit to evaluate public work for tenure review.[7] Wilfred Laurier University Press experimented with a three-year model for peer-reviewing podcasts.[8] Although a consensus has yet to form in the academic podcasting sphere, multiple disciplines are exploring ways to peer-review podcasts and the potentialities scholarly podcasting offers for knowledge creation and dissemination.[9] Implicit in all of these studies lies the affirmation that new media scholarship offers something of value for both the broader public and the academic community.

Teaching

Perhaps most intuitively, public scholarship is a form of teaching. The reception of our first season changed how we thought about the teaching impact of Women Who Went Before (WWWB). Exploring the too-often overlooked and underappreciated role of women in the ancient Mediterranean, the podcast’s tagline is “a gynocentric quest into the ancient world.” From the outset, we aimed to provide quality teaching on ancient history and religion to listeners outside of universities, but we did not realize that its spheres of influence would become wider than simply history instruction. During our first season’s release, we began reaching a diverse audience, beyond the academy, eventually gaining downloads on six continents. Listeners’ responses showed the multifaceted impact of our audio content: A church professional said the podcast “feeds my inner scholar and introduces me to new topics and perspectives.”[10] A popular Instagrammer felt empowered by our feminist lens. Although we originally aimed to reach audiences outside the academy, we were surprised by how many faculty also used WWWB as a resource. One professor played the first episode in their class on church history and reported that their students eagerly asked for more. Another professor who regularly teaches and researches women in antiquity emailed us, “Listening to your discussions has sharpened my understanding of all I've been reading and has helped me recognize gaps where I need to learn more.” Most surprisingly, our project gave listeners tools to process their own life experiences. A woman in Turkey shared that the podcast helped her respond to an assault. A female graduate student in Classics messaged that an episode gave her the strength to persevere in her studies despite the harassment all too common in the academy. Our listeners learned about women in antiquity—and much more.

Scripting episodes, crafting questions, and editing interviews into a narrative arc has made us better teachers in our own classrooms, too. Podcasting helped us make creative connections between the rich scholarly resources about ancient women and what matters to people today. In the TTI report, one participant asserted, “There is not [typically] enough value put into the translation, synthesis, and presentation of research. It’s not enough to do good research. You’ve got to make sure that the work gets into the minds of other people.”[11] Creating public scholarship trains scholars to create compelling narratives that engage listeners, a crucial skill in a social media era where attention spans have shortened and devices inundate the senses with information.[12] Learning how to cut through that digital noise and speak engagingly always pays off in class.

Service

While less intuitive perhaps than teaching, public scholarship can also be considered academic service. Service can take different forms, depending on the institution. In tenure review, academic service sometimes refers to work that supports the running of one's university and department, like serving as department chair or taking a term on the academic honor council. Broadly speaking, though, it also encompasses work that benefits the surrounding community and one's academic field(s).[13] We would suggest that public scholarship should also be considered under this rubric. First, public scholarship can benefit the academy by promoting diversity within the field.[14] The range of scholars we interview on the podcast reflects our commitment to this goal. Each season we curate a line-up of guests at different stages of their careers, in various academic disciplines, of diverse genders and ethnicities, and working at a range of institutions.

Another way we benefit the field is by avoiding a subscription model such as Patreon.[15] After all, scholarship is meant to increase access to knowledge. In a time where the financial burden of higher education has become a national conversation, it is more imperative than ever that trustworthy resources are made available to members of the public without access to a university classroom or endowed library systems.[16] Open-access sources for scholars, like Ancient Jew Review, are also important.

Finally, public scholarship promotes the Humanities by showing how different disciplines can respond to contemporary social and cultural needs. Our mission in Women Who Went Before is to connect rigorous historical scholarship to issues that matter today. For instance, by linking primary texts to contemporary topics like the manic pixie dream girl trope[17] or sexual exploitation,[18] audience members' knowledge of present issues is used to help them learn how social systems in the past worked both similarly and differently to today. They learn how gendered concerns recur and morph through the centuries. In turn, these efforts foster interest in the past and reveal its continued relevance, prompting renewed interest in the discipline. As Humanities departments face increasing pressures due to budgetary shortfalls and declining enrollment prompted by the “demographic cliff” of fewer high school graduates, public scholarship counters these trends through outreach and experimentation.[19] Learning about history accurately and in all its complexities can help improve society today. In highlighting the presence of women in the ancient world, in its texts, objects, and societies, we simultaneously work to correct the narratives implicitly communicated by men-centered histories and to help listeners identify male-dominating patterns in their own world so that they might respond with change. For us, community-engaged scholarship is animated not only by a desire to share knowledge for knowledge’s sake—a worthy goal—but also by a commitment to the public good.[20]

