BABEL Working Group List-Serv Membership

Ian Aebel, University of New Hampshire

• Ian Aebel is a History Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Hampshire. He is currently writing a brief dissertation about how the history of America was produced and circulated in the English Atlantic World between 1485 and 1714. He is also patiently awaiting the second coming of Erasmus and looking for a kindergarten for his daughters that provides both Latin instruction and readings of the Tabula Cebetis during story time.

Carolyn B. Anderson, University of Wyoming

• Carolyn Anderson is Associate Professor of English at Wyoming. Her interests are in Old English and Old Norse literature, especially in relation to issues of hybridity, race, and gender. Her published articles include "No Fixed Point: Gender and Blood Feuds in Njalssaga" (Philological Quarterly) and "'Gaest' and 'gist' in Beowulf: Consumption of the Boundaries" (Heroic Age), and she is also working on a book project, titled Middle Men: Body and State in the Middle Ages.

Mike Augustine, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

• Mike Augustine is a B.A. student in English at Southern Illinois who is currently preoccupied with/interested in: not becoming May from The Secret Life of Bees, learning to play the drums, if/how lucid dreams can be utilized (behavioral or creative applications), praying that Angelina Jolie never gets cast as Dagny Taggart (he couldn't care less about pop culture - but this strikes him as deplorable), and deciding where he wants to start channeling all his creativity. His guilty pleasures = keanu reeves, large amounts of cheap, bad beer and small amounts of not cheap, not bad beer. Mike is currently listening to: The Format, Rainer Maria, Bright Eyes, Maria Taylor and Say Anything. He is currently reading: The Fountainhead, and wishing that it was as good as Atlas Shrugged, and is currently wearing: Birkenstocks, because according to college culture, no footwear is more perfect for him- that, and they're comfortable (& not leather, he hates the smell of leather).

Maria K. Bachman, Coastal Carolina University

• Maria Bachman is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Coastal Carolina. She teaches a variety of courses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, children's literature, and gender studies. She is co-editer of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Broadview, 2006), Blind Love by Wilkie Collins (Broadview, 2004), and Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins (University of Tennessee Press, 2003). She has published articles on Samuel Richardson, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, and is currently working on a project in cognitive literary studies, theory of mind, emotional affect, and the Victorian novel. THEME SONG: Tom Jones, "She's a Lady"

Anne Clark Bartlett, DePaul University

• Anne Clark Bartlett is Associate Professor of English and Program Director for the M.A. in English at DePaul. She has published books and articles on Middle English devotional literature, Arthurian literature, and critical theory, including Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Cornell University Press, 1995), and is presently at work on a book entitled Women and the Literature of Statecraft in Late Medieval England. Anne also published a beautiful essay in the Autumn 2004 issue of Exemplaria, "Reading it Personally: Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, and Language in Crisis." Anne has agreed to be BABEL's "holy fool."

Kimberly K. Bell, Sam Houston State University

• Kimberly K. Bell is Assistant Professor of English at Sam Houston and her research interests include the medieval transformations of the Troy legend and Middle English romance. She is currently working on a book titled Romance Revisited: The Manuscript Contexts of Six Middle English Romances, and is the co-editor of Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), for which she also contributed the chapter, "Models of (Im)perfection: Parodic Refunctioning in Spike TV's Joe Schmo Show and Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas." And on top of all that, she is also co-editing, with Julie Nelson Couch, a collection of essays on Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 108, one of the massive Middle English miscellanies. THEME SONG: Sisters of Mercy, "Temple of Love"

Figure 1. The dynamic duo of Julie Couch and Kim Bell

Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Absolutely Nowhere

• Phillip received a very enjoyable but almost entirely useless Ph.D. in Celtic Civilizations from University College Cork in Ireland, with the thesis title "Canids in Celtic Cultures: From Celtiberia to Cú Chulainn to the Kennels of Camelot" (which, unfortunately, was not cited at the Annual American Association of Alliterative Appellations Awards), which consumed great amounts of time and borrowed money, but has not returned on the investment at all. Phillip is an academic whore, writing, publishing, and presenting wherever possible, and occasionally adjuncting in religious studies courses, while waiting for some institution to make him honest. Research interests include Celtic and Arthurian studies, medieval mysticism, monsters, werewolves, dogheads, comparative religion, queer studies, sexuality studies, gender studies, mythology, magic, syncretism, ancient religions, and pagan studies. Publications include articles in the journals Béascna, Foilsiú, Cosmos, Kelten (a short article translated into Dutch!), The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, and the Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook, as well as pieces in the anthologies Queering the Non/Human (Ashgate, 2008) and The Lesbian Premodern (forthcoming from Ashgate), and a number of non-academic publications in journals and anthologies on diverse subjects, amongst which is a retelling of a Middle Irish lesbian story in the magazine Parabola. Phillip has many theme songs, including Loreena McKennitt's "The Two Trees," Dave Van Ronk's "Head Inspector," Barenaked Ladies' "I'll Be That Girl," Shania Twain's "I'm Gonna Getchya Good!" and Krishna Das' "Namah Shivaya."

Figure 2. Phillip presenting the earliest form of the article that appears in Queering the Non/Human at the 10th Annual Lesbian Lives Conference at University College Dublin, February of 2003, mere feet away from Michael O'Rourke and Noreen Giffney

Kathleen Biddick, Temple University

• Kathleen Biddick is a Professor of History at Temple and her interests are in critical historiography, especially discussions of temporality, cultural studies of technology, gender studies, and medieval history. Her most recent monograph, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), extends her critical work on temporality and periodization. It considers the relationship of graphic technologies with medieval typological thinking and current problems of revisionism in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Her Shock of Medievalism (Duke University Press, 1998) explored some of the nineteenth-century foundations of medieval studies as well as certain unexamined contemporary consequences of these origins. Her other publications include The Other Economy (University of California Press, 1998) and a volume of edited essays entitled Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe. Kathleen has been selected as a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center; a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, UC-Santa Cruz, and has also been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Lilly Foundation. In 2002-03, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the Media Lab Europe, Dublin where she began work on her current project on sovereignty, the archive, and intermedia.

Bettina Bildhauer, University of St Andrews

• Bettina Bildhauer is a faculty member at St Andrews and co-editor with Robert Mills of The Monstrous Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2003). She is also the author of the book Medieval Blood (University of Wales, 2006). Her research focuses on film and medieval literature and culture, with an emphasis on bodies and gender.

Doryjane Birrer, College of Charleston

• Doryjane Birrer is Assistant Professor of English at Charleston whose research interests involve the reciprocal interactions among literature, critical theory, and academic culture. Her most recent work in this area will be appearing shortly in the essay collection Stumbling Through the Groves: Fictions on Academia. Doryjane is also co-editing (with Kaye Mitchell) Radicality, Criticism, and Reality: The Future of Oppositional Critiques in Literary Studies (to be published by Somers Town Press as part of a new series developed by the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies, of which Doryjane is an Executive Committee member). Doryjane's long-term project British Novels of the 1980s and the Crisis in English Studies explores British novels of the 1980s in the context of public debates of the same time period about the rise of critical theory and associated cultural politics. So we have our own in-house metatheorist who can help us work on "the crisis of the humanities," as soon as she figures out "the crisis of English studies,"which are "so over" by the way. THEME SONG: The Eels, "Beautiful Freak"

Liza Blake, New York University

• Liza is a PhD student at New York University, interested in bodies, materialities, and early theater practice. She has an MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from Cambridge University, where she studied dismembered body parts as stage properties in early modern drama. At NYU she plans to study medieval and early modern sciences of the body, Skelton, prostheses, and anything else shiny that crosses her path.

Scott Boston, Bowling Green State University

• Scott S. Boston is in the process of getting his PhD in Theatre from the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green. He is extremely interested in the idea of a New Middle Ages, and is investigating how concepts of masculinity from the Middle Ages are revealing themselves in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Research interests include: Theatre, Performance Studies, Historiography, Memory Studies, Temporal Studies, Embodiment, Identity, and Presentism. He is very glad to have found a group of people interested in similar concerns, who are so intellectually open and rigorous. THEME SONG: The Artist Formerly Know as Shatner And Rated R, "No Tears For Caesar"

Keys Botzum, IBM

• Keys Botzum is a Senior Technical Advisor for IBM's Advanced Websphere Technology, and is the co-author of the book IBM Websphere: Deployment and Advanced Configuration (IBM Press, 2004). He has over 15 years of experience in large scale distributed system design and additionally specializes in security. Keys has worked with a variety of distributed technologies, including Sun RPC, DCE, CORBA, AFS, and DFS. Recently, he has been focusing on J2EE and related technologies. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Keys is our corporate "arm" and also BABEL's resident security expert.

