Research highlights made easy

A seemingly unsolvable duality emerges upon completion of a research track. On the one hand, as scholars, we are supposed to produce new, valuable results that impact scholarship and allow an advancement of knowledge in the field. These results are structured as articles, books, papers, and other items directed to fellow scholars around the world. On the other hand, however, academia also has a societal duty to nurture a broader and more original conception of knowledge by making our research available to the wider public. Yet these outreach items need to be designed to maximise their understandability, relatability, and reusability by non-specialised audiences. Hence, we have a duality of ways to convey our research: two approaches that very often lead to the production of unrelated sets of items and a trivialisation of the outreach strategy.

This section challenges the assumption that such a duality of research product need to be marked by unrelatability. Its aim is to bridge between scholarly and outreach items by processing the former into something that meets the expectation of the latter. Said it differently, Research highlights made easy offers the main highlights of my published research (i.e., articles, papers, books) fashioned in a way that makes them cushier, better relatable, and more understandable also by non-specialists in the field. Well, at least this is my objective. My intention is to make short videos of some of the most interesting papers I published in the past and, most importantly, to do the same with all papers I will publish in the future and play with different communication strategies.

Roger Bacon on Translations

This video engages with the main results presented in my paper “Disentangling Roger Bacon’s Criticism of Medieval Translations”, published in the volume Early Thirteenth-Century English Franciscan Thought edited by Lydia Schumacher (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 261-282. You can read the paper here.

Watch the video