BABEL members O-Z

Julie Orlemanski, Boston College (julieorlemanski[at]gmail.com)

• Julie Orlemanski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Boston College. Her recent dissertation is “Symptomatic Subjects: Diagnosis, Mimesis, and Narrative in Middle English Literature.” She is interested in the history of medicine and the history of the body, semiotics (particularly “natural signs” — symptoms, indexical signs, photographs, etc), dialectical thought (Hegel, Adorno), exemplarity, the challenge of George Bataille, her own resistance to phenomenology, leprosy, l’informe vs./re: abjection, deformation vs/re: transformation, matter vs./re: form, the face, Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, practical texts, jargon. THEME SONG: Bob Dylan, “Mama, You Been On My Mind”

Michael O’Rourke, Independent Scholar (tranquilised_icon[at]yahoo.com)

• Michael O’Rourke is the co-editor of Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan 2003, paperback 2007); Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan 2006); The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory(Ashgate 2009); and special issues of the journals, Romanticism on the Net (Queer Romanticisms) and borderlands (Jacques Ranciere on the Shores of Queer Theory); and the editor of Derrida and Queer Theory (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan); and special issues of the journals, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (The Becoming-Deleuzoguattarian of Queer Studies) and Medieval Feminist Review (Queer Methodologies and/or Queers in Medieval Studies). He is (with Noreen Giffney) the series co-editor of two queer theory book series: Queer Interventions at Ashgate and Cultural Connections: Key Thinkers and Queer Theory at the University of Wales Press. With Noreen he has organized The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research since 2002. He has published widely on the intersections between queer theory and continental philosophy and sits on the editorial board of the uber-cool journals Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge and postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. He lives in Dublin where he works as the Postman of Truth. THEME SONG: Fields of the Nephilim, “Psychonaut”

Caroline Osella, SOAS, University of London (co6@[at]soas.ac.uk)

• Caroline Osella is the Other who is calling you here into subjectivity, whether you like her and her work or not. Especially if not. I am a social anthropologist working in India and the Gulf. (That’s not Mexico, but the one that we carefully avoid naming as Arab or Persian). I’ve published on fashion; cookery; spirit possession; neoliberal economy; Islamism; and on caste, class, gender and other forms of (mistaken-) identity. I have been trolling around BABEL for a while because I am searching fellow-escapees from liberalism, anthropocentrism, and many other aspects of the modern; and because I am greatly fond of bent forms of thinking and also of working in non-verbal and emotional registers — modalities of knowing which I surreptitiously write into my academic work and hope to bring to BABEL. My theme song would be Prince Buster’s “Enjoy yourself” -– not a paean to hedonism but, if you listen to the lyrics (and you always do that, don’t you?) some eternally sage advice for all ages.

Dana Oswald, University of Wisconsin-Parkside (dana.oswald[at]uwp.edu)

• 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.

Karen Overbey, Tufts University (Karen.Overbey[at]tufts.edu)

• Karen Overbey is an art historian at Tufts University, where she teaches courses like ‘Medieval Maps and Diagrams,’ ‘Dress and Textiles,’ and ‘Medieval Reliquaries, Inside/Out.’ Her book Sacral Geographies: Saints, Shrines, and Territories was just published by Brepols; she is co-editor (with Martin Foys and Dan Terkla) of The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations (2009) and has published a number of articles on Irish cults of the saints. She is working on a project on the materiality of gems in medieval art, and another on temporality and ‘ruins’ in visual hagiography. Any day now, she will give this all up to become a SCUBA divemaster. Or a yoga teacher. Current theme song: She Don’t Use Jelly (The Flaming Lips).

Marissa Pareles, New York University

• Mo Pareles is a first-year PhD student in the NYU English department. She digs all things medieval, Deleuze-Guattarian, religious, Puritanical, right-wing, linguistic, and affective, and also enjoys Haruki Murakami, Hayao Miyazaki, Pedro Almodóvar, reality TV, Yiddishkeit, and the dark side of Victorian epistemology. She is hard at work on the Gerasene demon (Legion) of the West Saxon Gospels. THEME SONGS: “One Beat” (Sleater-Kinney), “Gay-Not Gay” (King Missile)

Serina Patterson, University of British Columbia (serinap[at]interchange.ubc.ca)