Robin Mary Bower, Pennsylvania State University-Beaver

• Robin Bower is Associate Professor of Spanish at Penn. State, Beaver campus, and is our Iberian interloper. Robin is primarily interested in medieval Iberian vernacular literatures and the local-ization of "universal" political and religious cultures, ethnicity, embodiment, cultural studies, and pit bull pedagogy (most specifically related to a pit bull puppy named Horace who attended the Kalamazoo 2007 Congress with Robin).

Jen Boyle, Hollins University

• Jen Boyle is Assistant Professor of English (with affiliations in Screenwriting and Film Studies, Women's Studies, and Dance) at Hollins, and was also the Carol J. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University from 2000-07. Jen has published articles and book chapters on perspective technics and affect in Milton, queer and transversal theory and film, becoming-animal and the Enlightenment, and technoculture and sexuality. She is working on a book, The Anamorphic Imaginary: Perspective Media and Embodiment in Early Modern Literature and Technoscience, and also on an installation project, Perspective and the Affective Image. Following the work of Bryan Reynolds, Jen is also a transversalist--someone who emphasizes in her creative and critical work [indeed, her critico-creative work] the "investigative-expansive" over the "dissective-cohesive." You can also check our her weblog here.

Brantley L. Bryant, Sonoma State University

• Brantley L. Bryant is Assistant Professor of English at Sonoma State, where he teaches medieval literature with a special interest in Chaucer and fourteenth-century England. He enjoys examining the intersections of economics, ethics, and politics in texts both literary and documentary, and has published on Chaucer and corrupt officials as well as on Wynnere and Wastoure, social protest, and taxation. THEME SONG: Shane McGowan and Nick Cave covering "What a Wonderful World."

Nathan Breen, DePaul University

• Nathan Breen is Assistant Professor of English at DePaul.  His primary medieval interests include Anglo-Saxon culture and literature and 20th-century medievalism, particularly in its graphic/comic representations of the medieval period.  His current work includes an article on the legal role of Wealhtheow in Beowulf, an essay on the influence of John Cassian’s Consolationes on the Anglo-Saxon poem Guthlac A, and an essay on mid-20th-century American Dream ideology in Hal Foster’s comic Prince Valiant.

Justin Brent, Presbyterian College

• Justin Brent is Associate Professor of English at Presbyterian, and his research interests include medieval conceptions of soul and body following death, particularly in devotional literature and debate poetry. He is in the process of revising a dissertation chapter about homiletic treatments of the soul's weekly journey to the its corpse into an article, and also plans to contribute a chapter to a book devoted to the contents of Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 108 (to be co-edited by BABEL-ers Kimberly Bell and Julie Nelson Couch), which constitutes one of the great Middle English miscellanies compiled prior to the mid-fourteenth century.

George Brooks, Valencia Community College

• George Brooks is Professor of Humanities at Valencia (Florida). He specializes in medieval craft and technology and is especially interested in the investigation of the mental landscape of those who wrote no words, but made things with their hands. He recently completed his doctoral dissertation at Florida State University, "The Mechanization of the Middle Ages: An Intellectual History of Medieval Machine Building" (2003), and has a chapter, "The 'Vitruvian Mill' in Roman and Medieval Europe," forthcoming in Wind and Water in the Middle Ages: Fluid Technologies from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). George devotes some of his energies to actually reconstructing medieval technological devices and sponsors an annual festival at his college called "Catapult Day," at which he recently graciously agreed to officially "launch" our BABEL enterprise (in the form of a pumpkin). George has agreed to serve as BABEL's ingeniator, and will oversee defenses in the event of a siege. Herewith, Prof. Brooks with his mighty trebuchet:

Greg Carrier, University of Alberta

• Gregory Carrier is currently finishing his MA thesis on insanity in Plantagenet England at Alberta. His research interests include medieval disability history, medieval concepts of the body, monstrosity, ideas of ‘Otherness’, and generally trying to convince scholars that medieval disability studies is cool. Along with his service dog, Chase, Greg maintains the weblog Medieval Cripples, Crazies, and Imbeciles … and a Service Dog? While not working on his MA, he can often be found at the dog park watching Chase go all medieval while chasing down balls in games of fetch.

Jane Chance, Rice University

• Jane Chance is Professor of English at Rice and her research interests center on mythology and myth-making, the reception of classical mythology and medieval Latin literature in the Middle Ages, particularly in England (especially in relation to Chaucer and Gower), medieval women writers (Christine de Pizan in particular) and the study of gender, and modern medievalism (Tolkien in particular). Her twenty-two books include The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); ed., Women Medievalists and the Academy (2005); Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, co-edited with Alfred Siewers (2005); ed., Tolkien and the Invention of Myth (2005); ed., Tolkien the Medievalist (2003); Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England (1979; rev. ed. 2001); The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (1992; rev. ed. 2001; trans. into Japanese 2003); Medieval Mythography, vols. 1 & 2 (1994, winner of the SCMLA Best Book Prize; 2000); ed., The Assembly of Gods (1999); ed., Gender and Text in the Later Ages; The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics (1995); ed., Inklings and Others, vol. 3.3 of Studies in Medievalism (1991); ed., The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (1990); trans., Christine de Pizan's Letter of Othea to Hector (1990; rpt. 1997); Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986; rpt. 2006); ed., with. Miriam Miller, Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1986); ed., with R.O. Wells, Mapping the Cosmos (1985); ed., Medievalism in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2.1 of Studies in Medievalism (1990); and The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1975). She edits three series, including the Library of Medieval Women, the new Praeger Series on the Middle Ages, and the Greenwood Guides to Historic Events in the Medieval World.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Aldgate Tower (London)

• Geoffrey Chaucer is the author of The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women, among other literary works, as well as the translator of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Geoffrey also maintains a witty blog, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog, which has to be seen to be believed. To those who would maintain that Chaucer has not been seen since "round about the beginning of the fifteenth century," we can only say, please visit the blog, and try to remember that part of BABEL's mission is flattening out all those bothersome temporal wrinkles.

Eddie Christie, Georgia State University

• Eddie Christie is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State.  His main research project, Mystic Writing and the Science of the Letter in Anglo-Saxon Literature, focuses on Anglo-Saxon representations of writing both as a material practice and as a sign system. Published parts of this research critique the digital  remediation of medieval manuscripts, pointing to the way in which (post)modern encounters with such remediations manifest a transhistorical desire for unmediated access to the past. He is currently writing about how scripture, as a divine gift, is implicated in the economic “redemptions”  of Anglo-Saxon society, as well as working on a piece about grief and the inner life of men in Beowulf. Eddie spends a lot of time thinking about myriad nascent projects that distract him remarkably from real work,  trying to figure out how to insinuate “mad X-BOX skills” into his CV, and contemplating taking up Zen Archery. THEME SONG: Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Kenneth Clarke, Oxford University

• Kenneth recently completed a doctorate at University College Oxford entitled: "I shal fynde it in a maner glose: Commentary and Hermeneutics, Chaucer and His Italian Sources," and he has just taken up a lectureship at Brasenose College, Oxford teaching Old and Middle English literature. He is the co-editor of On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), with a contribution therein entitled: "Reading/Writing Griselda: A Fourteenth-Century Response (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 42,1)." His current research project is based on Chaucer and Dante. We'll "see you next Tuesday," Kenneth, and you know what we mean.

Figure 3. Justin Brent and Kenneth Clarke in Swansea, Wales

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University

• Jeffrey Cohen is Professor of English and Human Sciences and Chair of English at George Washington and is the author of Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Medieval Identity Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), as well as the editor of The Postcolonial Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and the forthcoming Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain: Archipelago, Island, England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Jeffrey is also the progenitor of the medieval studies group weblog, In The Middle, and BABEL is pleased to say that he is also the author of the Afterword, "Intertemporality," to our book, Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages. THEME SONG: Pink Martini, "Hang on Little Tomato." Apparently, Jeffrey, like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger, is a little camera-shy:

Which is not to say Jeffrey doesn't also have his Warholesque moments:

Julie Nelson Couch, Texas Tech. University

• Julie Nelson Couch is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech. and has published on Malory, miracle tales, and retellings of medieval narratives in children’s literature. She is also interested in the modern reception of medieval literature. She is currently working, along with Kimberly Bell, on an edited collection of essays on the Bodleian Laud Misc. 108 manuscript, one of the huge mid-fourteenth-century miscellanies [there, now we've described that manuscript three different ways!].

