Why have a website? Why have a blog? (A first post)

Hello! On this momentous occasion of my first blog post on my new personal website, I thought I’d share a few reflections on why I have a website at all, and what this blog might consist of.

My primary reason for having a personal website is to have a space for my professional presence online – and a space that’s my own, rather than governed by academia.edu. Several colleagues on Twitter have discussed moving off the platform recently, for reasons that I have to agree with – namely, the lack of open access. I’m strongly in favour of open access publishing where possible, and although I’m early on in my career, I’m looking to start out the right way.

Connected to this, blogging is a nice way of informally sharing the research I’m doing. I’m in the beginning stages of a new research project, leading out of my PhD, which looked at Athenian homicide rhetoric in context. Now, I want to examine how spaces and places figure in all kinds of rhetoric in Athens. I’ll be exploring some of my initial thoughts here, as a way of cataloguing my progress as well as sharing my work with the world.

I also hope that another aspect of the blog might be geared towards holding myself accountable to running. I started exercising regularly at the beginning of 2017 for the first time (more on this in a later post); I started running about 8 weeks ago, having always hated it. This is something I’ll go into more detail about in future posts, but I’m finding the journey interesting if challenging, and am hopeful that writing about it will make that challenge a positive one.

Thirdly, I’d like to use this blog as a place to share aspects of my general everyday life, and particularly my culinary life. I’m a keen but broke home chef; I cook a meal from scratch most nights. I don’t think this is all that unusual, but I’ve heard differently. I like experimenting with recipes, and sharing them when they work out well, so that’s something you can expect here too.

I’ll file all of this as best I can, so those of you interested in my research don’t have to trawl through posts about how I make chilli con carne! 

I’m looking forward to seeing how this website project grows, develops, and changes. Thanks for reading!