I don't want to shock anyone, necessarily, but I'm deaf. ;)

My field is the specific myth that says the people of the Medieval Period drank alcoholic drinks instead of water, because the water at the time was polluted and undrinkable.

I got into it because it's super-common and historical myths annoy the blight out of me, so I went rapidly from dropping a link collection about how untrue it is, to studying into it and thus making my own post on how untrue it is.

My family moved to Scotland from the United States nine years ago due to my parents' work. I had to take a year off university due to the complexity of the immigration process, so I started volunteering at the local museum in the village we had relocated to. It happened to be the Scottish Fisheries Museum. I actually remember seeing it in a guidebook before we moved and thinking "Hmm... I don't know anything about the Scottish fishing industry, but I could learn!"

On my very first visit to the museum, I was struck by the displays about the women who travelled all across the country working as herring gutters and packers. The work was so hard, but the women spoke of how important the financial independence it afforded them was. It was so different from the image of Victorian-era women I'd learned in school and university, which had mostly focused on the English and American middle class women. That really captured my attention. During my time as a volunteer, I came across a reference to women singing while working. I was so curious to know what they were singing and asked the curator why there was nothing about that in the museum. She told me that if someone researched it, maybe one day there would be!

All these years later, here I am, halfway through a PhD on the role of music and dance in the lives of women who worked as herring gutters, packers and kipperers from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. My research has taken me around the villages of my new home as well as places further afield such as Lewis, Shetland, and the Isle of Man. I don't actually write about my PhD subject on AskHistorians all that much, but I love researching it. I have especially loved working in oral history archives as well as conducting ethnographic interviews with people who worked in the industry at its height - in Shetland last year I even got to interview two women who had worked at the hand gutting before its mechanization in the 1960s. You can learn more about my research here. The CV has links to talks I've given that are available to watch online if you're curious.

I've answered this question from my perspective here, specifically focused on a very niche subject!

I’m currently studying communist movements in Western Europe during the late Cold War (at least I think that’s what I’m doing - this year is my comprehensive exams so it’s all up in the air).

When I was in high school I got extremely into the Pink Floyd album “The Final Cut” which is a concept album about Thatcherism and the destruction of postwar Britain. As an American teen with budding lefty sensibilities this was the first step in getting interested specifically in modern European history. In undergrad I ended up doing my honors thesis on a magazine run by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1980s, largely because it was one of the only proper digital archives I could access. Sometimes you end up working on things simply because they are what you are able to work on!

As a graduate student my focus has started to shift to continental Europe and Italy in particular, simply because there’s more there there (the Italian Communist Party was the second biggest party in Italy for around 40 years whereas the CPGB was generally a minor sect). The stakes are somewhat higher to put it quite simply.

I like old gadgets. Like, check out this 1950s Westinghouse washing machine that plays 'How Dry I Am' when you open it.

Also, I create interactive media for my day job, and I use what I learn in about historical games and film to inform my modern design.

I have long liked history but got into my particular era becuase I tried a Playstation demo, liked this Dynasty Warriors 2 hack and slash thingy, fighting my way through the magic of the Turbans, so I brought it. I enjoyed the game and the franchise introduced me to the era: Cao Cao the calm think, Sun Ce the happy go lucky warlord with tonfu's and a close relationship with the handsome strategist Zhou Yu, the topless pirate Gan Ning, the cold calculating Zhen Ji, the warrior princess Sun Shang Xing, Zhuge Liang the pompous "it is all part of my plan" and fan weapon. Totally historically accurate portrayals all (and by all, I mean none) and wait till you hear of Kessen 2 (I also liked Dynasty Tactics)

Naturally with this wonderful new fangled thing called online, found places for fellow Dynasty Warriors fan and reading the encyclopaedia's the game had (quick officer info) I learned of the novel. A grand 120 chapter epic full of duels and grand almost superhuman strategies, poetry aplenty great heroes brought down by their fundamental flaws, bits of magic, romance and ghost kills. It is a great book but fundamentally different from the history

This led me further on internet towards the history. So shockingly different. Did you know Liu Bei did not proclaim Han loyalty ten times a day and was shock of shocks, an ambitious backstabber? Guan Yu "only" killed Yan Liang, so on and so forth? I went through the usual the heroes of the novel (particularly the Shu-Han ones) sucked and anyone major who was hit in terms of ability or character becomes a hero. Fair to say, as bad a way of looking at the era as going "hey I bet this romance novel is really accurate", both attitudes one is having to deal with when talking to people about the era.

Through the three kingdoms I made some online friends, I found a passion that has stayed me for a long time. I wonder what might have been if I had never played that demo.

It really depends what you mean by "your field of speciality", I suppose! I'll answer on both levels of specificity I'm thinking of.

In the broader sense, I came to the early modern Holy Roman Empire by a pretty oblique approach. I'd always had some interest in military history, and while reading a general history of warfare in Europe, I came across a treatment of the Thirty Years' War. It fascinated me immensely, and not just from the military side. Rather, the question of how something came to be which was - or was represented - so differently to everything else in Europe just gripped me.

As I looked more into it, I became interested in how our perceptions of what the Empire was have changed, and the question of its nature. To me, it's a unique look into the question of what a state is, and more precisely, what it was in the early modern period, that time of dramatic change as states begin to go from something looking closer to an affinity than a bureaucracy to something quite like modern states. The Empire also lets us look at some incredibly interesting questions about how people experienced state power, and what it meant to them. Luca Scholz's work Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (OUP, 2020) has been especially influential for me in that regard.

That leads me on to the more specific topic of my interest, which is more of a question. What did it mean to live on the fringes of the Empire in the early modern period? Some of these places are conquered and come to be parts of other states, but only kind of - Alsace and Lorraine are the obvious ones. Others just sort of drifted into other states, or formed their own, like Switzerland and the Netherlands. During the 15th and 16th centuries, it could be quite unclear just what was in the Empire, and what was out - Lorraine played a bit of a double game with France and the Empire, claiming to be a vassal of both!

So what led me to that question? Fundamentally, it was a question that arose to me while reading Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger's (excellent) The Emperor's Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire (trans. Thomas Dunlap; Berghahn Books, 2020). Stollberg-Rilinger was speaking about Lorraine's situation from the 15th century, and how it half-claimed to be in the Empire, and half-claimed to be out. I wondered to myself: but what did that mean on the ground for the people living in Lorraine? Not the nobles and the "great men", but the peasants, burghers, and smaller landlords.

From there, further research questions presented themselves, especially as I began to look into the history of East Frisia. Not much work has been done on East Frisia in the 16th century, yet it's a really interesting period. Most excitingly, in 1595 something rather odd happens: the Calvinist citizens of Emden rise up against Enno III, and he calls troops from the Netherlands to intervene against these seditious subjects. The troops arrive - and attack him! They saw the rebels' cause as more righteous. That's a very strange thing to think of happening, given that East Frisia was technically a principality of the Empire - sovereign states these days don't usually let their subregions call in foreign militaries to deal with domestic disturbances, let alone allow those foreign militaries to support the rebels! Indeed, there was basically no central Imperial intervention (as far as current research suggests).

This is a really interesting test-case in my opinion. It allows us to examine what sovereign authority meant in the late 16th century Empire, and what sovereignty was for - not to mention whom it was for. So that's where I am!

Hope that was interesting for you too.