Holly Crocker, University of South Carolina-Columbia

• Holly A. Crocker is Assistant Professor of English at South Carolina. Her main research interests are in 14th-16th c. literature, gender, and visual studies. She is the author of a book in Palgrave Macmillan's New Middle Ages series, titled Chaucer's Visions of Manhood (2007), and she is editor of a book in Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures series, titled Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (2006). She has published articles in Chaucer Review, Medieval Feminist Forum, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and a number of edited collections (the finest of which were edited by fellow BABEL members—of course!). Currently, she’s returned to working on her dissertation, which, for its book instantiation, is tentatively titled "Conductive Subjects: Engendering Virtue in Premodern England."

Josh Davies, Kings College London

• Josh Davies is doing a Ph.D. at King's College London. His dissertation will be called something like "Building, Dwelling, Writing, Reading," and will mostly be about the relationship between senses of place and senses of the past in Old English literature and twentieth-century British poetry, along with some little bits about architecture, town planning, and old photographs. THEME SONG: Brian Wilson, "I Get Around"

Patricia DeMarco, Ohio Wesleyan University

• Patricia DeMarco is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan and her research interests and published writings focus upon late medieval romance, feminist theory, and linguistic-based approaches to the study of gender and performative speech.

Craig Dionne, Eastern Michigan University

• Craig Dionne is Professor of Literature at Eastern Michigan and editor of the Journal of Narrative Theory. He is the co-editor of Rogues and Early Modern Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2002). Craig's teaching includes Shakespeare, English Renaissance Literature, Literary Theory. His research interests include reception of Shakespeare through the ages, Shakespeare in Popular Culture, theater in early modern urban culture, history of the underworld, rogues and class history. POST-HUMAN THEME SONG: Louis Armstrong, "A Kiss to Build a Dream On" [because the history of Literature as a discourse is like that of the myth of Pygmalion: we build a canon reflecting our own preoccupations, and that we later fall in love with. We are nothing without it. It is our sustenance and our shrine . . . the source of our imagination, the shaping ideologies of our ego?]

Mary Dockray-Miller, Lesley University

• Mary Dockray-Miller is Associate Professor of English in the humanities program at Lesley.  Author of Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and various articles about gender in Anglo-Saxon culture, she is currently working on an edition of the Wilton Chronicle, a fifteenth-century text that is part history, part saint's life, and part propaganda. THEME SONG: "Pop! Goes My Heart"

Holly Dugan, George Washington University

• Holly Dugan is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington where she teaches sixteenth-century literature and early English drama. Her research and teaching interests explore relationships between history, literature, and material culture. Holly's scholarship focuses on questions of gender, sexuality, and the boundaries of the body in early modern England and she is currently working on two projects: the first examines the ephemeral history of perfume and the role of smell in late medieval and early modern English culture; the second explores the history of ravishment. Holly also likes cheap beer, dirty jokes, and cupcakes (but not necessarily in that order).

Irina Dumitrescu, Yale University

• Irina Dumitrescu is a PhD candidate in English and Medieval Studies at Yale. Her thesis, "The Instructional Moment in Anglo-Saxon Literature," is an examination of the role of pain in literary depictions of teacher-student encounters in Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. She also has a growing interest in performance studies, an abiding fascination with sex, violence and humour in medieval texts, and a passion for learning and forgetting languages. (She is especially fond of Ionesco's La Leçon, which fits into all of the above categories.) Irina spends her summers in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, writing her dissertation in the company of Homer and a host of melancholic angels. THEME SONGS: Cake, "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" and Queen, "Killer Queen."

Lara Farina, West Virginia University

• Lara Farina is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia and author of Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), which would have been titled Reading for Pleasure if her publisher had listened to her. Her interests include: the material history of reading, textual communities, histories of gender and sexuality, devotional literature, and crossing the pre/post Conquest divide with indiscretion. She has articles forthcoming in Women, Wealth, and Power in Medieval Europe and The Lesbian Premodern, and she is beginning work on a history of the sense of touch. She also works hard at slaying the NY Times crossword. Theme song: Ohio Players, "Love Rollercoaster"

Laurie Finke, Kenyon College & Martin Shichtman, Eastern Michigan University

• We hope that Professors Finke and Shichtman won’t mind being listed together since, although they are separable, they are well-known gangster-collaborators in scholarly crimes. Together, they have written King Arthur and the Myth of History (University of Florida Press, 2004), edited Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Cornell University Press, 1987), and are currently working on a new book project, The Middle Ages in the Movies. Martin is the extreme opposite of boring at a conference dinner party, refreshingly so, and Professor Finke is extremely well-known (even eminent) as a feminist scholar and theorist both within and beyond medieval studies (indeed, Laurie is the medieval section editor for the Norton Anthology of Critical Theory). The two of them probably thought of BABEL first, and forgot to tell us about it. THEME SONG: Louis Armstrong, "What a Wonderful World"

Christina Fitzgerald, University of Toledo

• Christina Fitzgerald is Associate Professor of English at Toledo and the author of The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), on the York and Chester mystery plays and the guild culture that produced them. She regrets that she changed the title from the working version, "The Mystery of Men," for she was looking forward to its being mistaken for a relationship self-help book and thus selling wildly. Christina is yet another person working on the MS Laud 108 (what is it with that manuscript?), especially its 15th-century use and ownership by prominent London guildsmen and its figuration of a "compilation masculinity." She is also thinking about mercantile masculinity, performance anxiety, anti-ludic sentiments, and the figure of the Jew in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.

Rachel E. Frier, University of Maryland

• Rachel E. Frier holds a Master's in Medieval Literature from American University, and currently teaches writing at the University of Maryland. She hopes to continue her graduate studies in the field of medieval women's and disabilities studies, and to pursue her interest in deafness and gestural communication in the Middle Ages. Her presented work includes conference papers on the spiritual writings of Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa de Cartagena, and the Zohar, and on sociolinguistics in Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil. THEME SONG: Sansévérino, "Mal ô Mains"

Noreen Giffney, University College Dublin

• Noreen Giffney wrote her doctoral thesis on anti-Mongol atrocity propaganda, monstrosity, and medieval apocalypticism entitled "The Age is Drowned in Blood": Reading Anti-Mongol Propaganda, 1236-56, and specializes in critical theory and sexuality studies. She is the author of Queer Theory [The Key Concepts] (Berg 2009) and the co-editor of Queering the Non/Human (Ashgate 2008), Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies (Taylor and Francis 2007), The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory (Ashgate 2008) and The Lesbian Premodern (in progress, under review). She is interested in the relations between queer theory, psychoanalysis, and posthumanism and will write about them in her next research project, tentatively titled Objects of Desire: Queer Theory and Melanie Klein. She is also undertaking clinical training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the Department of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. See her website here.

Bruce D. Gilchrist, McGill University

• Bruce is "wrapping up" his doctoral thesis, "The Body and Metaphysics in Old English" at McGill; the first part of his thesis focuses on the body as a philosophical concept in King Alfred's translations of Gregory and Augustine, while the second part traces the doctrine of bodily resurrection in a longitudinal study of Old English poetry and prose. Bruce is currently a lecturer at Carleton University (Ottawa), and has also taught extensively at Université Laval (Québec City), including the tandem course designed with Eileen Joy on Beowulf and literary theory which became the genesis for the book (co-edited by Eileen Joy and Mary Ramsey, with Bruce's assistance), The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook (West Virginia University Press, 2007). Bruce has a longstanding interest in marrying literature and science--his M.A./M.S. thesis is titled "Oliver Sacks and the Neurological Sublime" and he presented a paper titled "Sex and the Single Scientist," on C.P. Snow and Carl Djerassi, for which he coined the term wissenschaftlerroman ("scientist's novel"). When Bruce is not shoveling snow he can be found hard at work on bridging literary and scientific theories of pain and the capacity of human language. THEME SONG: Teardrop Explodes, "Treason."

Eliza Glaze, Coastal Carolina University

• Eliza Glaze is Assistant Professor of History at Coastal Carolina, where she also co-directs the University Honors program. Trained as a paleographer and historian of medicine from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, Prof. Glaze's research explores the textual legacy of ancient medicine and its creative adaptation by monastic and clerical writers across Europe. Her essays have appeared in Barbara Newman's Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, in Science, and in Textual Healing: Medieval & Early Modern Medicine. Her book Medicine and Mission: The Production, Use, and Circulation of Medical Books in Europe, c. 500-1200 is under contract with Ashgate Press. As a recipient of the Rome Prize, Eliza will be on leave in Italy for the academic year 2007-8, completing her analysis of the socio-cultural implications of a medical revival and pedagogical practices re-invented at Salerno, Italy during the late 11th and 12th centuries. Her project’s title is “Gariopontus and the Salernitans: Medical Texts and Medical Practice in Southern Italy c. 1050-1225.” Yes, BABEL, there is a doctor in the house.