• Serina Patterson is Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English with research interests in medieval literature, digital humanities, game studies, and web development. Her current research focuses on the cultural intersections of games, the “literary-ludic,” and late medieval literature. She has previously published articles in the journals New Knowledge Environments and LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries about implementing curricula on e-readers for digital-age youth. She is also an associate web developer/designer for the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria, technical editor for the online journal Digital Studies, and copy-editor for The Devonshire Manuscript Project. THEME SONGS: Lunasa’s “The Wedding Reel” in Morning Nightcap or any good version of “TamvLin’s”/”The Glasgow Reel” (played here by the Fiddlers 3). They are Serina’s two favorite reels, which she also enjoys playing in sessions on her whistle or 48-button accordion.

Pierre, Chimpanzee & Leader of BABEL’s Underground

• Yes, BABEL has an Underground and Pierre (yes, a chimp, 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”

Chris Piuma, University of Toronto (chris.piuma[at]utoronto.ca)

• Chris Piuma works on his PhD, which has something to do with multilingualism and creativity in the Crown of Aragon and, secretly, experimental poetry. This lets him learn all the languages and obsess over all the puns. He has a few small books of poetry out, most recently Bell-lloc, which adapts and adopts Guillem de Torroella’s fourteenth-century polyglot poem La Faula. Theme song: The Mountain Goats, “Dutch Orchestra Blues”.

Zareen Price (thelichenthrope[at]gmail.com)

• Zareen Price is probably what you would call an independent researcher. Then again, you might not. Hir work is practice-based, arising as much from creative efforts and esoteric ritual as from studied reflection and textual analysis. This amounts, or so ze hopes, to an exploration of nihilism, pessimissim, decay, demonism, and nothingness that serves to challenge the mainstream knee-jerk disgust towards these proclivities and avenues of thought. Notably, ze is an Editor, alongside Amelia Ishmael, Aspasia Stephanou, and Benjamin Woodard, and the founder of Helvete, a journal of black metal theory. Theme Song: Deathspell Omega, Apokatastasis Panton

Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida (Tison.Pugh[at]ucf.edu)

• Tison Pugh is Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Queering Medieval Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature (Routledge 2011). With Angela Jane Weisl of Seton Hall University, he edited a pedagogical volume, Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems; with Lynn Ramey of Vanderbilt University, he edited Race, Class, and Gender in Medieval Cinema; with Marcia Smith Marzec of St. Francis University, he edited Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (D.S. Brewer, 2008); and with Kathleen Kelly (Northeastern University), he edited Queer Movie Medievalisms (Ashgate, 2009). He is currently an editor of Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 2004 and 2009 he won Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Awards from UCF’s College of Arts and Humanities; in 2006 and 2011 he won UCF’s Research Incentive 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.ramsey[at]selu.edu)

• 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.

Shyama Rajendran, George Washington University (shyama.rajendran[at]gmail.com)

• Shyama Rajendran is a first-year PhD student at GWU. She is interested in temporality, ideas of embodiment, and textual transmission and translation. Her theme song changes daily, but is generally something danceable.

Samantha Rayner, National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at the University of Wales, Bangor (s.rayner[at]bangor.ac.uk)

• 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 (treed[at]jsu.edu)

• 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, New York University (danremein[at]gmail.com)

• Dan Remein is a Ph.D. student at NYU and holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. Dan feels gravitationally pulled by the idea that affect opens the scene of intellection, and that the practice of Theory can still connect us to everything. His recent projects include a paper on “Wulf and Eadwacer” and history as queer fetish, in the service of theorizing a poetics of historiography. Dan’s poems can be read in Sidebrow, Sentence, Zafusy, and other journals. Additionally, he blogs at wraetlic and edits the little magazine Whiskey & Fox. Dan supports “Champagne Supernova” as the BABEL theme song.

