BABEL members A-G

• 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 WilkieCollins (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”

• Heather Bamford is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Texas State University, San Marcos. Her research interests include the impact of Jewish, Christian and Muslim relations on the formation of medieval and early modern Iberian literature and thought and the function of pre-modern material culture in the construction of Spanish national identity in the present. She is working on a book about highly fragmentary medieval and early modern Iberian manuscripts and how the practical and theoretical challenges these manuscripts pose can help us understand parts of the pre-modern period and the present. Theme song: “November was White, December was Gray” by Say Hi.

Justin Barker, Purdue University (barker18[at]purdue.edu)

• Justin Barker is a PhD student at Purdue. Her interests include temporality, hybridity and monstrosity, postcolonial critique, and medievalism. She also a (weird) fascination with the Black Death. In her spare time, she watches food competition shows (think Cupcake Wars), instigates spontaneous dance parties (in her office), and hangs out with her cat named Bartleby. Theme Song: “Shake it Out” by Florence & the Machine.

Anne Clark Bartlett, DePaul University (abartlet[at]depaul.edu)

• 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.”

Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State University (barringtonc[at]ccsu.edu)

• Candace Barrington is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, and has three primary fields of research: (1) reconfigurations of Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales in American popular culture, (2) courtly gestures implied in the literary texts associated with late-medieval royal courts, and (3) the repertoire of linguistic and structural gestures associated with the legal profession shaping literary production in late-medieval England. Her published work can be found in essay collections and journals, as well as in her book American Chaucers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Kimberly K. Bell, Sam Houston State University (eng_kkb[at]shsu.edu)

• 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 ofCultural 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”

Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Absolutely Nowhere (phillip.bernhardthouse[at]gmail.com)

• Phillip received a very enjoyable 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 won a 2009 D. Simon Evans Dissertation Prize with The Edwin Mellen Press, and will be published as a book late in ’09 under a different (to be negotiated!) title. Phillip is trying to make the most of underemployment in these troubled economic times, writing, publishing, and presenting wherever possible, and adjuncting in religious studies courses for Columbia College military base extension programs, 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!), Eolas, The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, and the Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook, as well as a chapter in the anthology Queering the Non/Human (Ashgate, 2008), and a number of non-academic publications in journals and anthologies on diverse subjects, amongst which is a retelling of a Middle Irish lesbian story in the magazine Parabola, and a recent article in the same journal on Irish flood myths. Phillip also has published poetry in various places, including an entire book of verse (under a different name) in late 2008. 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.”

Kathleen Biddick, Temple University (kbiddick[at]temple.edu)

• 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 (bmeb[at]st-andrews.ac.uk)

• Bettina Bildhauer is a Lecturer 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 (birrerd[at]cofc.edu)

• Doryjane Birrer is Associate 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.blake[at]gmail.com)

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

Virginia Blanton, University of Missouri-Kansas City (blantonv[at]umkc.edu)

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

Scott Boston, Bowling Green State University (scottsboston[at]gmail.com)

• 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 (rmb29[at]psu.edu)

• 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, Coastal Carolina University (jboyle[at]coastal.edu)

• Jen Boyle is Assistant Professor of English at Coastal Carolina, 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 has a book, Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature, a study of mediation and embodiment in early modern literature and technoscience, which is forthcoming from Ashgate Press, and also on an installation project, Perspective and the Affective Image. Jen is also on the Editorial Board of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. 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 and her website here.

Nathan Breen, DePaul University (nbreen[at]depaul.edu)

• 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 inBeowulf, 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 (jbrent[at]presby.edu)

• 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.

Alexander Brey, Bryn Mawr (abrey[at]brynmawr.edu)

• Alex is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art department at Bryn Mawr College. His primary interest is in the borrowings and appropriations of visual motifs and architectural techniques between Byzantine, Early Islamic, and Central Asian peoples in the late antique and early medieval periods. Other interests include trade in the Indian Ocean and finding clever ways to use new media to serve his own nefarious medieval ends (mostly Photosynth and Processing). Sometimes he blogs. He also enjoys the post-humanist musical stylings of Janelle Monae.

George Brooks, Valencia Community College (gbrooks[at]valenciacc.edu)

• 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:

Nancy Marie Brown (nmb[at]kingcon.com)

• Nancy Marie Brown is the author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt 2007) and the forthcoming The Abacus & the Cross: How the Pope Brought Islamic Science to the West before the Year1000 (Basic Books, 2010), both of which look at medieval literature and history through the lens of science. Nancy has an M.A. in comparative literature from Penn State (1985), with emphases in Old Norse, Old French, and Middle English, but she worked for 25 years as a science writer/editor at Penn State before embarking on a new career writing books about the Middle Ages. More about Nancy’s career and writing can be found at her website here.