Rick Godden, Washington University at Saint Louis

• Rick Godden is a PhD candidate at Washington University. He is finishing a dissertation provisionally titled, "Melancholic Temporalities: Fame, Judgment, and History in the Middle Ages." In a former life Rick was a Computer Science major, but now finds himself immersed in psychoanalysis, philosophies of time and history, and of course, dream visions and talking corpses. Non-medieval activities have included teaching and curriculum development in his university’s Writing Program, interviewing Orhan Pamuk, and being obsessed with the 2008 election. THEME SONG: Metallica, “One”

Steve Guthrie, Agnes Scott College

• Steve Guthrie is Professor of English at Agnes Scott and publishes on Chaucer, prosody, and historical linguistics, and on the relevance of the Middle Ages to contemporary culture and politics. He contributed a chapter to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) titled "Torture, Inquisition, Medievalism, Reality, TV." It will make your hair stand on end.

Michael Harper, Mount San Antonio College

• Michael Harper is a Professor of English at Mount San Antonio where he teaches various courses in reading, thinking & writing. In particular, his pedagogy squarely targets intriguing and diverse facets of American culture and aesthetics. Currently, Harper is completing his Ph.D. in American Literature and Culture at Claremont Graduate University. His dissertation, "Ludic Americana: The Play Element of the American Self," examines the playful permutations of American identity as they emerge in works ranging from Emerson's Transcendental musings to the stage rants of 20th-century comic visionary, Bill Hicks. And yes, he can stand sideways like that on a sidewalk. In fact, when he's around, everything's sideways, but in a good way.

Brandon Hawk, University of Connecticut

• Brandon Hawk graduated with a B.A. in English from Houghton College and is attending Connecticut in the medieval studies graduate program. His interests include Old English and Old Norse literature, Germanic mythology, medieval Christianity, and the interactions of paganism and Christianity in medieval England and Scandinavia. Brandon also writes one of our favorite weblogs, Point of Know Return.

Geraldine Heng, University of Texas-Austin

• Geraldine Heng is Professor of English at Texas and the author of the indispensable Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia University Press, 2003). She is currently working on a new book project, The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages. Heng is a well-known theorist of gender and race in medieval cultures (note the emphasis on the plural).

Marcus Hensel, University of Oregon

• Marcus Hensel is a PhD student at Oregon. His work focuses on monsters (the adult in him likes the cultural criticism, but the kid in him likes the monsters!) and food in medieval texts, but he also has a theory crush on Lacan. THEME SONG: Led Zeppelin, "Ramble On," because it is the perfect storm of classic rock, postmodernity, and (of course) Tolkien/Anglo-Saxon wonkishness.

Cynthia A. Ho, University of North Carolina-Asheville

• Cynthia Ho is Professor of Literature and Language and also the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities at North Carolina at Asheville. With Barbara Stevenson she edited Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Heian Japanese and Medieval European Women Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). She has also edited a Humanities textbook, The Asheville Reader: The Medieval and Renaissance World, and has published on Indian, Japanese, European and Arabic authors, both medieval and modern. Prof. Ho has contributed a chapter (co-written with James Driggers) to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, titled "Outwit, Outplay, Outlast: Moral Lessons from Handlyng Synne and Survivor."

Aaron Hostetter, Princeton University

• Aaron Hostetter is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton. He is writing a dissertation entitled "The Politics of Food in Medieval Romance," which engages the ways that food and cooking are used to complicate and enrich discussions of political authority, temporal identity, aristocratic conduct, and the place of gendered bodies in several medieval romances. His interests include Old and Middle English literature, Marxist theory and criticism, penitentials and confession, alliterative poetry, John Gower, The Faerie Queene, children's literature, and pedagogy. He is also engaged in a blog project to retranslate the Old English narrative poems that usually take a backseat to Beowulf, including Andreas, Elene and the Genesis (online at Anglo-Saxon Poetry). He also draws cartoons of guinea pigs and sings a lot of karaoke. THEME SONG (for the moment): Raekwon, "Criminology"

Cary Howie, Cornell University

• Cary Howie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell, where he teaches French and Italian medieval literature, gender studies, and critical theory. His book, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in May 2007, and he's just finished a manuscript with Bill Burgwinkle about sanctity and pornography.

Mary Kate Hurley, Columbia University

• Mary Kate Hurley is a Ph.D. student at Columbia. Her major field is Old English literature--more specifically "Hybridity, Intertextuality and Translation in Old English literature" (by the time she has written her dissertation she hopes to understand what at least one of those terms actually means). She teaches in the University Writing program at Columbia, and spends part of the summer and winter breaks working on the Allen Mandelbaum Collection at Wake Forest University's ZSR Library. Mary Kate wrote a beautiful memoriam piece on Nicholas Howe for In The Middle, which can be found here, and check out also her excellent blog, Old English in New York. She is also a regular contributor to In The Middle.

Miriam Jacobson, Wake Forest University

• Miriam Jacobson is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest, and is completing Antiquity and the East in Early Modern English Poetry, a book that explores linguistic, graphic and geographic intersections between ancient Greek and Roman poetry and the Ottoman Empire in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and poetics, arguing that we cannot read early modern English poetry about the ancients without attending to the way in which it is informed and ultimately inseminated by the East. Her second book project will examine the relationship between writing, poetry and natural objects as new year's gifts. Miriam is also obsessed with black and white movies from the 1930s (Ernst Lubitsch; Fred Astaire) but has yet to figure out how to work this into her scholarship on Renaissance poetry, though she has been known to teach Shakespeare in smashing art deco silver shoes.

Hannah Johnson, University of Pittsburgh

• Hannah Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at Pittsburgh, where she teaches medieval literature. She is currently working on a book about the influence of ethical concerns on contemporary historical writing about the Middle Ages. The project is titled, "The Medieval Limit: Historiography, Ethics, Culture," and Johnson is busy training it to sit, fetch, and roll over. Alternating THEME SONGS: Koko Taylor's version of "Wang Dang Doodle" (performance recordings only) and "Sometimes We Make You Move Your Feet," by Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band.

Michael A. Johnson, University of Texas-Austin

• Michael Johnson is Assistant Professor of French and Italian at Texas, and he is very devoted to demonstrating that, yes, medieval thinkers did have meta-discourses with which to speak of the sex/gender (body/language) binary and further, contemporary debates over the body could benefit immeasurably from paying more attention to medieval debates over the body. At the moment, Michael is working on a genealogy of the sodomitic body, from St Paul to Dante and beyond--he is interested in bodies that were thought to unground and/or interrupt allegorical meaning and how the anxiety about the status of these unruly bodies reflects an anxiety about the category of the human.

Figure 4. Dante's Sodomites Under a Rain of Fire

Chris Jones, University of St Andrews

• Chris Jones used to worry about whether he was a modernist pretending to do a bit of mediaeval, or a mediaevalist pretending to do a bit of modern. Then Clare Lees invited him out to play at the first Anglo-Saxon Futures colloquium at King's College London and he realized he probably was allowed to be an Anglo-Saxonist if he wanted to be. He's still not sure which he is, but now he doesn't worry about it. In fact he secretly enjoys it - it's like being the undecidable other, and it makes him feel more important than he really is. His book Strange Likeness: The use of Old English in twentieth-century poetry came out with Oxford UP in 2006 and has been shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) book prize for 2006-08. Chris lives in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, but often goes out to play at the interdisciplinary St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies (SAIMS). On the occasion of Tony Blair's step-down from office, Chris wrote for the Guardian on why the former British PM's favourite book is Ivanhoe: go here for that. As well as being the year in which Chris found Joy and was BABELized, 2008 was also when Chris went feral and began eating roadkill. Theme song: Kate Nash, Pumpkin Song (I just want your kiss)

Jennifer Lynn Jordan, Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Jennifer Lynn Jordan is a PhD candidate in Medieval European History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include Prester John and medieval mythology, Levantine Jerusalem and Crusader history, Dante and medieval Florence, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Victorian medievalism, and popular medievalism. She is the blogstress behind Per Omnia Saecula: Adventures in Medievalism. When not ruminating on Weird Medieval Animals, she can be seen snuggling with her Weird Modern Animal Simon "Kitten" Jordan, perfecting her stuffed mushroom recipe, or trying to locate Prester John. THEME SONG: The Kinks, "This Time Tomorrow"
  

Deirdre A. Joy, National Institutes of Health

• Deirdre Joy is a biologist and Senior Program Officer at N.I.H. Before that appointment, she was a member of the research group of the NIH's Malaria Functional Genomics Section (Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research), where she and her colleagues have published a number of articles--in Science, Nature, and other journals--on the population structure, evolution history, transmission dynamics, and sexual differentiation of the human malaria genome. Deirdre lived in the Central African Republic for two years when she was in the Peace Corps, working as an AIDS educator, and when she was an English major at the University of Virginia, she studied poetry writing with Charles Wright and also took courses in painting. Deirdre is BABEL's official biologist, and yes, she is Eileen's sister (and she is still mad at Eileen for pilfering her Riverside Chaucer).