Nelljean Rice, Coastal Carolina University (nrice[at]coastal.edu)

• 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 (smr0144[at]louisiana.edu)

• 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”

Helen Roberts, BABEL Youth Ambassador

Helen R. in Baume, France (2008)

• Helen Roberts, who will be entering the seventh grade at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio in August 2009 (mascots: the nut and the eagle–”go nuts”), is a musician (violin, fiddle, cello, wooden flute, recorder, African percussion and wind instruments, piano, trombone, and she wants to learn the viol)and a writer. She is most proud of her play “Windows,” about a dreamy girl who always sits near a window and stares out of it, and if she can only see walls, she has fits and imagines god-like entities; her novel “Tidal Wars,” about two twin Japanese girls during the War Between the States, who grew up with a lullaby (a poem about a butterfly flying over a bloodied sea) sung to them by their father every morning and night, and later they wander along the seashore coming across the strangest people and situations, while their father is in prison for unpaid debts; her poem “Shifting Blackbird,” which is a mood-piece about the conversion/shifting of sadness and melancholy, not to utopic happiness, but to a certain pleasure in simplicity, which leads to the “passing” of the blackbird; her short story, “Protected,” about a girl-pugilist named Eveline whose best friend is her older brother Ethan who is shunned by the villagers for being “incomplete” (he sees things and cannot convey this through speech, which he is unable to learn, but he writes and is a genius), and Eveline and Ethan are searching for a home where they can be respected. Helen’s favorite things to do are: writing, playing music in her band “Knee-High Chucks,” painting, sketching, and molding, dancing, composing musical arrangements (modern and classical), reading everyone (especially Jane Austen and Edgar Allan Poe), sitting in trees, and being a petite barbarian. She also loves to debate, and even the mellowest person, like her father, who used to be a pirate, protests against her skills, saying they are unbeatable. You might like to know that Helen is also the founder and managing co-ordinator of the Bronte Coffee Book Club, and she is also an accomplished actor whose most memorable roles are: Beatrice, in a short rendition of Much Ado About Nothing, getting beat up by trees, who consequentially are three boys who love their roles as trees because of this; Midsummer Night’s Dream, where she played the role of Puck, but with more little tricks than the origional version; Cutie and the Beast, a comedy adaptation where she played the role of an old man watchmaker, and a favorite pet of the herione Cutie, a cardboard shipping box with a smiley face drawn on it, Boxie; as well as a VERY forgetful elephant in an adaptation of Squids Will Be Squids. THEME SONG: Death Cab for Cutie, “Transatlanticism.”

Beth Robertson, University of Glasgow (E.Robertson[at]englang.arts.gla.ac.uk)

• Beth Robertson is Professor of English Language at Glasgow, where her research interests mainly focus 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.

Amy Rodgers, Mount Holyoke College (arodgers[at]mtholyoke.edu)

• Amy Rodgers is an assistant professor of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature at Mount Holyoke College. Before attending Columbia University, where she received a B.A. in creative writing, she was a member of the Washington, Joffrey and Atlanta ballet companies. She received a Ph.D. in English literature and language from the University of Michigan, and her primary teaching and research fields include early modern literature and culture, film, audience and popular culture studies, and dance history. Currently she is completing a monograph entitled “A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England,” which explores how discourses that developed in response to the rapid rise of the early modern professional theater helped create the theoretical entity we today call “the spectator.” Her favorite hobbies include naps, overcooking rice, trying to pick up after her three kids and watching reruns of the original Star Trek series. Her theme song is Regina Spektor’s “Samson.”

Jesus Rodriguez-Velasco, Columbia University (jrvelasco[at]columbia.edu)

• Jesus is a professor of medieval and early modern studies at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, and at the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society, Columbia University. Before Columbia, he had a similar job at UC Berkeley, Universidad de Salamanca, Université de Paris III, École Normale Supérieure, and other venues. He has published books and articles on law and politics in the Iberian Middle Ages, Provençal poetry, Catalan narrative, and so on. His most recent book is Plebeyos Márgenes. Ficción, Industria del Derecho y Ciencia Literaria (Salamanca, 2011). In this moment -alas, a transitory moment- he is on leave, simply reading and writing.THEME SONG: MARINERO SOY DE AMOR – Anónimo (Sefardí) / Cervantes

Christopher Roman, Kent State University Tuscarawas (croman2[at]kent.edu)

• Christopher Roman is Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University Tuscarawas. His research focuses on medieval mysticism and theology, devotional literature, gender, and the queer. He really likes when all of those things come together. He also likes contemplating the human, the post-human, and that which comes in between. He is the author of Domestic Mysticism in Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich (2005). He is currently at work on a book that queers Richard Rolle, whether he likes it or not. THEME SONG (which is subject to change since his iTunes folder is currently holding over 11,000 songs): Andrew Bird, “Tables and Chairs”

Conrad Roth, University of London (chalybea[at]hotmail.com)

• 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.

