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."