Winter's Death Punch & Presenting This Weekend

From Winter's Death Punch

Winter's Death Punch
Winter's in its death throws. With 50 degree (10 celsius) weather a couple of weeks back, I was getting all excited about Spring and Summer. The tulips were coming up, the daffodils and crochyses (sp?) were out, and it was beatiful, green, and sunny. Then winter threw one last punch.

When I stop and think about it, the States was this way. Spring weasels it's way in for a week, then winter comes back for a week or two, as if in the throws of death, and then Spring returns for good...or at least until Summer and Autumn come, only to be chased away by Winter once again.

I woke up to a heavy snow this morning that didn't last long. In fact, the snow that did fall will be gone tomorrow as it does start warming up again. Hopefully winter really is dead this time and won't come back with another left hook or right jab.

Presenting a Paper This Weekend
I'm presenting a paper this weekend at the Irish Historical Student Association conference in Maynooth, outside Dublin. It's a paper entitled 'Postmodernism's Troubling Place in Holocaust Denial: Moderation and Extremism' that looks at the foundations of postmodern theory in Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Hayden White, and then analyzes whether or not Postmodernism defends and supports the claims of Holocaust Denial.

I won't give away the ending, but I'd be more than glad to share the paper with you, so just shoot me an email or Facebook message if you're interested.

This is one of those papers that was a class assignment and a 'mind exercise' on my part, to see if I could understand both Postmodernism (and it's implications on history) and Holocaust Denial better, since they are both fairly contemporary issues. Because it was just a single paper, none of the persons I write about are figures I know well or whose writings I am confident in understanding - so I may be answering a lot of questions after my paper presentation this weekend with - 'That's a great question. I actually have no idea, because I don't know what I'm talking about. But I would guess that.....' The other alternative is to make sure that I use up all 20 minutes of my presentation with the paper and don't leave any time for questions. ;-)

But hey, it goes on my CV, it's a really low-key conference, and it'll be a great experience for getting used to presenting papers.

There's a conference called Researching Africa Day (it's the 10th annual conference) at St. Antony's College (Oxford) in May. I may try to submit a paper from the dissertation work I'm doing for that - we'll see. I hate to pass up an opportunity since this is where I hope to do my PhD, but life is pretty crazy busy for the next couple of months.

Well, I'm off to bed. May God bless you on this Thursday/Friday and show himself both transcendent above the troubles of this world and personally intimate in your own life, all at the same time.

Here are more pictures from the snow. Enjoy!