UMW Blogs is featuring itself this time, for it has put on a new theme for the new academic year. Wearing the elegant theme PrimePress by Ravi Varma, thanks to the unfailing eye for great looking sites of Andy “Edu”Rush. Moreover, the custom images of Mary Washington were taken and freely shared by our very own Serena Epstein and Jerry Slezak. And if anyone else has images roughtly 920 px wide and 150px high they want to offer up, let us know through the contact form. Well, let us know what you think, and let’s change the world this year, as someone used to say.

Emily McAlpine has some absolutely gorgeous images of Florence, Italy she took in glorious black and white. Just beautiful stuff.

While Serena keeps the weekly installments of images capturing the “City of Light” coming, Stephanie —another of UMW’s faithful abroad—offers up her own vision of Paris. And if you want to read some missives from the center of European culture, you can get regular updates from Italy on Jana’s blog coming live from the masterpiece that is Florence. If anyone else has a space online (by no means limited to UMW Blogs) tracing their trips, adventures, and/or follies abroad that they would like to share, drop the URL in the comments. Au revoir.

David Merkowitz’s Real Estate Crisis and a Little American Studies blog traces news about the current housing crisis in the US on a regular basis. It’s a personal favorite because I can get a ton of information about the spiraling effects of greed and consumption gone awry from one RSS feed! The format of the blog is simple and quite old school, it has a brief description of an article accompanied by a link to the original— in many ways hearkening back to the roots of web logs.

Dr. Gardner Campbell will be hosting the twelfth and final Paradise Lost all-night readathon at UMW this Friday, July 11th. For more details and directions click here. And while we are on the subject of professor Campbell and Milton, take a look at his Summer seminar’s course blog—brilliantly titled Attack of the Summer Miltonauts—that traces the class’s distributed thoughts, commentaries, and struggles with the great works of John Milton. Well worth your time to read these “thoughts inflam’d with highest design.”