Research

Depending on the project, pursuing public scholarship can even benefit an academic’s research agenda. Just like teaching, working within alternative avenues of communication encourages the researcher to ask new questions, explore comparative fields, and think through problems from different angles. Producing WWWB has expanded our own areas of knowledge, changed the questions we ask of our primary sources, and built new theoretical grounding for our own research and publications. We come from different fields, as do our guests. Engaging a range of disciplines through reading our guests’ publications and locating sources for each episode continues to shape our own research. Public scholarship does not always produce new research, but it can midwife research along.

Our podcast’s study of ancient Mediterranean women also gave us a new conceptualization of the consequence of collaborative scholarship. A central theme of our first season became the possibilities latent in the gaps of the past. As has been long noted, few texts survive written by named ancient women. But a feature of ancient writing is that much of it remains anonymous. As Sarit Kattan Gribetz reminded our listeners, this gap leaves open the possibility that women were involved in writing these texts.[21] And as Kate Cooper pointed out, even materials that claim to be written by women, like Paula and Eustochium’s letter to Marcella (Jerome, Ep. XLVI), were sometimes assumed to have been written by men simply because the literary style was too high.[22]

I think that gives us a little bit of insight as to why we have so little material that’s come down to us under the names of women. Famously, there’s that early feminist saying, ‘Anonymous was a woman.’ And it’s possible that that is actually true. Women kind of make themselves anonymous and then later, in order to kind of get the thing into the system, those anonymous texts start to become ‘Oh, this must be Jerome. It looks good, so it must be Jerome’...[23]

In curating conversations with guests, like Kattan Gribetz and Cooper, our season brought ideas like this to the attention of a broader audience. And it is precisely collaboration that gives public scholarship such rich possibilities. Public scholarship offers a counterpoint to the assumption of the individual authorship of our sources and the isolation of traditional forms of scholarly publication. Many ancient texts were not the product of a single author but rather reflect a shared cultural production of knowledge: the work of (often) anonymous writers, who produced living texts, sometimes from oral traditions, that could be tweaked and even reimagined over many generations. Another payoff of public scholarship, in answer to Sweet, is that it, too, is not usually a single-author project. Digital knowledge production can bring together fields of expertise that don’t typically intersect. Not unlike a conference or workshop, new media fosters dialogue between scholars around the globe over primary sources and methodological approaches, facilitating new directions and lines of influence.

 It is not the medium that determines a product’s intellectual contribution or scholarly merit, but the content within it. Just as a book may publish the conclusions from years of painstaking research or share a celebrity’s ghostwritten memoir, so too may YouTube videos and podcasts produce and curate rigorously sourced products or equally disseminate Buzzfeed fodder. Perhaps scholarly podcasting and other forms of new media are not an upstart threat to academic publishing in the first place. In fact, this turn to new media may signal a return to methods of instruction popular in earlier times, from the original Socratic dialogues to memorization in one-room schoolhouses, oral exams, and lecturing.[24] Although debate continues over the frequency of silent reading in antiquity, it is generally accepted that reading aloud was common.[25] New media offers immediacy of feedback—through reviews, tweets, comments from audience members.[26] This is not dissimilar to the opinions of Pliny the Younger, who defended his practice of reading his speeches aloud to selected groups of friends because their live responses helped him clarify his own positions (Pliny, Ep. 17.7).

Bittersweet though it may be, the landscape of higher education is rapidly changing, and educators need to change with it. The traditional write-a-monograph-and-articles model may not be what the deans of tomorrow prioritize. In addition to foundational skills in languages, theory, and historiography, further training in public-facing communication and digital humanities enables scholars to make new cases for timeless research. Good public scholarship takes work, but the rewards are worth it.

