Paul Milliman

Paul Milliman believes the best way to learn history is by doing what historians do, not memorizing what historians have done.  Memorizing names and dates is trivia, not history.  Therefore, in each class he teaches, students engage in their own (course-level appropriate) research projects. Dr. Milliman wants to help students produce, not just consume, history.  Because writing history is a messy process, he wants students to see and appreciate how the sausage gets made, so they can make their own well-informed decisions about whether or not to consume it.  These are important skills they will continue to use long after they graduate from the University of Arizona.  So, like Ms. Frizzle, he encourages students to “take chances, make mistakes, get messy!”

Dr. Milliman's current research focuses on how games--especially chess, hunting, and the tournament--reflected, influenced, and supplied metaphors for processes of political, cultural, and social interaction in medieval Europe.  His first article on this larger research project--"Ludus Scaccarii: Games and Governance in Twelfth-Century England," in Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Daniel E. O'Sullivan (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 63-86--was awarded the Medieval Academy of America’s 2014 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize.  He also wrote the entry on "Games and Pastimes" in Handbook of Medieval Culture: Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 582-612, and he is editing A Cultural History of Leisure in the Medieval Age (London: Bloomsbury Academic).  He also regularly teaches a course on games in medieval and early modern history (History 207).