About the Photography

Throughout this book, you will notice several photographs attributed to me, the author. I developed an interest in photography about twenty years ago when I began taking photos of the American Civil War battlefields while visiting them with my family. For several years, I entered contests sponsored by the Civil War Trust and was honored to win multiple awards, particularly in the category of Preservation Threats. From this beginning, my photography has expanded into other subjects, and I have contributed photos, particularly with nature themes, to several juried exhibitions. In addition, I serve as the unofficial photographer for my dojo.

Bringing my photography into the classroom allows me to develop as a photographer, a teacher, and a scholar, combining three of my greatest passions. It allows me to speak to my students in unique and creative ways, demonstrating what I see as a trained expert when I visit cultural heritage sites and how crucial I think cultural heritage and history of all kinds are to humanity. This communication with my students can then spread to the local communities and hopefully further afield, perhaps inspiring other teachers to bring their passions into the classroom. In particular, I feel that photography has the ability to communicate in ways that other mediums do not, and I explore how it can teach and how it can bridge gaps in geography, time, and cultural empathy.

As an amateur photographer, I am committed to developing my photography skills and to connecting what I see through the lens – the histories, the past civilizations, the individual people – with the literature I study as a professor of medieval studies. Photography has grown from my hobby into a means of translating essential cultural heritage stories. This interest has developed into a project I work on with my students and other community members entitled “Cultural Heritage through Image.”