Getting Started in Public Scholarship

If we’ve convinced you that public-facing scholarship has a place, there are some things you might consider before embarking on it yourself. First, good public scholarship takes time (seriously, a lot of time). We all have limited time in the day, and faculty members and professional scholars do sometimes need to prioritize publications that will be “counted” for tenure.[27] That means carefully considering available time when deciding whether or not to begin a public scholarship project, especially a long term one. Public scholarship involves all the usual research and writing steps academics are used to, but then further work as this research needs “translating” into a new medium and for a new audience, whether in an op-ed or TikTok video. With WWWB, for example, every hour-long episode has approximately thirty-five hours of labor behind it, and sometimes far more. Second, you will likely have to learn some skills grad school didn’t teach you—things like how to splice audio files, how to erase that refrigerator hum, and increasing traffic through SEO. Crucially, you will practice distilling the most important points in straightforward yet engaging language, since you cannot assume your listeners or viewers have any background knowledge—and they aren’t a captive, grade-seeking class. Lastly, depending on the medium you select, public scholarship can necessitate funds. Purchasing editing software and soundproofing equipment and paying for a website domain are not free. While some of the aforementioned technical skills can be learned through helpful online videos, to produce professional-quality resources the public scholar may need to register for training courses. Of course, such funds are not always available. That might mean applying for grants, connecting with a campus initiative, or advocating for the value of public scholarship.[28]

We will all engage in different kinds of scholarship throughout our careers. Some change the world by expanding the sphere of known knowledge, like a journal article. Some change the world one person at a time. It’s especially meaningful when your work can do both.

Interested in using Women Who Went Before in your own teaching? Season Two covers ancient women’s bodies, and episodes release every other Thursday. We’d love to hear how you’re using this podcast and other new media resources in your work.

Emily Chesley is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton and a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. Her research centers on women and gender, late antique Christianity and society, and Syriac worlds.

Rebekah Haigh is a postdoctoral scholar in religion at Princeton University. A scholar of ritual and violence in early Judaism, her work focuses on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the early Jesus movement.

[1] For example, Adhiambo Edith Magak, “The One-Eyed African Queen Who Defeated the Roman Empire,” Narratively, September 23, 2021; Ekulture, “Princess Amanirenas,” Medium, April 15, 2020; Carrie S., “Kickass Women in History: Queen Amanirenas,” Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Jun 3, 2023.

[2] Selina O’Grady, And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus (New York: Atlantic Books, 2012), 84.

[3] Jacob N. Shapiro and Chris Mattmann, “A.I. Is Coming for the Past, Too,” The New York Times, January 28, 2024. For pedagogical suggestions on dealing with AI-generated pseudo-historical images, see Joy Ashwell Callaway, “Tackling the Reliability of AI-Generated Images as Historical Sources,” Agora 59:2 (2024): 67–69.

[4] “Publicly engaged academic work is scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area. It encompasses different forms of making knowledge about, for, and with diverse publics and communities. Through a coherent, purposeful sequence of activities, it contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value” (J. Ellison and T. K. Eatman, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University [Syracuse, NY: Imagining America, 2008], 6). Christopher J. Schneider nods to the various forms of public scholarship in Doing Public Scholarship, 1–3. Adrianna J. Kezar, Yianna Drivalas, and Joseph A. Kitchen argue that public scholarship should work towards building a more democratic society and should bi-directionally involve academics and the general public (“Defining the Evolving Concept of Public Scholarship,” in Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers, eds. Kezar, Drivalas, and Kitchen [New York, Taylor & Francis, 2018, republished by Routledge, 2023], 3–17). For further reading on types of publicly engaged scholarship and their purpose, see the other chapters in Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time. 

[5] Consider, e.g., Amanda L. French’s peer review of the Secret Feminist Agenda podcast, where research is equated with producing new knowledge, and the interview podcast is regarded as valuable but not scholarly. “Review by Amanda L. French,” Wilfred Laurier University Press, May 2018.

[6] David Frum, “The New History Wars,” The Atlantic, October 30, 2022. See also James H. Sweet’s original essay about doing history responsibly, which generated rigorous debate, “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,” Perspectives on History, August 17, 2022. 

[7] The Imagining America Tenure Team Initiative (TTI) report proposes ways for academic institutions to remove the obstacles to public scholarship within the tenure system, advocating for its place as scholarship, research, and artistic creation (Ellison and Eatman, 2008). 

[8] Siobhan McMenemy, “Scholarly Podcasting Open Peer Review,” Wilfrid Laurier University Press, last updated 2019.

[9] Lori Beckstead, Podcast or Perish: Peer Review and Knowledge Creation for the 21st Century, Bloomsbury Podcast Studies, ed. Martin Spinelli (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); M. Cox, et al. “How academic podcasting can change academia and its relationship with society: A conversation and guide,” Frontiers in Communication 8 ( 2023). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1090112.