Bryant (far right) with other young BABEL-ers Dan Remein, Julie Orlemanski, Lowell Duckert, and Mary Kate Hurley (Kalamazoo Congress 2009)

Brantley L. Bryant, Sonoma State University (brantley.bryant[at]sonoma.edu)

• 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.”

Emma Campbell, University of Warwick (Emma.Campbell[at]warwick.ac.uk)

• Emma Campbell is Associate Professor of French at the University of Warwick. Her main research interests are in Old French literature, manuscript studies and modern philosophy and critical theory. She is particularly interested in theoretically-oriented approaches to medieval literature and manuscript studies, notably in relation to feminism and queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial theory and translation studies. She is the author of Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (2008) and co-editor (with Robert Mills) of Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image (2004). Her current book project is on translation and the untranslatable in medieval francophone literature.

Shanna Carlson, Cornell University (shannat99[at]gmail.com)

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

Greg Carrier, University of Alberta (greg.carrier[at]gmail.com)

• 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.

Thea Cervone, University of Southern California (cervone[at]usc.edu)

• Thea Cervone lectures in Medieval and Renaissance literature at the University of Southern California. Her field of study is the Early Modern period, with a focus on the English Reformation. She is the author of Sworn Bond in Tudor England, NC: McFarland Press, 2011. In addition to her research on oath swearing, she has published articles on the ghost tradition of the Sixteenth Century, and on propaganda plays of the Reformation. Her current project is a book on disinterments in English literature and culture.THEME SONG: The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated”

Jane Chance, Rice University (jchance[at]rice.edu)

• Jane Chance, currently the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in English at Rice, retired July 1 and then will be a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for the Medical Humanitiesat the University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston, where she will continue to edit her postmedieval issue on “Cognitive Alterities/Neuromedievalism” during the 2011-12 academic year. In addition, she is also attempting to complete the third volume of Medieval Mythography (on The Italian “Renaissance”) and serving on the Advisory Board of PMLA and the editorial boards of postmedieval and College Literature. In the two book series for which she functions as general editor, books will be out soon, on the Women Skalds (by Sandra Straubhaar, Library of Medieval Women) and on Mythology in the Middle Ages and Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love (by Christopher Fee and Jennifer Wollock, Praeger Series on the Middle Ages). 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). Among her books, authored and edited, are The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), SCMLA Book Prize winner; Women Medievalists and the Academy (2005); with Alfred K. Siewers, Tolkien’s ModernMiddle Ages (2005); Tolkien and the Invention of Myth(2005); 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); The Assembly of Gods (1999);Gender and Text in the Later Ages; The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics (1995); Inklings and Others, vol. 3.3 of Studies in Medievalism(1991); The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable andthe Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (1990); Christine de Pizan’s Letter of Othea to Hector(1990; rpt. 1997); Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986; rpt. 2006); with. Miriam Miller, Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight(1986); with R.O. Wells, Mapping theCosmos (1985); Medievalism in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2.1 of Studies in Medievalism (1990); and The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1975).

Geoffrey Chaucer, Aldgate Tower, London (daliaunce[at]hotmail.com)

• 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’sConsolation 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.

Michal Choptiany, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland (michal.choptiany[at]uj.edu.pl)

• Michal Choptiany is a PhD cadidate in old-Polish literature at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland who is currently preparing a dissertation on Ramist rhetoric. He also works in the field of the intellectual history of Polish Socinianism. He is an editor of the Polish Journal of Philosophy, a peer-reviewed semi-annual and Autoportret, an interdisciplinary quarterly dedicated to space as a cultural phenomenon. He holds the position of editorial and scientific secretary of the Committee on the Study of the Reformation in Poland and East-Central Europe.

Eddie Christie, Georgia State University (engejc[at]langate.gsu.edu)

• 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

Justin Brent and Kenneth Clarke in Swansea, Wales

Kenneth Clarke, Oxford University (kenneth.clarke[at]bnc.ox.ac.uk)

• 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.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University (jjcohen[at]gwu.edu)

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

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

Julie Nelson Couch, Texas Tech University (julie.couch[at]ttu.edu)

• Julie Nelson Couch is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech. Shehas published on Havelok the Dane, Howard Pyle’s retellings of medieval legendsfor children, Malory, apocryphal poetry, and miracle tales. 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 A. Crocker is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She is author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (Palgrave, 2007) and editor of Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave, 2006). Her articles have appeared in The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, Medieval Feminist Forum, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, and a number of edited collections. She is currently completing a second book, The Reformation of Feminine Virtue from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and beginning a third book, Feeling Medieval: The Affects of the Past in Reformation England. She serves as Book Reviews Editor for postmedieval, and she is co-editing a critical anthology, Middle English Literature: Criticism and Debate, for Routledge. THEME SONG: Tones on Tail, “Go!”

