BABEL Working Group List-Serv Membership

H through N

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.

Antony Hasler, Saint Louis University (hasleraj@slu.edu)

• Antony Hasler is Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University. His main research is on the medieval and Renaissance literatures of England and Scotland, especially (but not exclusively) on the period between the late fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Additional areas of interest include Scottish literature to the present, in particular the writing of Scott, Hogg and their contemporaries; comparative literature; poetry and translation (mostly German-English); and psychoanalytic theory. He is the American editor of the Renaissance section of Blackwell Publishing's online journal Literature Compass, and is an advisory member of the International Committee of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies.

Brandon Hawk, University of Connecticut (brandonhawk@gmail.com)

• 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 (heng@mail.utexas.edu)

• 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 (mhensel1@uoregon.edu)

• 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.

Stephen Higa, Brown University (Stephen_Higa@brown.edu)

• Stephen Higa is a doctoral student in History at Brown. He is currently fascinated by aurality and religion (both medieval and modern), and is working on a dissertation about singing, listening, perception, and religious experience in Carolingian Christianities. He is also interested in questions of the historical and the historiographic, and is attempting to formulate a way in which listening and sound may create an entire philosophy of historical inquiry. In addition to his word-based endeavors, he also spends inordinate amounts of time singing. In 2004, he founded Resonanda, Brown's medieval music ensemble, and continues to direct and guide the group along the troubled pathways of "historically informed performance." Although his primary love is medieval/early music, he makes frequent adulterous excursions into the realms of the avant-garde and experimental. The intersections of new music/medieval music and new performance/medieval performance are particularly fascinating to him, and he has collaborated with other artists on projects in digital, multimedia, and performance art. THEME SONG: "Barbara Allen"

John M. Hill, United State Naval Academy (jhill@usna.edu)

• John Hill is a Professor of English at the Naval Academy and his aesthetic inclinations go back to Heraclitus and forward to Peirce, James, the philosophical one, and Dewey (not the destroyer of the Spanish fleet at Manila). Scholarly sallies include Chaucerian Belief: The Poetics of Reverence and Delight (1991), The Cultural World in Beowulf (1995), The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic (2000), Reconstructive Polyphony: Studies in the Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages (with Deborah Sinnreich-Levi and in memoriam for Robert O. Payne, 2000), The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf (2008) and On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems (2010). I am currently at work figuring out how Chaucer thinks and how Shakespeare poses the fluidity of friendship in his plays and some of his sonnets. THEME SONG: Jo Stafford, "You Belong to Me"

Cynthia A. Ho, University of North Carolina-Asheville (cho@unca.edu)

• 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 (ahostett@princeton.edu)

• Aaron Hostetter is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton. He is writing a dissertation entitled "The Politics of Eating and Cooking 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, and The Faerie Queene. 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): Blackalicious, "Chemical Calisthenics"

Cary Howie, Cornell University (csh34@cornell.edu)

• 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 (mk.hurley@gmail.com)

• 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 (jacobsm@wfu.edu)

• 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 (hrjohn@gmail.com)

• 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 (mjohnson@mail.utexas.edu)

• 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

Figure 5. Michael with Tiny Shriner button in Saint Louis airport

Chris Jones, University of St Andrews (csj2@st-andrews.ac.uk)

• Chris Jones used to worry about whether he was a modernist pretending to do a bit of medieval, or a medievalist 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 (iheartdante@gmail.com)

• 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, medieval children, 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 (djoy@mail.nih.gov)

• 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 6. Deirdre with her brother-in-law (Deirdre is not the bald one)

Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

• Eileen Joy is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, ethics, and the post/human. 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 research/writing project is on the Anglo-Latin and Old English Lives of Saint Guthlac and the queer erotics of unsettled inter-subjectivities. She is a regular reviewer for 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 a monograph, tentatively titled Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History. She is also the Editor, with Myra Seaman, of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, for which she and Craig Dionne co-edited the inaugural issue, "When Did We Become Post/human?" THEME SONG: Kings of Convenience, "I'd Rather Dance with You"

Kathleen Kelly, Northeastern University (k.kelly@neu.edu)

• 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 (ssklein@rci.rutgers.edu)

• 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 (afdtk@uaa.alaska.edu)

• Daniel T. Kline (M.Div., Ph.D.) is Professor of English at Alaska and lives in Wasilla (yes, that Wasilla). He specializes in Middle English literature and culture, Chaucer, literary and cultural theory, and digital medievalism. His research concerns children, violence, sacrifice, and ethics in late-medieval England, and he has essays forthcoming on children in Middle English literature, reading the Physician's and Prioress's Tales together, John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, and the apocryphal Infancy of Jesus Christ in MS Laud 108. Recent essays have appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and Philological Quarterly, and he has chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women (Cambridge, 2003), Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (MRTS, 2005), Mass Market Medievalism (McFarland, 2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007), and Levinas and Midieval Literature (Duquesne, 2008). He has edited Medieval Children's Literature (Routledge, 2003), the Medieval British Literature Handbook (Continuum, 2008), and is co-editing a volume with Gail Ashton in the Palgrave New Middle Ages Series tentatively entitled, Medieval Afterlives: Fantasies and Fascinations. He hopes to finish his 'big book' on medieval children by fall 2011. He is woefully behind on updating his website The Electronic Canterbury Tales. THEME SONG: Cannonball Adderley, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy"

