When not buried in a library somewhere, I enjoy living and serving in Charlottesville, VA. On Thursday mornings I can be found flipping pancakes at The Haven, a progressive day shelter in downtown Charlottesville dedicated to serving the homeless community. The Haven also houses the offices for New City Arts, a community arts organization that promotes cultural dialogue and community engagement, as well as providing gallery and studio space for local artists. One program which came out of New City Arts, Charlottesville SOUP is particularly near to my heart. Cville SOUP is a dinner series that offers local artists the chance to make connections and crowd source project funding. I was lucky enought to attend/volunteer at the first three iterations of SOUP and look forward to remaining invovled. While most of my time is spent in Alderman Library, I am committed to remaining engaged with the communities I live in and I find these engagements enrich my research in unexpected ways.
As a dedicated cyclist, Charlottesville is a great place to live. I commute by bike each day and, if I am luckly, sneak off for a quick spin in the mountains 4-5 times a week. I also serve on the board of Community Bikes, a local bike co-op dedicated to supporting and growing the cycling community in Charlottesville and making bikes accessible to anyone, regardless of income. My students always find it amusing when they come by on a Wednesday or Saturday, looking for a cheap bike to ride around campus, and they run into their composition instructor.
The the desgin of this website came out of my time as a Praxis Fellow at the Scholars Lab at the University of Virginia in 2013-14. It began as a possible design template for our project, Ivanhoe, but after we choose to go another direction, I kept working on it and it became this. The font is a google font, 'Caudex' that takes styling cues from several medieval scripts. The colors and the various icons are meant to evoke the manuscript tradition as well. I made the site on Sublime Text 2 and manage it through Github. If you like it and want to tweek the CSS/HTML for yourself, have at it. Here is the Github repo. Finally, while I guess I 'made' it, this site would not have been possible with out the patience and support of all the Scholars Lab staff at UVA. They held my hand through everything and helped me fix what was broken. Thanks Jeremey, Wayne, Eric, Bethany, and Purdom!