Figure 5. Deirdre with her brother-in-law (Deirdre is not the bald one)

Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

• Eileen Joy is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Southern Illinois and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, and ethics. She has published articles and book chapters on: Beowulf, suicide terrorism, and Emmanuel Levinas; Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul and the Old English Ruin; historical artifacts and cultural memory; eros and the Old English legend The Seven Sleepers; the Anglo-Latin Wonders of the East and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; and the intellectual history of early modern bibliography. Her current article project is on the Anglo-Latin and Old English Lives of Saint Guthlac and the queer erotics of unsettled inter-subjectivity. She is a regular reviewer for The Year's Work in Old English Studies and Sixteenth Century Journal, is on the editorial board of Blackwell's Literature Compass, is a column editor for The Heroic Age, and is a regular contributor to the medieval studies group weblog In The Middle. She is the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook (West Virginia University Press, 2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project (special issue, Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 [Summer 2007]), and is also working on two monograph projects, tentatively titled Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History and We Must Speak What We Feel: Eros, Love, Regard and the Humanities. THEME SONG: Kings of Convenience, "I'd Rather Dance with You"

Kathleen Kelly, Northeastern University

• Kathleen Kelly is Professor of English at Northeastern, where she teaches courses in medieval literature, composition theory, and the contemporary British novel, and is also the Director of the Writing Programs. She is the author of A.S. Byatt: A Study (Prentice Hall, 1996) and Performing Chastity and Testing Virginity in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2000), as well as numerous articles on medieval and contemporary literature.

Stacy S. Klein, Rutgers University

• Stacy S. Klein is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers. Her scholarly interests center on medieval literature and culture, with an emphasis on Old English literature, feminist thought, and the history of gender and sexuality. Klein is the author of Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), as well as such essays as "Centralizing Feminism in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture" and "Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Poetry." She is currently at work on a new book project, "The Militancy of Gender and the Making of Sexual Difference in Anglo-Saxon Literature," that aims to shed fresh light on how cultural obsessions with warfare and large-scale violence shape the ways in which people understand themselves as gendered beings. Stacy holds a PhD from Ohio State University (1998), an MA in critical theory from the University of Sussex (1992), and a BA from Dartmouth College (1989). She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a cofounder of the New York/New Jersey Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium. And she loves big dogs and fast horses.

Daniel T. Kline, University of Alaska

• Daniel T. Kline is Associate Professor of English at Alaska and the author of “Textuality, Subjectivity, and Violence: Theorizing the Figure of the Child in Middle English Literature” and “Digital Hagiography: Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Medieval Women in Cyberspace,” articles published in Essays in Medieval Studies and College Literature, respectively. Prof. Kline contributed a chapter to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), titled "The Crisis of Legitimation in Bush's America and Henry IV's England."

Anna Klosowska, Miami University at Oxford, Ohio

• Anna Klosowska is Associate Professor of French at Miami at Oxford and her main interests are medieval literature, queer theory, feminism, and Lacan. She recently published her monograph Queer Love in the Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and also edited the volume of essays Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (University of Florida Press, 1998). She has published articles on Arthur, incest, women's friendship, and female heroes, among other subjects. She has two books under review, a critical edition and bilingual edition of the Renaissance poet Madeliene de l'Aubespine (at Honore Champion Editeur in Paris and University of Chicago Press, respectively). "Under construction" is a book about medieval subjectivity. THEME SONG: Natasha Atlas, "Mon amie la rose"

Figure 6. Anna K. and badass posse in France

Joseph Kugelmass, University of California, Irvine

• Joseph Kugelmass is a doctoral student at California, Irvine. His presented work includes papers on G. W. F. Hegel's Science of Logic, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. His interests include self-fashioning, subcultures, and utopian thought. He also blogs at The Kugelmass Episodes, and contributes to the collective literature blog The Valve. His online writing includes writing on film (Children of Men, The Devil Wears Prada, Pan's Labyrinth), music (Elliott Smith, Britney Spears, Ani Difranco), and television (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, Arrested Development). THEME SONG: DJ Danger Mouse (feat. Jay-Z and the Beatles), "Encore"

Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa

• Kathy Lavezzo is Associate Professor of English at Iowa, and her book, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Cornell University Press, 2006), analyzes rhetorics of English geographic isolation (namely the perception of England as an island cut off from the rest of the world) as a means of charting a new prehistory to England's break with Rome in 1534. In addition to cultural geography, the book also attends to issues of nationhood, race, gender, and class. Prof. Lavezzo's next project, tentatively titled Chaucer's Object Lessons, will build upon her previous work on coffins, poverty, and burial in Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale," and will examine the life of everyday objects in the Canterbury Tales.

Peter Lecouras, Coastal Carolina University

• Peter Lecouras is Associate Professor of English at Coastal Carolina, where he teaches the survey courses in British Literature, British Romanticism, and Literary Theory. His work has appeared in Studies in Short Fiction, Texas College English, The Shakespeare Bulletin, Yeats-Eliot Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Renascence, The McNeese Review, and Studies in the Humanities.

Roy M. Liuzza, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

• Roy Liuzza is Professor of English at Tennessee and the artist behind Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Broadview Press, 2000). He is also the editor of The Old English Version of the Gospels, vols. 1 & 2 (Oxford University Press, 1994-2000), Old English Literature: Critical Essays (Yale University Press, 2002), The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings (Routledge, 2002), as well as the editor of The Old English Newsletter and the author of countless articles, essays, and book chapters in Old English studies. As regards Babylon and "all things Babelesque," Roy has also penned a beautiful article, "The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History," which appeared in Studies in the Literary Imagination 36 (2003).

Robyn Malo, Austin College (Texas)

• Robyn Malo is Assistant Professor at Austin College, where her research examines, primarily in English and Anglo-Latin texts, how the control of and access to saints' relics was a source of conflict in late medieval culture and literature. Robyn's long-term interests lie in periodization, as well as in exploring the literary modes through which spiritual power circulated and was challenged in the English Middle Ages. (She is also mildly obsessed with Gower and Hoccleve.) When she is not thinking about the architectural history of relic cults and the political significance of dead body parts, she kickboxes (the air), drinks red wine (with other people), watches reruns of Firefly and current runs of America's Top Model (and is not ashamed to admit it), hangs out with her husband (and sometimes the cat), wishes she had a dog (alas, not yet), wishes she were better at ending lists . . . . Oh, and she also has an article forthcoming in The Chaucer Review (2008), "The Pardoner's Relics (and Why They Matter the Most)."

Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College-CUNY

• Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College where he is thinking, reading, and writing about labor and the animal/human boundary (understanding the place of labor within the history of human nature and theorizing its place within humanism's future), the arbitariness of identity and the ever-present absence of an explanation for why one happens to be oneself (what Heidegger called the "thrown-ness" of existence), and love as knowledge (reclaiming love as a form of knowledge and theorizing its relationship to scholarly, intellectual practice). He is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) and also the founder of the International Society of Fools. Nicola is also the author of one of our favorite blogs, The Whim, and it goes without saying, the possessor par excellence of BABEL's "best hair." THEME SONG: Bolt Thrower, "Where Next to Conquer"

Figure 7. Nicola, Myra Seaman, and Karl Steel (Kalamazoo 2007)

Betsy McCormick, Mount San Antonio College

• Betsy McCormick is Professor of English at Mount San Antonio and her main research interest is the medieval debate about women. She has published essays in Studies of the Literary Imagination and Studies in the Age of Chaucer, as well as a chapter in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Boydell & Brewer, 2006). She also contributed a chapter to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) on liminality and ludic play in PBS's reality House shows (i.e., Manor House, Colonial House, etc.) and in the medieval dream vision. She is, of course, BABEL's official surfer on the West Coast, but she is still waiting for the official BABEL logo so she can affix one to her surfboard. Prof. McCormick, it should also be noted, is the only one who can drink Eileen Joy under the table. THEME SONG: The Verve, "Bittersweet Symphony"

Asa Simon Mittman, California State University, Chico

• Asa Simon Mittman is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State. He is the author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge, 2006; paperback 2008), as well as articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages. He is the president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application), accidentally founded at Kalamazoo in 2008 to create a home for walkers in the margins of academia. His current projects include a book on the Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, co-written with Susan Kim, and the Digital Mappaemundi, co-designed with Martin Foys. See his webpage for more. THEME SONG: Tom Waits, "Goin' Out West"

Hal Momma, New York University

• Hal Momma is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of The Composition of Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1997) and From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, forthcoming in 2009). She is also a co-editor, with Michael Matto, of the Blackwell Companion to the History of the English Language (2008, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book project on Anglo-Saxon borders.