[10] Anonymous937940, Apple Podcast review of Women Who Went Before, March 4, 2024.

[11] Craig Calhoun interviewed in Ellison and Eatman, Scholarship in Public, 12.

[12] Gloria Mark, “Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD,” Speaking of Psychology by the American Psychological Association; Gary W. Small, et al.,. 2020. “Brain Health Consequences of Digital Technology Use.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 22 (2): 179–87; Frank Furedi, “Focus Fracas,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec 6, 2015; Sophia Hsu, “Attention spans dwindle due to social media use,” The Standard, May 2, 2023.

[13] In their analysis of tenure review standards for Australian universities, Fraser and Ryan found that “academic service” or, as it is also called, “engagement,” generally encompasses service to one’s university, surrounding community, and the academic field (Kym Fraser and Yoni Ryan, “Promoting the Australian Academic Profession,” Profesorado 24, no. 2 [2020], 57–65). One study contrasts internal service—“service efforts that support the internal functioning of the institution and the maintenance of the academic discipline”—with external service that “allow[s] faculty members to share their expertise with external communities and address their needs” (Ketevan Mamiseishvili, Michael T. Miller, and Donghun Lee, “Beyond Teaching and Research: Faculty Perceptions of Service Roles at Research Universities,” Innovative Higher Education 41 [2016], 274–275).

[14] Cox et. al., “How Academic Podcasting can Change Academia,” 7.

[15] This choice might not be possible for everyone, especially without institutional support. 

[16] Audrey Williams June, “Is College Worth It? Depends on the Student Debt,” The Chronicle for Higher Education, May 23, 2024.

[17] “Fall Girl: Theology, Gender, and How Eve Ruined Us All,” interview with Elaine Pagels, Women Who Went Before, Season 1 Episode 3, September 27, 2022.

[18] “Was the Oldest Profession a Profession?” interview with Thomas A.J. McGinn, Women Who Went Before, Season 1 Episode 5, October 25, 2022. 

[19] Sonel Cutler, "UNC-Greensboro Reckons with the Fallout of Painful Academic Cuts," The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 1, 2024; Anemona Hartocollis, “Can Humanities Survive the Budget Cuts?” The New York Times, Nov 3, 2023. 

[20] Cox et. al., “How Academic Podcasting can Change Academia,” 4; and Kezar et al, “Defining the Evolving Concept,” 9. 

[21] “Invisible Women and How They Made History,” interview with Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Women Who Went Before podcast, Season 1 Episode 1, August 30, 2022; “In Her Own Words: Ancient Women Authors,” interview with Kate Cooper, Women Who Went Before podcast, Season 1 Episode 9, January 11, 2023. See also Kim Haines-Eitzen, “‘Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing’: Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 4 (1998): 629–646.

[22] The letter is titled “Paula and Eustochium to Marcella,” but the NPNF editor introduces it: “Jerome writes to Marcella in the name of Paula and Eustochium…” (Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. W.H. Fremantle with the assistance of G. Lewis and W.G. Martley, NPNF series 2, volume 6 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).

[23] “In Her Own Words: Ancient Women Authors,” interview with Kate Cooper, Women Who Went Before podcast, Season 1 Episode 9.

[24] Podcast or Perish, 43; Krista Dalton, “How I Give Oral Finals,” Ancient Jew Review, August 31, 2023.

[25] R.W. McCutcheon, "Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book." Book History 18 (2015): 1-32, at 10. Perhaps the first articulation of lectio viva voce as a widespread ancient custom was by Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI Jahrhundert V Chr. bis in die Zeit der Renaissance, 1st ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898).

[26] C.f., Kezar et. al., who suggest that public scholarship conducted primarily on (social) media limits the possibilities for scholars and the public to mutually engage (“Defining the Evolving Concept,” 6–9).

[27] For an article with concrete suggestions for turning pedagogical practices into research publications, see Helen Dixon, “Making it ‘Count’: Translating Your Teaching Innovations into Research Output,” Ancient Jew Review, March 19, 2021.  