Arthur Russell, Arizona State University (ajrusse3[at]asu.edu)

• Arthur J. Russell is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. His research interests include Middle English language and literature, manuscripts studies, and the cultural history of the five senses. His dissertation examines the sense of touch and the “tactile values” of late-medieval religious culture. Arthur spends his free time in the kitchen making a ton of pasta with his best friend Julianne, and with their favorite quadruped, and official taste tester, Murray “the dog” Russell. Theme Song: “Walk On,” by Neil Young (NOT U2).

Emily Russell, Eastern Michigan University (erussel4[at]yahoo.com)

• Emily is very close to finishing her M.A. thesis in medieval studies entitled, “Here tung made here slayn”: Dangerous Speech Acts in Four Exempla From Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, at which point she will graduate from Eastern Michigan University with an M.A. in Dec. of 2009. She is happily (and anxiously) awaiting acceptance into a PhD program where she will continue to pursue interests in medieval literature, with special attention to Mannyng’s texts and to deviant speech acts. She also engages several post-structural theorists in her readings. Her obsessions lead her into some interesting and exciting literary and critical spaces where she passes perhaps a little too much time at play. THEME SONG: Savatage, “Chance”

• Benjamin Saltzman is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Medieval Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies the literatures of Anglo-Saxon England (Old English and Anglo-Latin) with particular interests in medieval law and monasticism, exegesis and the history of hermeneutics (both medieval and modern), paleography and codicology, and critical theory. His dissertation considers the relationship between secrecy and hermeneutics in early medieval England, and his article, “Writing Friendship, Mourning the Friend in Late Anglo-Saxon Rules of Confraternity” recently appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Andy Scheil and Mary Kate Hurley (Kalamazoo 2008)

• 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.”

Myra Seaman, College of Charleston (seamanm[at]cofc.edu)

• Myra Seaman is Associate Professor of English at the College of Charleston. She has published on Middle English romance, textual studies, gender studies, dream visions, medievalisms, and posthumanisms medieval and modern. She co-edited the essay collection Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (2007) and is co-editing another essay collection of medievalists considering humanism, then and now. She is an editor of the journal postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and a co-founder of BABEL. She is currently working on an extended project that investigates affective literacy among the late medieval English gentry through an object-oriented ontological approach.  THEME SONG: Noah and the Whale, “5 Years’ Time”

Zoë Seaman-Grant, BABEL Youth Ambassador

Future BABEL scholar at work (2006)

• Zoë Seaman-Grant is a twelfth-grader at the Charleston County Academic Magnet High School in Charleston, SC. Back in her younger days, the appeal of BABEL to her was bound up in her 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.

Donovan Sherman, University of California, Irvine & University of California, San Diego (dsherman[at]uci.edu)

• Donovan Sherman is a doctoral candidate in the joint PhD program in Drama and Theatre at University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego. Brazenly disobeying W.C. Fields’s famous advice, his work examines children and animals in early modern England, specifically in terms of their theatricality. He is also a critical theory junkie who believes in exposing, and celebrating, a new humanism lurking in the recesses and vestiges of poststructuralism. Recent published work includes “Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground Performances, and the Transversality of Children” (co-authored with Bryan Reynolds) in Transversal Subjects (forthcoming from Palgrave in 2009). THEME SONG: “AT & T” by Pavement—a hopefully winning combination of inscrutability and passion.

Nicole Nolan Sidhu, East Carolina University (SIDHUN[at]ecu.edu)

• Nicole Nolan Sidhu is Associate Professor of English at East Carolina in Greenville, North Carolina. She is interested in gender, obscenity, piety, and, increasingly, political theory in the Middle Ages. She has published articles in Exemplaria, the Chaucer Review, Literature Compass, and the essay collections Medieval Domesticity (2008) and Comic Provocations (2006). She is currently working on a book about the uses and revisions of obscene comic discourse in Middle English writing of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She has recently fallen in love with Langland and hopes one day to stir up more trouble than she currently does.