Anna Klosowska, Miami University at Oxford, Ohio (roberta2@muohio.edu)

• 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 7. Anna K. at BABEL's postmedieval Launch Party (Kalamazoo 2010)

Tessa Kostelc, George Washington University (tmkostelc@gmail.com)

• Tessa Kostelc has completed her M.A. in English at the University of Wyoming, and has moved on to working towards a PhD at George Washington. She is interested in Medieval Literature, especially French, and is fascinated by the ways in which medievalism functions in modern fantasy literature. Closely tied to this interest is a fascination with myths and fairy tales. Also preoccupying her on both an academic and personal level are the cultural implications of food and romance novels, respectively and together. When not engrossed in literary pursuits, she can be found discussing the socio-political implications of lolcats, whipping up a tasty curry, or playing a rousing game of badminton. THEME SONG: Carmina Burana.

Joseph Kugelmass, University of California, Irvine (josephkugelmass@gmail.com)

• 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"

Erin Felicia Labbie, Bowling Green State University (labbie@bgsu.edu)

• Erin Felicia Labbie is Associate Professor of medieval studies and literary and critical theory at Bowling Green. She is the author of several articles on medieval literature, psychoanalysis, and historiography, as well as the book Lacan’s Medievalism (University of Minnesota, 2006). She is currently at work on several projects that reveal the implications of the juxtaposition of medieval literature and psychoanalysis as well as the history of science and nature.

Vickie Larsen, University of Michigan-Flint (vlarsen@umflint.edu)

• Vickie Larsen is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan-Flint and she works on medieval manuscripts and the people who made and used them, particularly those manuscripts that contain devotional materials by and for women. Her current project examines the futures of medieval pieties. Entitled The Pious Fringe, it is an asynchronic study of Julian of Norwich's devotees and critics inside and outside of fringe religious communities between the 15th and 20th centuries

Erynn Rowan Laurie, Poet-Terrorist for a Better Society (inisglas@seanet.com)

• Erynn Rowan Laurie is a professional madwoman living in the Pacific Northwest, where she earned her degree in Library Card from the School of Hard Knocks. An independent scholar and author of Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom (Megalithica, 2007), she is fascinated by the early and medieval concept of poets and the poetic as agents and victims of madness and prophecy. Her current project is a book on the Gaelic geilt as a metaphor for post-traumatic stress and poetic healing; as a disabled Navy veteran she believes that examining these metaphors in modern spiritual practice can offer a potential model for healing from trauma. Erynn keeps vampire hours and believes that the only reasonable way to see a sunrise is just before going to bed. She blogs as Erynn999 on LiveJournal and doesn't mind kibitzing from the peanut gallery. THEME SONG: Elvis is Everywhere

Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa (kathy-lavezzo@uiowa.edu)

• 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 (plecouras@sc.rr.com)

• 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.

Molly Lewis, Independent Scholar (lewis.mollyc@gmail.com)

• Molly recently graduated from the College of Charleston with a BA in English and a minor in African Studies. After taking a Chaucer class fairly late in her undergraduate career, she became incredibly interested in the Middle Ages, so much so that she gave herself extra work in her final semester of college with an independent study entitled "Finding the Past Through the Present: Approaches to the Modern Middle Ages." She is currently exploring connections between the medieval and post-colonial while applying to graduate school. THEME SONG: The Beatles, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"

Roy M. Liuzza, University of Tennessee-Knoxville (rliuzza@utk.edu)

• 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).

Scott Maisano, University of Massachusetts Boston (Scott.Maisano@umb.edu)

• Scott Maisano is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and his research interests are in Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, Renaissaince humanism, and posthumanist theory. He is the author of numerous articles on Shakespeare and currently has a book manuscript in progress, titled "Shakespeare's Revolution: New Science, Late Romances, and the Future," and he has contributed an essay to the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, "Shakespearean Primatology." THEME SONG: Kool Moe Dee, "I Go To Work"

Robyn Malo, Purdue University (rmalo@purdue.edu)

• Robyn Malo is Assistant Professor at Purdue, 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, City University of New York (nicolamasciandaro@gmail.com)

• Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2007) and emerging essays on various subjects (sorrow, commentary, the hand, metal, beheading, Aesop, dislocation, individuation, Dante, and the dissolution of the cosmos). Other activities: Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary and The Whim. Current projects: a book on mystical mourning entitled The Sorrow of Being, a sequence of 101 ghazals called Event of Oneself, and a black metal theory symposium. THEME SONGS: Portal, "Glumurphonel" and Volahn, "Trascendencia del Espacio y Tiempo."