[28] Some studies have suggested that an important factor in ensuring the continuation of scholarly podcasts is the availability of institutional financial support (L. Persohn, R. Letourneau, E. Abell-Selby, et al. “Podcasting for Public Knowledge: A Multiple Case Study of Scholarly Podcasts at One University,” Innovative Higher Education 49 (2024), 776. Research also suggests that perceptions of a university's support for public engagement are strong predictors of involvement in public scholarship. See Luye Bao, et al. “How institutional factors at US land-grant universities impact scientists’ public scholarship,” Public Understanding of Science, 32, no. 2 (2023): 124-142.

Bibliography

Amaral, Marina. “AI is creating fake historical photos, and that's a problem.” The Colour of Time with Marina Amaral substack, March 19, 2024,

Beckstead, Lori, Ian M. Cook, Hannah McGregor, Lance Dann. Podcast or Perish: Peer Review and Knowledge Creation for the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Podcast Studies. Edited by Martin Spinelli. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Cox, M., H. L. Harrison, S. Partelow, S. Curtis, S. R. Elser, C. Hammond Wagner, R. Hobbins, et al. “How academic podcasting can change academia and its relationship with society: A conversation and guide.” Frontiers in Communication 8 (January 1, 2023).

Cutler, Sonel. "UNC-Greensboro Reckons with the Fallout of Painful Academic Cuts." The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 1, 2024.

Ekulture, “Princess Amanirenas.” Medium, April 15, 2020.

Ellison, J. and T. K. Eatman. Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University. Syracuse, NY: Imagining America, 2008.

Fraser, Kym, and Yoni Ryan. “Promoting the Australian Academic Profession.” Profesorado 24, no. 2 (2020): 54–70.

Frum, David. “The New History Wars.” The Atlantic. October 30, 2022.

Furedi, Frank.“Focus Fracas.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. December 6, 2015.

Haines-Eitzen, Kim. “‘Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing’: Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 4 (1998): 629–646.

Hartocollis, Anemona. “Can Humanities Survive the Budget Cuts?” The New York Times. November 3, 2023.

Hsu, Sophia. “Attention spans dwindle due to social media use.” The Standard. May 2, 2023.

June, Audrey Williams. “Is College Worth It? Depends on the Student Debt.” The Chronicle for Higher Education. May 23, 2024.

Kezar, Adrianna J., Yianna Drivalas, and Joseph A. Kitchen. “Defining the Evolving Concept of Public Scholarship.” Pp. 3–17 in Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers. Edited by Adrianna J. Kezar, Yianna Drivalas, and Joseph A. Kitchen. New York, Taylor & Francis, 2018, republished by Routledge, 2023.

Magak, Adhiambo Edith. “The One-Eyed African Queen Who Defeated the Roman Empire.” Narratively, September 23, 2021.

Mamiseishvili, Ketevan, Michael T. Miller, and Donghun Lee. “Beyond Teaching and Research: Faculty Perceptions of Service Roles at Research Universities.” Innovative Higher Education 41 (2016): 273–285.

McCutcheon, R. W. “Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book.” Book History 18 (2015): 1-32, at 10.

McMenemy, Siobhan. “Scholarly Podcasting Open Peer Review.” Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Last updated 2019.

Mills, K. (Host). “Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD” [Audio podcast episode]. In Speaking of Psychology. American Psychological Association. 2023.

Norden, Eduard. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI Jahrhundert V Chr. bis in die Zeit der Renaissance, 1st ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1898.

O’Grady, Selina. And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus. New York: Atlantic Books, 2012.

Persohn, L., Letourneau, R., Abell-Selby, E. et al. “Podcasting for Public Knowledge: A Multiple Case Study of Scholarly Podcasts at One University.” Innovative Higher Education 49 (2024): 757–782.

S. Carrie. “Kickass Women in History: Queen Amanirenas.” Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Jun 3, 2023.

Schaff, Phillip and Henry Wace. Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome. Translated by W.H. Fremantle with the assistance of G. Lewis and W.G. Martley. NPNF series 2. Volume 6. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Shapiro, Jacob N. and Chris Mattmann, “A.I. Is Coming for the Past, Too.” The New York Times, January 28, 2024,

Small, Gary W., Jooyeon Lee, Aaron Kaufman, Jason Jalil, Prabha Siddarth, Himaja Gaddipati, Teena D. Moody, and Susan Y. Bookheimer. “Brain Health Consequences of Digital Technology Use.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 22, no. 2 (2020): 179–87. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2020.22.2/gsmall.

Sweet, James H. “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present.” Perspectives on History, August 17, 2022.