Alf Siewers, Bucknell University (asiewers[at]bucknell.edu)

• 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 (jskoblo[at]siue.edu)

• 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. In Jeffrey’s recent publications and conference presentations he has continued to examine the contemporaneity of Morris’ various medievalist ventures, literary and commercial, as well as Burns and other Scottish subjects, Bob Dylan, and pedagogical practice; a piece on “Representations of Human Being at Rouffignac and Chauvet (France)” for Fragments Toward a History of a Vanishing Humanism is currently in the works. Here is a picture of Jeff in Utah, near Dinosaur National Monument, touching the imprint of a dinosaur’s foot. He says, ‘it took us longer than we thought to get down there, and we got lost on the way back before we found our way. There were more footprints than you can imagine, or even see when you’re right there…’

Michael Snediker, Queen’s University, Ontario (snediker[at]queensu.ca)

• Michael Snediker is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). He is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minnesota, 2008), as well as Nervous Pastoral, a chapbook published by dove|tail press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, jubilat, The Laurel Review, MARGIE, The Paris Review, and Pleiades. His current book project explores aesthetics of disability in authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein. He’s also recently completed a poetry manuscript obliquely engaged with the novels of Henry James. His hair is sometimes less spiky than this. THEME SONGS: Elaine Stritch, “Ladies who Lunch.” Or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, “Ich Habe Genug.” Or Antony & the Johnsons, “For Today I’m a Boy.”

Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen (s.i.sobecki[at]rug.nl)

• Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture and Chair of the English department at Groningen and has published widely on a wide variety of subjects, such as Dominican hagiography, Piers Plowman, Gower, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Petrarch, Mandeville, and Marie de France. In 2008, he published the book The Sea and Medieval English Literature (D.S. Brewer) and has two other books in progress: Unwritten Verities: The Common Law, Reading, and Ideas of Englishness, 1460-1586 and A Passion for the Centre: Landscape and Ideology in Late Medieval Culture.

Tim Spence, Independent Scholar (tspence[at]rcs.k12.va.us)

• Tim Spence’s research interests include the histories of rhetoric, mysticism, technology, and documentary culture (while writing his dissertation, Tim co-foundedRagtag 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 is Assistant Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He does critical animal theory: he’s completing a monograph titled How to Make a Human: Violence and Animals in the Middle Ages; co-editing (with Peggy McCracken) a special issue of postmedieval on “The Animal Turn”; has published on Sidrak and Bokkus and animals in Exemplaria; and has animals pieces appearing in the first issue of postmedieval and the Ohio UP anthology (edited by BABEL divines Eileen Joy, Betsy McCormick, and Myra J. Seaman) Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism. He’s also proud to have a piece on “The Phoenix and Turtle” in the anthology Shakesqueer (to be published by the “notoriously liberal Duke University Press”). If research be the food of life, play on. He posts occasionally on the webblog In the Middle, where he tries to be a notorious troublemaker. THEME SONGS: Brigitte Fontaine, “Je suis inadaptée” (“Je n’aime pas … les femmes qu’on jette / A la mer dans un sac / Avec un chat vivant”) or Essential Logic, “Brute Fury” (“brute fury / they couldn’t find the answers / that they wanted”).

Manny Steier (emanuel3[at]ieee.org)

• Manny Steier is a Senior Citizen Auditor at Queens College CUNY which had awarded him a B.A. degree. Prior employment with the Securities Industry Automation Corporation. Interest in the history of technology and the evolution of wages and prices.

Cheryl Stiles, Kennesaw State University (cstiles[at]kennesaw.edu)

• 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, Clemson University (whstockton[at]gmail.com)

• Will Stockton is Assistant Professor of English at Clemson. He is the author of Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy (forthcoming from Minnesota, 2011), a book about the eroticized production of filth and the limits of both psychoanalytic and historicist hermeneutics. With Stephen Guy-Bray and Vin Nardizzi, he is also the co-editor of Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009). His essays have appeared in Exemplaria, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Rhizomes. The scope and shape of his current projects are ill-defined: one argues that psychoanalysis reiterates a dually early modern and prelapsarian way of thinking about sex; another explores the ways that horror films and fiction pose questions about animal rights in a posthumanist idiom. THEME SONG: Prince, “I Wanna Be Your Lover”

• Randall has no fixed abode, material or intellectual. He completed his PhD thesis, “Technology and Military Policy in England, 1250-1350″ at the University of Reading in 2003. He’s fond of forcing squaring pegs into round holes which includes pretending that mainstream histories work while hoping that alternatives flourish. THEME SONG: Soft Cell, “Tainted Love.”

