During this session we focused on slavery in the Roman world. Student had watched a brief documentary that offered an overview of Roman slavery; he also read and took notes on four demanding articles. Two of those were thorough overviews of Roman slavery - one from more of an economic perspective, and one focusing more on literary sources. We discussed the main points of these articles and compared their methodologies and approaches. A third, and very demanding, article, sought to look for evidence of Roman slave religiosity by "reading against the grain" of ancient sources. In the case of that article, we discussed the author's attempts to draw upon methodologies employed by scholars working on slave religiosity in the trans-Atlantic context. Finally, we discussed an article on the blurry lines between "coloni" (tenant farmers) and slaves in later Roman antiquity; this article picked up on Student's interest in the comparative statuses of enslaved and colonized persons. Student mentioned that he was particularly interested, after reading these articles, in the division of household labor in Roman slave economies. For our next meeting, we will focus on slavery in Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean more broadly.
This was week 6, and week 3 of our study of important classic total syntheses. We looked at the synthesis of the 8 members of the L-hexoses. We decided to split this topic into this and next meeting instead of looking at a new synthesis because there was so much to discuss. This week, we discussed both lab techniques in detail, as well as going over the NMR spectrum of the hexoses that Student was assigned as her homework. Next week, we will continue by looking at some of the reactions in the syntheses, which will entail a discussion of stereochemistry. I would consider stereochemistry to be one of the final basic topics in Organic Chemistry we have not yet gotten to, and this will be the perfect opportunity to discuss this in detail.
We began the meeting with a brief check-in and then jumped into discussing the articles that Student found on google scholar and by searching the reference list of the previous reading. He had strong justifications for his selections and had effectively formatted the citations according to APA protocol, as assigned. We identified one reading from the list that felt most relevant to Student that would be assigned for next week. We then discussed the assigned reading for the session, which was a meta-analysis of research on interventions to combat loneliness among the elderly. Again, Student showed very strong comprehension and was able to identify the significance of various findings for his own letter-writing project. We discussed how these findings contributed to a narrative for situating the hypothesized value of letter-writing as an intervention, including whether to conceive of it as an intervention to combat isolation or loneliness. We discussed unanswered questions in the research and Student then walked me through his website and we strategized about where our work could show up. We then confirmed our next meeting and set expectations for follow-up steps between now and then.