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, University of Colorado at Denver

• Mike Augustine is an M.A. student in English at Colorado 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 a chapter in the anthology Queering the Non/Human (Ashgate, 2008), 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.

Virginia Blanton, University of Missouri-Kansas City

• Virginia is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she serves as doctoral faculty in English and Religious Studies. Her research focuses on medieval hagiography and religious ritual, as well as the representations of women in religious culture. She is the author of Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615 and also co-editor of Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach. Virginia is writing a second book, Shaping English Identities: Sanctity and Devotion Late Medieval England, and is co-editing a Middle English legendary with Veronica O'Mara. She serves on the Editorial Board of Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art. Her favorite painting these days is Kate Kretz's representation of Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary and (someday) she will write a conference presentation on it--and AJ's response.

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.

Nancy Marie Brown

• Nancy Marie Brown is the author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt 2007) and the forthcoming The Abacus & the Cross: How the Pope Brought Islamic Science to the West before the Year 1000 (Basic Books, 2010), both of which look at medieval literature and history through the lens of science. Nancy has an M.A. in comparative literature from Penn State (1985), with emphases in Old Norse, Old French, and Middle English, but she worked for 25 years as a science writer/editor at Penn State before embarking on a new career writing books about the Middle Ages. More about Nancy's career and writing can be found at her website 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:

Shanna Carlson, Cornell University

• Shanna Carlson is a graduate student in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University. She is working on a dissertation on "trans" narratives of the French Middle Ages and premodern period as well as contemporary issues in politics and psychoanalysis.

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 the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in 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), which was recently awarded the SCMLA Best Book Prize; 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 and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute 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 Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: 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."

Nunzio D'Alessio, University of Texas-Austin

• A doctoral student in English at UT-Austin, Nic holds a BA from Mt. St. Mary's University (Emmitsburg, MD) in theology, music, and philosophy, and master's degrees in theology from Yale Divinity School and English from UT-Austin. He has also studied musicology at both Yale and UT. His recent writings and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in GLQ, Sixteenth Century Journal, and the Handbook of Trends in Medieval Studies. His conference activities have included SEMA, Kalamazoo, New Chaucer Society, and the John Gower Society. Research interests include: postmodern religion/theology, mysticism, devotional/didactic literatures, continental philosophy/theory, gender/queer studies, the reception of classical and ancient Christian texts, liturgical cultures, historiography, and is especially interested in the works of Gower, the Pearl-poet, Milton, and Bunyan. Right now he's pretty fascinated by questions of affect and the boundaries of the human. Some have predicted that he'll end up a Langland scholar, but he's hoping to avoid as long as possible the pull of that star's gravity. He blogs at Indirections. THEME SONG: Jack White, "Wayfaring Stranger"

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"

Karma de Gruy, Emory University

• Karma de Gruy is a PhD student in English at Emory, where she focuses on sacred eroticism, sexuality and religion, monsters, angels, devils, and the regulation of appetite(s) in various medieval and early modern contexts. She wrote her MA thesis on the relationship between media of symbolic exchange and the monstrous in Beowulf, and is currently exploring the sexuality of Milton's fallen angels in Paradise Lost, masochism and gender in Robert Crashaw (more angels, and some bleeding saints), and demonic propagation in "Solomon and Saturn II." She blogs at Slouching Towards Extimacy. THEME SONG: Flogging Molly, "Rebels of the Sacred Heart"

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.

Helen Dell, University of Melbourne

• Helen is a research fellow in Literary Studies, School of Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD, awarded in 2006, was on desire in trouvère song, with a Lacanian twist. It was published mid-2008 as a book, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song, by Boydell & Brewer. She has also published articles on French secular monophonic song and has a particular interest in medieval woman's song. Helen has recently focused her research on medievalism studies and has begun to publish in this area. Her most pressing project is called "Music in the Medievalism of Nostalgia." It involves a study of the role of music in medieval fantasy fiction and film, and recordings of medieval music. She is using listener responses to recorded medieval music via personal interviews and online chatrooms, customer reviews, fanzines, promotional material etc., to better understand how music, especially vocal music, figures in nostalgic fantasies of the medieval. She plans to turn this research into a book. She would dearly love to hear of or from anyone with similar interests. When not researching, she sings and plays portative organ with medieval music group: Troveresse, which she founded and directs. She also teaches singing. THEME SONG: "The singer or the song." [She
  doesn't know the song, just likes the title.]

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"

Lowell Duckert, George Washington University

• Lowell Duckert is a Ph.D. student at George Washington and his interests include early modern drama, economics, travel literature, and material culture. He is currently theorizing the role of heavy metal -- gold, silver, copper, lead -- in these areas. He also maintains the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute blog. THEME SONG: Neil Young, "Heart of Gold." It has nothing to do with Lowell's scholarly interests. When he's not reading, he's playing harmonica and guitar (to Jeffrey's chagrin). Lowell is BABEL's first official troubadour.

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"

Denis Ferhatovic, Yale University

• Denis Ferhatovic is a PhD candidate in English languages and literatures at Yale. His dissertation deals with uses and roles of spolia in four Old English poems, Exodus, Andreas, Beowulf, and Judith.  Whenever he works on Old English, he misses Middle English, and vice-versa; whenever he works on medieval, or early-early-modern, he misses modern, or late-late-medieval, and vice-versa. Some things that particularly interest him, in no particular order: interactions of word and image; love and God; small, shiny objects; cities; not silencing AND not falsifying (at least not too much) the Other; writers who always write something different; alternate histories; Gastros winning over Eros and Thanatos. THEME SONG: He cannot decide between the original “Hajde mala da pravimo lom” by Šaban Šaulic and the cover by Cucuk Stana.

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. Marty 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"

Jeffrey Fisher, Carroll University

• Jeffrey Fisher is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Carroll University. His first publications were an interview with Paul Di Filippo in Wired, and an essay on Dante and Cyberpunk in Internet Culture, that is, if you don't count the SF and technoculture book reviews in the mid-1990s. His main work for the last several years has focused on Jean Gerson, and the apophatic mystical theology of Dionysius and his followers (including Gerson). He teaches pretty much everything but the stuff he writes on.

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 of Limerick (Ireland)

• 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, 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.

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