Etta’s experiences teaching Italian university students as a William J. Fulbright scholar, teaching US university students abroad, and her onsite research in Italian archives feed her love for All Things Italy. Gain a taste by subscribing to her newsletter and blog and following on social media.
Anne Hampton Brewster: Nineteenth-Century News from Rome
Think of Anne Hampton Brewster as a precursor to NPR's Sylvia Poggioli. American, female, news correspondent in Rome, writing stories followed by many in the US. The similarities stop there. Brewster, a Philadelphian, left for Italy...
Let There Be Light: Leaning in to Change
We finally have a “new” antique light in our dining room. After 18-plus years of wanting to gaze upon something other than a 1970s Victorian reproduction chandelier, we have made a change. Some of my...
More than a Haunted Cemetery: Public Humanities Past & Present
Mausoleum Row, Mount Mora Cemetery, St. Joseph, Missouri A tour at Mount Mora Cemetery in St. Joseph last week gave me much more than a Halloween scare. It connected me "with...
Candace Millard and the Library Company
Candace Millard & the Library Company Candace Millard speaks at this year's Library Company of Philadelphia lecture Missouri author Candace Millard speaks at this year’s annual dinner of one of my...
Alternative Spiritual Formation in the Italian Piedmont & Tuscany
Soon after I announced this summer 2018 spiritual formation trip, a full slate of travelers had signed up. (A "full slate" means small--a half-dozen or so, a dozen at the most. ) So we were...
Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers & The Good Life
Mark Sundeen's book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America Mark Sundeen's The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America ranks among the most interesting new...
Constance Fenimore Woolson and Zoar
Constance Fenimore Woolson Linking “utopian” communal groups and American women writers in Italy, I spoke last weekend on Constance Fenimore Woolson and Zoar. Zoar Separatist Community, Ohio....
An American Woman in 19th-Century Palestine
Occasionally I read a not-recently-published book that moves me so that I wonder how I missed it when it first appeared. Book cover of Barbara Kreiger's Divine Expectations: An American Woman...
Transitions in Gender and Spirituality: Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka
In the spring of 1962, within a month of my birth and just before his death, Lobzang Jivaka finished composing his spiritual autobiography in India. Almost fifty years before and half-way round the world, he...
Vida Dutton Scudder, Christian Socialist for Several Generations
Yesterday my son, just returned from grad school, told me he's writing an essay on Vida Dutton Scudder. Before stating her name, he hesitated. Why the hesitation--in what was otherwise an enthusiastic report of his...
American Women Abroad
I often teach works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Margaret Fuller, three among several 19th-century American writers whose lives were changed by time abroad. My current book project focuses on three other...
Food: a Utopian Studies Special Issue
Idealized food practices have changed, I explain in the introduction to a 2015 special issue (26.1) of the journal Utopian Studies. Since Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias appeared, utopian foodways have turned to production that...