Allen Strouse, Fordham University (allenstrouse[at]gmail.com)

• Allen Strouse, who lives in Harlem, could describe himself by quoting two lines from Langston Hughes: “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. / I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.” Allen very much likes doing those things, and doing many more things besides. Currently he is an M.A. student in Medieval Studies at Fordham University, where he is writing a thesis entitled “Girls Becoming (Wo)men: Christine de Pizan’s Queer Children.” Besides queering Christine, he is also meddling with William Langland, Ausonius, and Boethius, as well as with artifacts from contemporary pop culture. His interests in nostalgia, history, sexuality, and literature (besides motivating his academic research) are materializing into a prosimetric, book-length meditation on life in rural America, tentatively titled The Lane. After stressing entirely too long about the matter of his theme song, he has decided that Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine” is as good a choice as any.

Robert Sturges, Arizona State University (Robert.Sturges[at]asu.edu)

• Bob Sturges has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown. His career has taken him hither and thither, and he spent many years teaching in New Orleans, where he met his partner, Jim Davidson. They fled after Hurricane Katrina, and eventually fetched up in Arizona, where Bob is now Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Arizona State. He is the author of Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100-1500(1990), Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (2000), and Dialogue and Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Dialogue Genre (Plato to Aelred, Plato to Sade, Plato to the Postmodern) (2005), as well as many essays. His edited collection on Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance should appear from Brepols any minute now, and he’s finishing up an edition of The Middle English Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies and Its Anti-Lollard Commentary, with his collaborator in the UK, Liz Urquhart, for the Heidelberg Middle English Texts series. His next book is under contract to Palgrave, and at the moment it’s called The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority. Recent and forthcoming essays and lectures concern economic discourse in the Towneley plays, visuality in Dante and Lacan and in Chaucer, Merlin at the limits of the human, and the Guise family’s medievalism. Bob recently realized his iMac has a “Photo Booth” feature, and the result is here. THEME SONG: Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro reconciliation scene.

Larry Swain, Independent Scholar (theswain[at]operamail.com)

• Larry recently completed his PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago in English, specializing in Medieval English and such things. Larry does a lot of stuff, never fully listed anywhere because such a listing would be too pedestrian. A few things of possible interest to Babelers is this guy edits The Heroic Age that has published and will continue to publish papers by Babel members. He also blogs, aptly calling himself The Ruminate, carefully and fully chewing his intellectual cud. Matt Gabriele graciously allows him to post on occasion at Modern Medieval. Swain describes himself as pretty much interested in everything between about 1000 BCE and 1900 CE, which makes being a medievalist, in the middle of that long stretch, so interesting. THEME SONG: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, “Sinister Minister,” Pt. 1 and Pt. 2, and his theme book would be The Exeter Book, a mix of bawdy, silly, spiritual, mundane and sublime.

LeAnne Teruya, San Jose State University (shebangsrocks[at]yahoo.com)

• 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 (janetthormann[at]att.net)

• Janet Thormann retired from teaching at Marin in 2008, leaving her free to work on Chaucer. Her two main research interests have been 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. THEME SONG:Count Basie, “L’il Darlin’”

Ben Tilghman, Lawrence University (benjamin.c.tilghman[at]lawrence.edu)

• Ben Tilghman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lawrence University, in Wisconsin’s frozen tundra, where he teaches classes on Medieval and Renaissance art. His work so far has focused on the Book of Kells and other early manuscripts, particularly the ways that early scribes explored the nature of writing through calligraphy and ornament. He also wonders what works of art do when we aren’t looking at them. Before teaching at Lawrence, Ben was a curatorial fellow at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where he organized exhibitions on medieval and contemporary illuminated manuscripts, miniaturization in art, and images from the Hubble Space Telescope. His theme song is certainly by Talking Heads, though he’s not sure which one of theirs it is. Probably “This Must Be The Place.”

