Photos

[November 2024]

Here I am in Venice, Italy.  Two of Shakespeare's plays are set here, partly, but I have read only one of these two: Othello. Although much of the play takes place in a different location, the titular character is a Moore from this city.

[November 2024]

This photo is me in Padua, Italy.  Padua is a major university town and intellectual center. It is also the setting of The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. The play is about a group of university students, one of whom agrees to date a very mean woman so that his friend can be allowed to pursue her sister.

[November 2024]

This photo depicts Juliet's balcony, allegedly, in Verona, Italy. While there is little to no evidence that a family named the Capulets ever lived in Verona, nor that Shakespeare himself ever even traveled to this country, legend has it that this spot inspired the bard's most famous play.

[November 2024]

This photo is taken in one of the squares in Mantua, Italy. Mantua is perhaps most famous in literature as the place where Romeo flees to after being vanished from Verona for killing Tybalt.

[March 2024]

Here I am standing out front of Ernest Hemingway's former home in Key West, FL. He lived here in the 1930s.  Sadly, we did not get to tour the home when we were there, as the museum closed five minutes before our arrival; so a view through the gates had to do. Works by Hemingway I have read include The Sun Also Rises, A Movable Feast, and "Hills Like White Elephants."

[January 2019]

Here I am standing out front of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. This hotel is the site of the famous argument between Tom and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, and it is also the setting of the Eloise children's books.

[June 2017]

This is at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, KY.  This hotel is mentioned in The Great Gatsby as the place where Daisy married Tom Buchanan even though she was in love with Gatsby. 

[February 2017]

Here I am in front of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC; journalists Woodward & Bernstein broke the story that Nixon had been spying on the Democrats headquartered there during the 1972 election. We talk about this incident in my Journalism class as an example of the watchdog function of the media because it was two journalists, Woodward & Bernstein, working for the Washington Post who broke the story. 

[March 2016]

On a glacier in Iceland, whose language is quite similar to Old English and whose landscape is prominently featured in sagas & mythology. TV shows like Game of Thrones have been filmed there, and parts of Tolkien's Middle Earth was allegedly inspired by Iceland.

[March 2016]

You can see my head poking out from the geothermal hot pot Grettislaug, Iceland, where according to saga the outlaw hero Grettir rested his bones after swimming to shore from a nearby island.

[April 2015]

Here I am at prolific American poet Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, MA.  The house is now a museum dedicated to the poet's life and work.

[April 2015]

Here I am at Walden Pond, where Thoreau wrote his classic Transcendentalist text. The pond is located very near to Concord, MA, where Thoreau's literary contemporaries, and his beloved mother, resided. 

[April 2015]

My husband and I are standing at the site of Thoreau's shack on Walden Pond.  Not sure why the photo is upside down.

[July 2009]

Here I am at the Parthenon (temple to the goddess Athena from mythology) located atop the acropolis in Athens, Greece.

[March 2009]

This photo was taken at Auswitz, Poland.  The concentration camp is featured prominently in many-a-story about WW2, including the graphic novel Maus, which we have read in my English II and AP Language classes.