This is essentially an opportunity to confess your secret, forbidden passion for archaeology

Maybe not my passion, but my unbridled admiration of archaeologists and their patience and dedication. They really do contribute a ton to history with their tireless layer by layer investigation, with a patience that is beyond anything I've ever had.

I have to say that if I wasn't all in on the Southern Levant, I would be very interested in Central Asia (steppes, Black Sea region, etc). It's just fascinating to me that there are so many people living there, moving around, and having impacts on so many established empires, and yet we know so little about them.

I've always had an interest in political violence, resistances, internal struggles pertaining to ethnic/national liberation, and also in historical and current leftist insurgencies and rebellions. A lot of the time all three can be essentially the same, but not always!

I was raised very politically-charged. My family has a lot of strong views, stronger when in opposition of each other (dinners continue to be fun), and raised me in an environment that encouraged my own worldview development and the idea that I ought to be very aware of my world and what I believe in it. That, and my background of living in multiethnic and class-conflicted areas, has often found me sympathetic to a lot of 'underdog' movements that have looked to liberate or strengthen minorities, or achieve political/social aims for the 'lower classes'.

I'm fascinated by why people resort to, or willingly promote, the use of violence and warfare to achieve their political ideals. I'm interested in how the people that are caught up in these conflicts - the belligerents and the non-combatants - are affected. My aforementioned bias tends to make me lean towards researching more into the 'Leftist' (whatever that may mean to someone) struggles.

It's not all blood and bullets, though. I'm equally interested in peace processes and conflict resolution. When the people who struggle come to a table, how do they enter? What do they look for? What can they agree to give up, if they have to? How do their supporters respond to resolutions?

Stuff like that!

Not so secret love: women's history. I really like studying the suffrage movements in the United States and Britain.

I also love researching mythologies, and I like reading the Bible, even though I'm an atheist. Stories are so much fun, and they tell you a lot about the culture that the writer was writing in.

The further I delve into the historiography of medieval history, the more fascinated I become by the culture and society of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century historians.

Much of this has been evoked by two historians. The first is David Crouch and his illuminating disourse in The Birth of Nobility (2005) and R.I. (Bob) Moore's inaugural paper at The University of Newcastle, 'The Second Century of Academic History' (1996).

All of our current history is borne out of the concepts and developments of the last vestiges of British nobility and some might argue that it was subsumed by the second sons of the British aristocracy in the twentieth-century.

Were engaging and dismantling these ideas on a case-by-case basis but I think a weird methodological dissonance has arisen where scholars who are interested in this aren't equipped with the analytical tools to preserve or uncover the evidence. We might be adept in interrogating sources which are centuries or millennia old but are we capable of using the oral histories available to us - our supervisors and senior colleagues?

I really like Cypriot history/archaeology. I took a couple of courses in my undergraduate on Cypriot archaeology because the professor was a lot of fun and I just kind of fell a little in love the island. If I weren't putzing around Jalisco, I'd probably be putzing around Cyprus instead.

Also, as someone who is afraid of water, I find it humorous that I like reading about Mediterranean Bronze Age ships and have an interest in them.

I'm generally pretty flighty in my interests--right now on my nightstand I have two anthologies of Chinese literature, a book on the Andaman islands, and a book about the neolithic. Partially I read these for fun, but I really do think that taking a broad view allows me a much more interesting perspective than if I only focused on Rome. My views on the Roman empire, for example, have probably benefited more from reading about imperialism in Africa than several of the works on Romanization I have read.

Also I like swamps. Nothing really to it, I just find them a fascinating human environment I wished I knew more about.

The paranormal and in particular the paranormal in Eastern European Folklore. I'm a skeptic, but it makes for good reading, especially the closer to the source you get.

I'm in history of science and writing a thesis that delves heavily into art history. I'm cheating a bit because my undergrad was in studio art. According to my very supportive adviser, I may ruffle some feathers by using the interpretation of artworks to frame questions about technology and culture. I think that the artists I'm considering were sometimes much more clearheaded about the space program than the engineers and government officials involved, and since the record of their interpretation is preserved in their artworks, that's where I'm starting.

Artists see, for instance, the figure of the astronaut as an amalgam of media representations and technical jargon- when you cut him (and it's always him) he bleeds data. If the astronaut is the ideal of American manhood in the 60s, at least for the establishment, we should take seriously the contradictions and artifice that artists find in his image.

The trouble with this kind of work is that it tends not to be chronologically structured or based on traditional sources. We shall see if I am successful in convincing my committee!

I have two fields that I absolutely adore but unfortunately don't have the language(s) to pursue with research: Russian/Soviet history and Mongol history. I have taken many undergraduate classes in the former and took an excellent graduate seminar in the latter.

Also those who have to deal with Russian archives... you deserve all the funding and pats on the back. I've heard it can be quite the nightmare.

I have this weird fascination with the Sengoku period in Japanese history. I mean, I guess it's not all that weird. I'm from a pretty old Taiwanese family on my mom's side, supposedly among the first wave of colonists, and both my grandparents were pretty big supporters of the Japanese (my grandma still says that for all the Japanese did wrong she preferred them to the KMT). So I kinda got interested in them through that, but my interest remained when I realized that there's actually a lot of similarities between the shitfight before Japan was united and the shitfight while the Republican state was falling apart.

I actually find the history of Bulgaria amazing. =/ I feel this is an unusual choice, but everything about that country is both magnificent and melancholy in equal measure; alas, most histories of Bulgaria that can be found in English were written either in communist times (hmmm) or are mostly designed to draw tourists.

If anyone has any good books to recommend on the middle-hundreds period of Bulgarian history (in English or German) then I would be very appreciative.

...I've been reading a lot of neo-nazi and Hungarian crack pot historical linguist websites in a somewhat systematic manner, separately of course. I'm trying to both analyse the development of their ideas, especially the conflicting ones and look at them as expressing genuine worries - why else would people need to believe in something and choose these?

I however feel totally over my head when trying to do anything but summarize particular things and I've not yet succeeded at assessing the causes - I keep trying to apply things I've at any time encountered as equivalents but that doesn't seem to cut it.