Michael E. Moore, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

• Michael Moore is Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois and his research focuses on the intellectual and political culture of late antique and Carolingian Europe. His book A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and Frankish Royal Power is forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press. He also contributed a chapter to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), titled "Wolves, Laws, and Enemy Combatants," dealing with the Bush White House legal memorandums on the treatment of "enemy combatants" and the treatment of outlaws in medieval European law.

Figure 8. Eileen and Michael caught in someone's cross-hairs

Susan Signe Morrison, Texas State University-San Marcos

• Susan Signe Morrison is Professor of English at Texas State. She writes extensively on pilgrimage, including Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England:  Private Piety as Public Performance (Routledge, 2000). She has published on Chaucer and Langland in The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, and The Yearbook of Langland Studies, as well as on Old English and German literature. Her interdisciplinary book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) applies fecal theories to late medieval culture. She argues that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny and proposes waste studies as a theoretical school of research for literary scholars. Future projects include books on pilgrimage poetics and a book tentatively called Number Two, her second foray into the privy of waste studies. THEME SONG:  Jeeves and Wooster TV show, title music by Anne Dudley

Christine Neufeld, Eastern Michigan University

• Christine Neufeld is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan. She has published on topics ranging from Scottish medieval anti-feminist satire to cinematic medievalism and pedagogy, and has two articles forthcoming on issues related to the discourse of witchcraft in literature. Her contribution to the BABEL panel at the 2006 Midwest MLA is now an article forthcoming in the Spring 2007 M/MLA journal. She is also co-editing the Journal of Narrative Theory special issue on BABEL's "Premodern to Modern Humanisms" project with Eileen Joy. Christine belongs to the TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) Board of Directors, where she has taken on the role of managing editor for the TEAMS electronic journal for K-12 teachers, The Once and Future Classroom. She is always looking for submissions, so if you want to help redefine and revitalize the study of the Middle Ages in K-12 or community college classrooms, send her an email! THEME SONG: Pink Martini, "Sympathique" [with Joan Jett as her rock alter ego]

Robin Norris, Carleton University

• Robin Norris joined the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa in Fall 2006. Her current research focuses on gender and mourning in Anglo-Saxon hagiography. Topics of particular interest include Saint Guthlac, female saints who die of natural causes, the Victorian construction of "the heroic code," and Anglo-Saxon definitions of emotional excess.

Michael O'Rourke, Independent Scholar

• Michael O'Rourke is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe at the University of Exeter, and is interested in and has most recently been publishing on the intersections between Queer Theory and Continental Philosophy (especially Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Butler, Caputo, Nancy, Badiou, Lyotard, Foucault, Agamben, Zizek), in particular around the question of futurity and messianicity. His articles have recently appeared in The Journal of Queer Studies in Finland ("The Roguish Future of Queer Studies") and Revista Critica de Ciencias Sociais ("What's So Queer About the Queer Theory To-Come?"). He is the co-editor, with Katherine O'Donnell, of Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800: Siting Same/Sex Desire in the Early Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). With Noreen Giffney he convenes The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research, is series co-editor of Queer Interventions (Ashgate Press) and Queer Connections (University of Wales Press), and co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. Michael is also on the editorial board of the uber-cool online experimental journal Rhizomes, and he is BABEL's official rogue and poet of queer hope. THEME SONG: Front Line Assembly, "Maniacal."

Dana Oswald, University of Wisconsin-Parkside

• Dana Oswald is Assistant Professor of English at Wisconsin-Parkside, and her research centers around the gendered body and monstrosity in medieval English literature. She is currently revising article, drawn from her dissertation, on Beowulf's fight with Grendel's mother, and on travelers' interactions with the monstrous in texts such as the Old English Wonders of the East and Mandeville's Travels. She plans to pursue future research on the relationship between transformation and monstrosity in Middle English literature.

Pierre, Chimpanzee & Leader of BABEL's Underground

• Yes, BABEL has an Underground and Pierre (yes, a monkey, but a damn smart one) is in charge of it. You might be interested in how Pierre came to BABEL. Well, it's a long story, actually, but let's just say that it all happened a few years back when Eileen Joy and Mary Ramsey were driving to Kalamazoo, Michigan from Atlanta, Georgia by way of Conway, South Carolina [yes, we know we should have flown, but we just like long road trips]. It started raining, and then flooding, and there was even a tornado [this part is 100% true] somewhere in whatever part of America is between Georgia and Michigan, and Eileen and Mary decided to pull off the highway and wait. Enter Pierre. The n'er-do-well former Wall Street bonds trader was sitting in the pull-off lane on top of his suitcase, chain-smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, and waiting for an air-conditioned ride. Everyone knows Eileen has a soft spot for chimpanzees, especially ones who wear Prada, and one thing led to another. Pierre was looking to escape the hurly burly of the world of commerce, and Eileen and Mary knew just the place. After it was determined that Pierre could type 120 words a minute and also mix a mean pitcher of martinis with one hand while making chillout-downbeat mixtapes with the other, BABEL knew it had found its front man for its underground. Nous t'aimons, Pierre. Nous t'aimons. THEME SONG: Rick James, "Superfreak"

Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

• Tison Pugh is currently Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at Central Florida. He is the author of Queering Medieval Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and numerous articles on medieval literature in such journals as The Chaucer Review, College English, Arthuriana, Philological Quarterly, and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching; his second monograph, Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature is forthcoming in 2008. With Angela Jane Weisl of Seton Hall University, he co-edited a pedagogical volume, Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems; with Lynn Ramey of Vanderbilt University, he co-edited Race, Class, and Gender in Medieval Cinema; and with Marcia Smith Marze, he co-edited the forthcoming volume, Men and Masculinities in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. In 2004 he won an Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from UCF's College of Arts and Sciences; in 2006 he won UCF's Research Incentive Award, Teaching Incentive Program Award, and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award; and in 2007 he was named UCF College of Arts and Humanities Distinguished Researcher. THEME SONG: Leslie Gore, "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows"

Kara Quentin, University of London

• Kara is a student at the University of London, currently in her second year of a BA in English. She has recently discovered a passion for medievalism, and is particularly interested in medieval medicine and folklore. She occasionally (when she remembers!) updates her medieval-based blog, Sceopellen. Beyond her studies, she is a keen singer, plays the psaltery, stunt-kites and loves growing herbs and using them in her cooking and medicine.

Mary K. Ramsey, Southeastern Louisiana University

• Mary K. Ramsey is Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana, and she is the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook (West Virginia University Press, 2007) and Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She is also working on a monograph, Composing a Distinctive Christianity: Old English Translations of Latin Religious Texts. She edited a special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination (2003), “Imagined Realities: Meaning and Textuality in the Middle Ages,” in which she published essays by other BABEL-ers Roy Liuzza, Betsy McCormick, and Andrew Scheil, and she is also a regular reviewer for TheYear's Work in Old English Studies. Mary (whose Unitarian jihad name is Sister War-Hammer of Mild Reason) is BABEL's resident Zen Master.

Samantha Rayner, National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at the University of Wales, Bangor

• Samantha Rayner is currently Research and Development Manager in the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at Wales, Bangor. Her research interests include the Ricardian poets, Middle English alliterative poetry, Arthurian romance, Restoration and Victorian literature, as well as e-science, new media, the social and cultural impact of publishing, and interdisciplinary creative industries development. Her monograph on “Images of Kingship in Contemporaries of Chaucer” will be published by Boydell & Brewer Press in 2008.

Teresa Reed, Jacksonville State University

• Teresa is Associate Professor of English at Jacksonville State and the author of the recent book Shadows of Mary: Understanding Images of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts (University of Wales Press, 2003), and her scholarly and teaching interests include Middle English literature, Chaucer, feminist theory, narrative theory, cultural studies, and teaching technologies.

Dan Remein, University of Pittsburgh

• Dan Remein is currently finishing an MFA in poetry at Pittsburgh. His more recent poems appear in the journal Sidebrow and are forthcoming in Sentence 6. Additionally, Dan is interested in the possibilities for thinking poetics in terms of historiography as poetry and poetry as historiography, as well as ways of reading the Middle Ages as a resource for contemporary poetics with a special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon verse and fourteenth-century Mystics.

