Corsets and Codpieces

In my last blog post, I made this off-hand comment: “If you’re looking for a pop culture book on the history of fashion, Ottoman Dress and Design in the West is not your book.”  Several of you contacted me to ask what I would recommend for those of you who were interested in such a…

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Ottoman Dress and Design in the West

  Those of you who have known me for a long, long time might remember that I once wrote a proposal for a book on how Islam influenced Western culture in fundamental ways.(1) Those of you who’ve known me even longer know that my dissertation was titled Building the Orient of the Imagination: Excess, Confusion…

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We Have Winners!

Depending on how you count, I began working on Women Warriors in November 2016 when I signed a contract with Beacon Press, sometime in 2014, when I began the proposal, or 1989, when I read Antonia Fraser’s Warrior Queens. It’s been exciting, frustrating, exciting, terrifying, exciting, humbling, and, oh yes, exciting.  Along the way I’ve…

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