Nunzio D’Alessio, University of Texas-Austin (ndalessio[at]mail.utexas.edu)

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

Josh Davies, Kings College London (joshua.davies[at]kcl.ac.uk)

• Josh Davies recently completed a Ph.D. at King’s College London. His dissertation was called something like “Building, Dwelling, Writing, Reading,” and was 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”

Rebecca Davis, University of California, Irvine (rebecca.davis.uci[at]gmail.com)

Karma deGruy, Emory University (karma.degruy[at]gmail.com)

• Karma deGruy is a PhD candidate at Emory, where she is (ostensibly) working on images of the soul/body relationship in early medieval English literature. Her preoccupations include folk angelology (Solomon and Saturn II, Angels in America, Le Conte du Graal), the intersection of the sacred and monstrous (cynocephali, the Book of Enoch, Andreas), media of exchange between humans and other-than-humans (Beowulf, Richard Crashaw, the history of the Eucharist, Bataille, Baudrillard), and becoming-angel (John Milton, “Vercelli Homily IV,” Deleuze & Guattari). She blogs at Slouching Towards Extimacy. THEME SONG:Flogging Molly, “Rebels of the Sacred Heart”

Joseph Derosier, Northwestern University (joseph.derosier[at]u.northwestern.edu)

• Joseph Derosier is a graduate student in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern. His work hovers on and around Li Hauz Livres du Graal—also known as the Perlesvaus. This romance has not only pulled Joseph from a focus in the 20th century to medieval studies but has also has lead to en exploration of (fantasies of) empire, biopolitics and sovereignty. He hopes to situate this romance in a larger genealogy or narrative of territory, corporeality and materiality in the rise of the vernacular narrative of the 13th century. Drawing from the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Deleuze, this work is an attempt at examining the relations between territory, the imaginary, and power in prose romance. He lives with a darling feline in Chicago. Theme song: Matmos’s recent cover of ESP.

Laura Michele Diener, Marshall University (diener[at]marshall.edu)

• Laura Michele is Assistant Professor of medieval history at Marshall and received her PhD from Ohio State. She finds everything to do with textile history fascinating, especially when it connects (as she firmly believes it does) to female spirituality, Latin literature, and monastic culture. She has published several articles based on her dissertation about gendered advice literature for twelfth-century nuns and is currently working on a project dealing with continuities in female spiritual autobiography from the middle ages to the twentieth century. When not actively working, she loves to make all manner of things–sweaters, skirts, curtains, afghans, and cupcakes being among her revolving top five. She spends some time walking dogs but far more time taking naps on top of them. THEME SONG: “Dancing in the Dark,” but only the version by Mirah.

Patricia DeMarco, Ohio Wesleyan University (pademarc[at]owu.edu)

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

Helen Dell, University of Melbourne (helendel[at]vicnet.net.au)

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

Craig Dionne, Eastern Michigan University (cdionne[at]emich.edu)

• Craig Dionne is Professor of Literature at Eastern Michigan and editorof 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 includesShakespeare, 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 (mdockray[at]lesley.edu)

• Mary Dockray-Miller is Professor of English in the humanities program at Lesley University. In fall 2009, Brepols will release her new book, an edition of the Wilton Chronicle, a fifteenth-century text that is part history, part saint’s life, and part propaganda. She is also the author of Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and various articles about gender in Anglo-Saxon culture. THEME SONG: “Stand By Me”

Lowell Duckert, George Washington University (lduckert[at]gwu.edu)

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

Holly Dugan, George Washington University (hdugan[at]gwu.edu)

• 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, Southern Methodist University (idumitrescu[at]smu.edu)

• Irina Dumitrescu is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Methodist. She is working on a book examining the productive role of pain in literary depictions of teacher-student encounters in Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Irina also has an 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.) THEME SONGS: Cake, “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and Queen, “Killer Queen.”

