Written in December 2025; posted in February 2026.
Welcome! This is a blog by a humanities scholar and professor turned business owner. It will chronicle the musings, challenges, triumphs, and realizations this new endeavor brings.
As I write this, I am sitting at the dealership while my car gets its regular maintenance, with my students’ final exams and final projects taken and submitted but not yet graded. It’s a good time to work on this blog because there’s no wifi here, which I need in order to grade. This start to the blog seems fitting, since I have crammed all the work on my business into nooks and crannies of my days since I decided to do this.
I have been a university professor for over twenty years. I am a medieval historian, so I study roughly the millennium of 500 to 1500 (ish) in Europe, specifically western Europe, although in its Mediterranean context. In practice, most of my research has focused on the last couple centuries of that period, where I am most at home. As a professor in a small university, I have ranged far afield, stretching to offer our students classes in periods and places far beyond that comfort zone.
But this blog is about an entirely new endeavor: a business called Elvenart Designs. It has been about a month since I launched my first products on Etsy. I have been working on these products for months now. I have thirteen, with more planned. Later than ideal for this year’s holiday season, but still … I’m launched! Elvenart Designs, my shiny new company, sells products made from medieval and early modern art (not just European) and my own photography, which is mostly of historic structures and sites in Spain. I started with puzzles, heavily weighted toward themes of the Nativity and the Three Kings for this initial November-December launch, and have added some prints, as well. My expansion plans include more secular (nonreligious) art, more prints, and some other items like mugs and other daily-use objects. Some of it will treat serious themes, but shop followers will also be treated to fair doses of whimsical marginalia -- the light-hearted doodles and sketches in the margins of some medieval manuscripts.
My friends, academics and others alike, have been intrigued by this new endeavor and have encouraged me to use my web site to write a blog about what I’m learning, realizing, and musing about as I navigate these new waters. Posts here will be on a variety of topics -- image choices and restoration endeavors, reflections on different images I work with, my battles with image editing software (I’m winning!), what I’m learning about effective use of AI, and the difference in mentalities and dispositions demanded by my day job and my side hustle. And probably some topics that I can’t even imagine yet because they haven’t emerged.
In my business, I work a lot with art. As a medievalist who enjoys art, I probably see it through different eyes than your average viewer, but I am not an art historian. Actual art historians will no doubt find some of my surprises and insights during my recent, more extensive encounter with these works amusing, since what’s struck me is already well known to them and not at all new and noteworthy. I have relished the newness of it all.
Fortunately, my day job has ample room for creativity: new kinds of assignments, entirely new classes, new research projects. As a professor, I am constantly innovating, especially with the emergence of AI. But those experiences of newness are within a gamut of basically familiar tasks. This business thing is totally new and refreshing. I have never taken a business class or read a book about business techniques. (I will confess to having watched some YouTube videos about Etsy and other print-on-demand platforms.) Like the art historians, readers with a business background will probably be amused by my realizations. But I suspect that beyond the bemused, or even among them, there are people out there who will be curious about my experiences as I embark on this venture. This blog is for them.
In future posts, I will reveal more about what my new business owner identity is like, but for now, let me just say that amid the admitted frustrations of the Photoshop learning curve, I have found it profoundly moving to spend so much time closely attentive to beautiful images, ones into which people with serious artistic skills poured their souls centuries ago. When I am working to restore an image (digitally, of course), hours go by in which I have not thought about the world’s woes and have not noticed that I haven’t eaten in hours. The beauty of these works from centuries ago has been a gift and a respite. Without realizing it, I think I was craving more exposure to beauty. The Irish poet and writer John O’Donohue wrote, “In parched terrains new wells are to be discovered. When we address difficulty in terms of the call to beauty, new invitations come alive. Perhaps, for the first time, we gain a clear view of how much ugliness we endure and allow. … The time is now ripe for beauty to surprise and liberate us.” (From Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, pp. 3 and 7)
More anon.