Nelljean Rice, Coastal Carolina University

• Nelljean Rice comes to us as our first “real” modernist interloper (not counting Jeff Skoblow who started out as a William Morris scholar, then veered toward Robert Burns, and is now skulking around the caves at Lascaux, but since he wrote an article on Bob Dylan, okay, okay, he’s a modernist, too!). She is Associate Professor of English, Assistant to the Dean for Special Projects, and Director of the "First-Year Experience" at Coastal Carolina, all of which means she has gone over to the "dark side" of administration (but, hey, in a "good way"). Prof. Rice is also an accomplished poet, scholar, and former director of Women’s Studies at Coastal. Her book, A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham, was published by Routledge. Nelljean has agreed to be BABEL’s “poet-jester” (not to be confused with our “holy fool,” Anne Clark Bartlett), and thanks to her, BABEL now has an official catch-phrase: “a simulacrum of an early warning system,” as well as a t-shirt slogan: “grammar is glamour.” Here is Nelljean as a younger poet-auteur fiercely channeling a bohemian-esque Emily Dickinson:

Sara Ritchey, University of Louisiana in Lafayette

• Sara Ritchey is Assistant Professor in History at Louisiana in Lafayette. She is interested in writing, reading, thinking, and talking about late medieval spirituality, communal religiosity, early ecology movements, and feminist art & theology. She is currently at work on a book about arboreal metaphoricity, entitled Spiritual Arborescence: The Meaning of Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination; you can find a preview of it in the Spring 2008 issue of Spiritus. Sara is a food fanatic and tends to exhibit symptoms of mania when in the presence of deluxe sewing machines, discounted textiles and small furry animals. THEME SONG: The Kinks, "Shangri-la"

Beth Robertson, University of Colorado at Boulder

• Beth Robertson is Professor of English at Colorado, where her research interests have mainly focused on medieval literature and feminist theory. Her books include Piers Plowman: A Norton Critical Edition of the B-Text, co-edited with Stephen Shepherd (W.W. Norton, 2005), Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, co-edited with Christine Rose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (University of Tennessee Press, 1990). Beth is also one of the original "founding mothers" of the Medieval Feminist Newsletter and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.

Conrad Roth, University of London

• Conrad H. Roth is a fledgling doctoral student at the School of Advanced Study, London (Warburg Institute). There he is sadly able to pursue only one of his many historical interests, which include neither self-fashioning nor subcultures, but do, on the other hand, include pre-Chomskyan linguistics; exegesis and hermeneutics; scepticism (and scepsis, but not skepticism); the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy, especially Plato, libertinage érudit, and Fruhromantik; heteroclite literatures; London; avant-garde idealist nonsense (with the proper perspective, of course); Quattrocento painting; truth and lies; the entire gamut of Western architecture; Rithmomachia: the Delphic oracle; Pythagoreanism; punning; and listmaking. Conrad has no expertise in anything, although he has written professional papers on Thomas Nashe, Vergilian allegory, and 1960s campus design. He bemoans the decline of Latin as an international language of scholarship, and will perpetuate the ghost of the Republic of Letters in any way he can. Like Freud, he has no interest in music. Unlike Freud, he is 100% ignorant of politics, and 105% ignorant of any cultural activity east of Greece. He also blogs, of course.

Myra J. Seaman, College of Charleston

• Myra Seaman is Associate Professor of English at Charleston and her work has been published in Studies in Philology, Medieval Perspectives, and Fifteenth-Century Studies. A chapter on Chaucer’s dream visions is forthcoming in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems. Her current project, Seeking an Audience for Late Middle English Romance in Two Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts, investigates the cultural work performed in fifteenth-century household miscellanies. Prof. Seaman is also the co-editor of Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), to which she is "also also" contributing the chapter (co-written with John Green), "Sacrificing Fiction and the Quest for the Real King Arthur." THEME SONG: Blur, "Out of Time"

Figure 9. Myra, Eileen, and Betsy in Oxford, MS (SEMA 2006)

Zoë Seaman-Grant, BABEL Youth Ambassador

• Zoë Seaman-Grant, a seventh-grader at the Charleston County School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, hopes for C.P. Snow’s “third culture,” because otherwise she will need to learn—as those before her have done—to see her loves for science and history as two separate, competing, and mutually unintelligible aspects of herself. She believes that scientists and historians have much to teach us all, and one another. Just as she simultaneously worries about (and is intrigued by) a future without fossil fuels, she fears for a future without the humanities. Mostly, though, she doesn’t believe in such a future and sees herself as part of the answer. Zoë plays the euphonium, has a mean butterfly stroke, loves animals, reads anything she can find about Greek and Roman antiquity, and spends her free moments imagining life during WWII—that is, when she’s not watching or creating new teleplays for Star Trek: Next Generation and Voyager. She’s been writing some challenging poetry of late, as well. Her friend Betsy McCormick believes she will become president of the U.S., but Zoë thinks she’d like to have more ability to make things actually happen than the president is allowed.

Figure 10. A Future BABEL Scholar at Work

Andrew Scheil, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Andrew Scheil is Associate Professor of English at Minnesota and recently published the much-acclaimed book, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding the Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Michigan, 2004), which the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists chose as best book published in Anglo-Saxom studies for 2004, and for which he was also awarded the Medieval Academy's John Nicholas Brown prize. Prof. Scheil is currently at work on a second book, The Babylon Complex: Text and Memory from Herodotus to Lovecraft, for which he was awarded an N.E.H. Fellowship (2007-08) and also a fellowship stint at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madsion for 2008-09. Because of this, Prof. Scheil is BABEL's unofficial "cultural historian."

Figure 11. Andy Scheil and Mary Kate Hurley (Kalamazoo 2008)

Alf Siewers, Bucknell University

• Alf Siewers is Assistant Professor of medieval literature at Bucknell and environmental humanities coordinator for the Bucknell Environmental Center. Alf's focus is on comparative work in early Welsh, Irish, Old and early English, and Icelandic literatures with an emphasis on environmental literary studies. Currently he is particularly interested in approaches that seek to combine environmental phenomenology and ethics with the geo-philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and in "archipelagic studies" inspired by Jeffrey Cohen's work. You can view his website here.

Jeffrey Skoblow, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

• Jeffrey Skoblow is Professor of English at Southern Illinois and is NOT a medievalist. He has two books, Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction (Delaware, 2001) and Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics, and Art (Virginia, 1993), which did, by the way, interrogate Morris' interest in and appropriation of the Middle Ages. Although Jeff has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Isles poetry, his research (and other) interests are wide-ranging and mesh well with BABEL's interests. He is an active actor in local theater (I saw him as Creon in Oedipus Rex--a little scary, actually), a published fiction writer, a former Fulbright scholar (in Catalan Spain), and he is currently interested in "prehistorical" art, anthropology, culture, etc. People have seen him skulking around at the caves at Lascaux, a place no Burns scholar belongs, and that's exactly why we like him. Jeffrey's last couple of conference papers have been about the contemporaneity of Morris’s medievalist commercial venture, the Kelmscott Press. Jeff also has an article forthcoming on Bob Dylan in a collection published in Spain, and he also wants us to know that, in addition to playing Creon, he has also played Roy Cohn in Angels in America, and we all agree that is really scary this time (scarier than Creon, anyway). Here is a picture of Jeff at Dinosaur National Park in Utah touching the imprint of a dinosar's foot--in other words, as he puts it, holding his own while the earth takes a sudden shiver on its axis.

Sophie and Georgie, BABEL Dog-House

• Sophie and Georgie are the road trip dogs of BABEL par excellence. When BABEL hits the road in summer of 2009 to produce its first road trip movie, Provocations Toward a Post-Catastrophic Humanities, in addition to Eileen Joy, Christine Neufeld and Tim Spence (writing-directing team), and Betsy McCormick (road manager), Sophie and Georgie will see us to the end of the driveway and beyond, their heads hanging out the window, joyfully catching the breeze of the winds of the future. But because Sophie and Georgie know that nothing, not even freedom, is for free, they will also be acting as our key and biscuit grips. THEME SONG: Steppenwolf, "Born to Be Wild"

Tim Spence, Hollins University

• Tim Spence is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hollins, where he is teaching Chaucer and a course on the Enlightenment.  His research interests include the histories of rhetoric, mysticism, technology, and documentary culture (while writing his dissertation, Tim co-founded Ragtag Cinemacafé in Columbia, Missouri, an independent cinema dedicated to documentary films).  His publications include "The Prioress' Oratio ad Mariam and Medieval Prayer Composition," in Scott Troyan's Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook (Routledge, 2004), and review-articles in the minnesota review.  His current projects include articles on Meister Eckhart's use of affective rhetoric in his sermons, postmodern mysticism and the lyrics of David Bowie, Stephen Malkmus, and David Berman, as well as an article focused on rhetorical exempla and medieval children's literature.  Tim's book project places prayers composed by Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-poet within the context of medieval arts of prayer.  Along with Lisa Moore-Hunt (University of Wyoming), Tim is developing a multi-media documentary project titled The Craft of Parchment, which investigates the development of manuscript culture through the medium of parchment. Tim has also provided for us this alternative biography: Although Tim Spence is currently a Visiting Professor of English at Hollins University, deep down he feels he is elegantly unemployable and has nightmares of being forced to eat typewriter ribbons. Tim insists that he must have a trinity of THEME SONGS: Velvet Underground, "Sweet Nothing," Stereolab, "The Light That Will Cease to Fail," and Pavement, "Fillmore Jive."

Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY

• Karl Steel is Asst. Professor of English at Brooklyn College and completed his dissertation, "Defining the Human: Discourses and Practices of Animal Subjugation in the Middle Ages," at Columbia University in 2007. A portion of that has appeared in Exemplaria as "How to Make a Human." He also works on Anglo-Norman literature: an edition of a prologue to a thirteenth-century sermon collection, Robert of Greatham's Evangiles des domnees, will appear in the The French of England (the sequel to The Idea of the Vernacular), and he is looking to get a project off the ground on the prequel to the Brut stories, Des Grantz Geanz. At In The Middle, he plays the role of death opposite Eileen Joy's life. He will mix it up posthumanistically with whoever. At Brooklyn College, he hopes to live out his days trading animal wisdom with Nicola Masciandaro.

Cheryl Stiles, Kennesaw State University

• Cheryl Stiles is Assistant Librarian at Kennesaw State where she coordinates library instruction, and she is a doctoral student in English at Georgia State University. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous online and print journals. Recently she launched her own small poetry press, La Vita Poetica, and is releasing two chapbooks from the press later this year. Her interests include: the history of the book, the book as art object and artifact, and electronic publishing and the digitalization/archival preservation of texts. She considers herself a very crafty person and loves to make books by hand. After reading Forty Centuries of Ink by David N. Carvalho last fall, she produced her own homemade black walnut ink (gall nut ink) from scratch and shared it with her calligrapher friends. Cheryl has agreed to be BABEL's librarian.

Will Stockton, Ball State University

• Will Stockton is Assistant Professor of English at Ball State. He is largely a Renaissance scholar, but he has frequent torrid love affairs with the Middle Ages. Along with Stephen Guy-Bray and Vin Nardizzi, he is currently co-editing a collection of essays on the state of queer Renaissance studies. He is also completing a monograph on sexuality and scatology in early modern comedy (from Ben Jonson to Chaucer). When he is not busy revising, he is dreaming up future projects on skepticism and sex in Shakespeare, seduction in Milton, and problems of belief in narratives of religious violence.

Larry Swain, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Larry Swain is currently completing his dissertation at Illinois at Chicago under Thomas N. Hall and Thomas Bestul. The title of this work is Aelfric's Letter to Sigeweard, An Edition, Translation, and Commentary and ventures into biblical exegesis, the hexameral tradition, and touches along the way every writer and most Anglo-Latin and Old English works from the Anglo-Saxon period. Never satisfied to do just one thing, Swain is also the acting editor in chief of the online, peer-reviewed journal The Heroic Age which has featured and will feature in future issues works by Babel members. Swain is also editing with Norb Wethington a collection of essays with a working title "Medieval English Biblical Literature" which examines both Old English and Middle English uses of the Bible in other types of literature; and is co-editing a volume of essays in honor of a former teacher. Larry is also interested in things Tolkien, both as medievalist and as medievalism and in other modern authors including Italo Calvino and Raymond Carver.

LeAnne Teruya, San Jose State University

• LeAnne Teruya is a geologist who likes exploring the connections between seemingly opposing ideas and concepts. This must be true because she loves being a geologist every bit as she once loved being a student of 18th-century English literature, and she makes her geology students dissect the personification of geological processes in poems by A.R. Ammons. She herself does close readings of granite rocks in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Check our her blog, She Bangs Rocks.

Janet Thormann, College of Marin

• Janet Thormann is Professor of English at Marin and her two main research interests are Old English poetry and psychoanalysis. She has published Lacanian readings of Chaucer’s “Shipman’s Tale,” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, and has also published articles on the meaning of the child in the nineteenth century in Henry James, Derridean absence and “The Lament of the Sole Survivor” in Beowulf, Zizek and the real in “The Battle of Brunanburh,” and the representation of Jews in Old English narrative poetry. During the past few years, she has tried to arouse a concern among psychoanalysts and therapists for human rights in essays on Arundahati Roy’s The Good of Small Things, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Shoshana Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious. Violence and the law are her current preoccupations.

Elaine Treharne, Florida State University

• Elaine Treharne is Professor of Early English Literature at Florida State, and specializes in early medieval manuscripts and texts. She investigates the archeology of the book and the ways in which texts were received and used. She is a Co-Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Project, "The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220," based in the Department of English at the University of Leicester. She is currently completing two books, Cnut: Viking Warror, Anglo-Saxon King (2009) and Living Through Conquest: The Ideology of Early English (OUP, 2009). Her major new project entitled "The Architextuality of Early English" seeks to uncover the polysemy of text in various manuscript contexts from c. 1000-1300. She is also beginning work on her native Welsh Literature, and is researching A History of British Manuscript Studies. Her theme song is the musical adaptation of Beowulf (sung here by Hrothgar, Wealhtheow and Grendel, with the amassed comitati of Geatland).

Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne (Australia)

• Stephanie Trigg is Lecturer in English Literary Studies at Melbourne where she teaches medieval, medievalist and modern literature. She has written on the institutions of Chaucer criticism in Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (2002) and is now trying to finish a book on the Order of the Garter (1346-2008), to see what it can tell us about the life of the medieval in post-medieval culture. It's part of an abiding interest in institutions with long histories. She has a long history at her own institution, although illness and other local changes have recently shaken up her sense of the most important things humanities scholars can do. She blogs at Humanities Researcher. THEME SONG: Madonna, "Ray of Light"

Valerie Vogrin, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

• Valerie Vogrin is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois where she teaches courses in fiction writing and is one of the editors of Sou'wester, SIUE's literary journal. Valerie is the author of the novel Shebang (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), has published short stories in various journals and magazines, and considers one of the highlights of her early career winning the Playboy College Fiction Contest in 1988. Valerie is BABEL's resident novelist and champion drunken night-time croquet and poker player. THEME SONG: The Partridge Family, "Come On, Get Happy"

Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall University

• Angela Jane Weisl is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Seton Hall. She has intense interests in the intersections (and "crossings") between medieval and contemporary culture, one of the fruits of which is her book The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Professor Weisl is also the author of Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer's Romance (D.S. Brewer, 1995) and the co-editor (with Cindy Carlson) of Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (Palgrave, 1999). Prof. Weisl is, moreover, the author of a chapter to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) titled "She appears as brightly radiant as she once was foul: Medieval Conversion Narratives and Contemporary Makeover Shows."

Bonnie Wheeler, Southern Methodist University

• Bonnie Wheeler is Professor of English and Director of Medieval Studies at Southern Methodist, the editor of Arthuriana, and the series editor for the New Middle Ages imprint at Palgrave. She is also editor and co-editor of numerous books on the Middle Ages, including Medieval Mothering (Garland, 1996), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (Garland, 1997), and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). She has also served as a commentator and historical consultant for A&E and The History Channel's programs on Camelot, the Holy Grail, and Joan of Arc. Prof. Wheeler is a veritable force to be reckoned with and dresses more stylishly than anyone BABEL knows. Anna Wintour could take tips (editor of Vogue, for those of you who don't know).

Karen Marie Williams, University of California, Berkeley

• Karen Marie Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Berkeley, where she works on Old English literature and the peculiar genre of Anglo-Saxon law. Schooled in the literary-historical mode but with a love of legal order, she aspires to be something of a cross between Dorothy Whitelock and Judge Judy. Before beginning her Ph.D. at Berkeley, she spent a year at King's College London, where in addition to studying Anglo-Saxon poetry, she also trained with the British National Kickboxing Team. And yes, she's pretty sure she can still knock you down. THEME SONG: The Mamas & the Papas, "California Dreamin'"
  

Meg Worley, Pomona College

• Meg Worley has been to seven continents, has lived on four, and has been arrested on three. She is now less migratory as an assistant professor at Po(mona) Co(llege), where she teaches classes on comic books, children's literature, HEL, the Bible as literature, and all things medieval. Currently she is interested in translation, superhero comics, coinage, biblical exegesis, and old-fashioned history, upon which she aspires to perform various Marxist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonialist vivisections and party tricks. She blogs at http://xom.blogs.com/xoom. THEME SONG: "Ojalá que llueve café."