Andrew Eichel, University of Tennessee-Knoxville (ateichel25[at]gmail.com)

• Andrew Eichel is a first year PhD student in English at Tennessee-Knoxville. His concentrations are Old English and Translation Studies. His MA thesis focused on translation theory and its applicability to the Old English poems “The Seafarer” and “The Wanderer,” specifically an analysis of Ezra Pound’s translation of the former followed by a foreignized rendering of the latter as the culminating chapter. He plans on continuing research in this field until all his fellowship money runs out. He’s also somewhat of a self-labeled “wanderer.” He has lived in Holland for a semester, Turkey for 2 years, and most recently Seoul, South Korea for a year. He’ll probably give up on the Western academic scene and get a job at any Asian university that happens to need an Anglo-Saxonist. THEME SONG: Wild Beasts, “Hooting and Howling”

Richmond Eustis, Nicholls State University (richmond.eustis[at]nicholls.edu)

• Richmond Eustis earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State in May 2010. It is entirely likely he is adjuncting at more than three places, and supplementing his income from other sources not entirely admirable. He is interested in the entanglement of nature and language, in Spain and Italy, Sufis and Ismailis, and Petrarch, Thoreau, and other writers who walk up small mountains. He is studying oracle and alchemy, but isn’t especially good at either. THEME SONG: Robbie Fulks, “Let’s Kill Saturday Night”

Elias Fahssi, Mount Royal University (elias.fahssi[at]gmail.com)

• Elias Fahssi is an MPhil student in English Language at the University of Glasgow. He previously worked as a Research Assistant for the Cotton Nero A.x. Project, and is currently writing a thesis on Chaucer’s textual afterlives. His research interests include textual editing and editorial theory, the history of reading, and the use of computers in humanities research and teaching. When not deciphering minim strokes, Elias writes poetry and micro-fiction, and reads as much Canadian literature as possible. He will be applying to PhD programs in the Fall, and hopes to enjoy his stay in the tower of BABEL. Theme song: Television – Marquee Moon

Lara Farina, West Virginia University (lara.farina[at]mail.wvu.edu)

• 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 inWomen, 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”

Patrick Fazioli, Medaille College (kpf27[at]medaille.edu)

• Patrick Fazioli is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Medaille College (Buffalo, NY). He holds a BA in History from Providence College, and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo. His research on the archaeology of the early medieval eastern Alpine region explores the intersections of ceramic technology, social identity, and skilled practice. He is also interested in the role played by “The Middle Ages” in contemporary expressions of Central European nationalism, colonialism, and historiography. THEME SONG: Broken Social Scene “Cause=Time”

Denis Ferhatovic, Yale University (denis.ferhatovic[at]yale.edu)

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

Laurie Finke, Kenyon College (finkel[at]kenyon.edu) & Martin Shichtman, Eastern Michigan University (mshichtma1[at]emich.edu)

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

Jeffrey Fisher, Carroll University (jeff.jfisher[at]gmail.com)

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

Christina Fitzgerald, University of Toledo (christina.fitzgerald[at]utoledo.edu)

• 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.

Susan Floyd, University of Texas (stellatex[at]gmail.com)

• Susan Floyd graduated from the University of York in 2003 with an MA in The Culture of Modernism before seeing the light and converting to full-scale medievalmania. Currently working at the University of Texas at Austin while taking medieval graduate courses, she hopes to become a full-time manuscript handler very soon by completing her MLIS, with a concentration in Archives and Preservation of the Cultulral Record.  Abiding interests include: medieval English manuscript culture, York and Norwich, Marxist theory, women writers and readers, rebellion and outlaws, temporality, typography, queer theory, architecture, eco-criticism and anti-civ theory, medievalism, travelogues and map-making, graffiti and illicit speech, foodways, feminism, codicology, digital humanities, publishing history, and the history of the book. Personal interests include Tex-Mex, amateur photography, International Klein Blue, cats, and Camus. Susan also writes a food blog and runs an online archive of Austin street art. Theme song? Tie between the Jackson 5, Who’s Loving You, and Conor Oberst, I Don’t Want to Die (in the Hospital).

Rachel E. Frier, University of Maryland (rachel.frier[at]yahoo.com)

• 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”

Lea Frost, Lindenwood University (lfrost[at]lindenwood.edu)

• Lea Luecking Frost recently completed her Ph.D. in English at Saint Louis University (under the supervision of BABELer Antony Hasler). She is not officially a medievalist, but did write her dissertation on sixteenth-century depictions of Richard II, and has both studied and taught enough medieval literature (particularly Chaucer) to fake it reasonably well. Lea’s scholarly interests include Shakespeare, Elizabethan history plays, early modern historiography, queer theory, kingship, queer kingship, medieval/early modern privies and their (dis)contents, the antitheatrical movement, and whether people at Richard II’s court really ever chained their shoes to their knees. She currently teaches English and Humanities at Lindenwood University. THEME SONG: Lyle Lovett, “If I Had a Boat”