Betsy McCormick, Mount San Antonio College (bmccormi@earthlink.net)

• 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"

Michael P. McGlynn

• Michael Patrick McGlynn is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Spanish. Trained as a comparatist, he also teaches Old English and will soon be teaching Middle High German or Icelandic.  His primary research interest is medieval law in a comparative context, specifically the ideological basis of law as code, literature and disputing.  THEME SONG: “Milonga de un moro judío”

Jenna Mead, University of Western Australia (jmead@cyllene.uwa.edu.au)

• Jenna Mead is Associate Professor at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Western Australia. In 1994 she published an early postcolonial critique of medieval literary disciplinarity; later work on the larger project appeared in 2005/06. She has also published an edited collection of essays on feminist theory and public life (1997) and, more recently, a feminist account of Chaucerian subjectivity and essays on Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe. Collaborations have included performance work with composer Helen English and convening a series of symposia, conference panels and advanced training workshops for graduates (2006-08). She is an invited member of the editorial boards of postmedieval, Cultural Studies Review and Screening the Past. Current research includes a project on Chaucer and categories, medieval cultural studies and e-pedagogy.

Fabienne Michelet, University of Toronto (fabienne.michelet@utoronto.ca)

• Fabienne Michelet is currently working as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Medieval Studies at Toronto. Her book,
  Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2006), explores the Anglo-Saxons' spatial imaginaire and traces its political, literary, and intellectual backgrounds. Gathering evidence both from Old English poetry and from historico-geographical documents, it highlights the links between place, identity, and collective memory. Her new project, tentatively entitled "Questions of Heroism / Heroism in Question: of Feminine Heroes and Feminized Victims" will examine the discourses of heroism and its various personifications in Old English literature. Although this book revisits the figure of the hero in Old English literature, its wider ambition is to reflect on the typology of heroism in which contemporary public figures are repeatedly cast and to ponder the articulation of the individual and the collective as well as processes of identification and (self-)representation.

Asa Simon Mittman, California State University, Chico (asmittman@csuchico.edu)

• Asa Simon Mittman is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. 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@nyu.edu)

• 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, University of Iowa (michael-e-moore@uiowa.edu)

• Michael Moore is Assistant Professor of History at Iowa and his research centers on ecclesiastical, legal and scholarly traditions of medieval Europe, and the formation of early medieval political culture and kingship. He has explored connections between the modern and the medieval, writing on topics such as humanism from the Middle Ages to the postmodern era, outlawry and torture, and on modern themes such as the seventeenth-century Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon (to him, that is modern), as well as literary and philosophical figures of Central Europe, such as Czeslaw Milosz. He has recently completed a book manuscript, A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and Frankish Royal Power (450-850), which traces the intellectual, legal and political connections and conflicts among religious and secular authorities from the 4th to the 9th century.

Susan Signe Morrison, Texas State University-San Marcos (smorrison78704@yahoo.com)

• 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

Jon Myerov, West Virginia University (jbmyerov@hotmail.com)

• Jon Myerov is a doctoral student at West Virginia University and a senior proposal lead at iRobot Corporation in Boston, Mass., which means that he gets to talk about future robotics technologies all day long. He has published a must-read article in Anglia 118 (2001) called "Lines 3074-3075 in Beowulf: Movement into Knowing," a title that now makes him shudder in regret. He also runs Gearwor, a blog on Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon studies. In his free time, he ghostwrites and edits, and he teaches a literature class at a nearby community college. His research interests include textuality, robotics/technology, literary representations of reasoning, selection effects and cognitive bias, and quotidian addictions such as his own to coffee. THEME SONG: "Long as You Know You're Living Yours"

Susan Nakely, St. Joseph's College (snakely@sjcny.edu)

• Susan Nakley is Assistant Professor of English at St. Joseph's, where she teaches medieval literature, with special enthusiasm for Chaucer's work and all political poetry. Her long-term project, a book manuscript called Living in the Future: Chaucer, Nationhood, Anachronism, engages the Canterbury Tales' national ideals (such as sovereignty and domesticity) through the lens of postcolonial critique, putting Geoffrey Chaucer into conversation with political thinkers past and present (like Dante Alighieri, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri). Susan also studies the York Corpus Christi Cycle and will ramble on and on about how these popular plays projected a political voice capable of challenging church and state hierarchies without forsaking either (if you let her). You can find her article "Sovereignty Matters: Anachronism, Chaucer's Britain, and England's Future's Past" in The Chaucer Review (44:4); meanwhile, you can find Susan in Brooklyn--listening to her theme song, Bruce Springsteen's "Livin' in the Future" and dancing around the apartment with Abraham, her best friend (and husband).

Reza Negarestani (reza.negarestani@gmail.com)

• Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and independent scholar working in Shiraz, Iran. He is a regular contributor to the British philosophy journal Collapse and is on the editorial board of Glossator and New Metaphysics. He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), and he occasionally blogs at Urbanomic's eliminative culinarism.

Christine Neufeld, Eastern Michigan University (cneufeld@emich.edu)

• 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]

Derek Newman-Stille, Trent University (dereknewmanst@trentu.ca)

Robin Norris, Carleton University (robin_norris@carleton.ca)

• 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. THEME SONG: Rufous-Sided Towhees, "Drink Your Tea"

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