Tiny after one too many drinks in Kalamazoo (May 2008)

The Tiny Shriner, Hookah Lounges

• The Tiny Shriner is the official mascot of the medieval studies group weblog In The Middle and also the beloved object of the Tiny Shriner Adoration Society. When not haunting hookah lounges, discotheques, opium dens, boutique hotels, buddha bars, and transatlantic planes, Tiny lives in the crevices and underneath the floorboards of Jeffrey Cohen’s office, where he writes mash notes to his favorite medievalists, all of whom mistakenly believe they are Tiny’s one true love (when, actually, only Kate Moss is). Tiny is a hedonist in every possible definition of the term and it is no great matter–as he is plastic, he cannot die nor is prone to liver disease, gout, or syphillis. THEME SONG: Chemical Brothers, “Get Yourself High”

Elaine Treharne, Florida State University (etreharne[at]mac.com)

• 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 (Oxford Univ. Press, 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).

Peter Travis, Dartmouth College (peter.w.travis[at]dartmouth.edu)

• Peter Travis is the Henry Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature at Dartmouth, where he specializes in medieval literature (especially Chaucer) and contemporary critical theory. He has published numerous articles on Chaucer and is also the author of Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982). He has a new book out from Notre Dame, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest Tale (November, 2009).

Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne (sjtrigg[at]unimelb.edu.au)

• 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”

Elly Truitt, Bryn Mawr College (etruitt[at]brynmawr.edu)

• Elly Truitt specializes in Medieval History and Science and Medicine and she received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2007. Her research interests include medieval technology, the occult sciences, courtly culture, imaginary lands and faraway places, and all aspects of the strange and weird of the medieval world. She is currently working on a book about medieval robots.

Lachlan Turnbull, University of Melbourne (l.turnbull[at]pgrad.unimelb.edu.au)

• Lachlan Turnbull is writing his PhD thesis in art history at the University of Melbourne. He works primarily on Roman late antiquity, especially the era of Constantine. Dealing with Constantinian art history often leads to wrestling with absent, incomplete or misinterpreted evidence, and so his central methodological concern is the problem of absent evidence, of reading through overlays of trace and reference, to make a useful construction of things now long gone. More broadly, he also works on notions of space and topography, and questions of how things begin and end, particularly concepts in art history. Lachlan has presented and published research on late antique art and architecture, Roman topography and Christian identities, and late-medieval devotional art and devotions to the suffering Christ. Current areas of research interest are fourth-century Rome, possible tangencies between emotions history and art history, and the historiography of medieval art.

Michael Ursell, University of California, Santa Cruz (mursell[at]ucsc.edu)

• Michael Ursell is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also finished his PhD. His recently completed dissertation is titled “‘If Words Be Made of Breath’: Inspiration, Book-making, and the Renaissance Lyric.” He writes on early modern poetics and cultural studies, in particular the sixteenth-century Lyonnais lyric as well as the works of the Sidney circle, Donne, and Milton. He also blogs for the Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Amy Vines, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (anvines[at]uncg.edu)

• Amy Vines is Assistant Professor of English at UNCG who specializes in the literature of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, with concentrations in women’s readership, patronage, textual studies, and medieval romance.  She has published articles on romance, the Middle English prose Brut, and fifteenth-century nativity lyrics; she is currently completing a monograph titled A Woman’s Counsel: Literary Models of Female Patronage in Late Medieval English Romance.  She joins BABEL Working Group as a new heretic and brings along her band of ninja warriors for any quick, discrete interventions or coups d’état that may be necessary (provided there are enough Cheetos to sustain them).  THEME SONG: The Alan Parsons Project, “Main Title Theme from Ladyhawke”

Valerie Vogrin, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (vvogrin[at]siue.edu)

• 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”

Erik Wade, Rutgers University (eiw10[at]rci.rutgers.edu)

• Erik Wade is a PhD student at Rutgers University, who loves Old English, critical theory, and philosophy, as well as transitional (12th and early 13th century) English literature. He has a Master’s in English from the University of Oregon (2011) and a Bachelor’s in English and History from SUNY Oswego (2009). His interests include literature of the fantastic, medieval wisdom literature, psychoanalysis (particularly Lacan, Copjec, and Žižek), Foucault, postmodernism, anachronism, queer theory, body studies, historicism, anti-historicism, weasel secrets, and contemporary film. THEME SONG: The Mountain Goats, “High Hawk Season.”

Jon Wargo, Independent Scholar (johnmwargo[at]gmail.com)

• Jon Wargo is a public school teacher and independent scholar working in Denver, Colorado. His research interests focus on queer visual culture, gender and sexuality, film, allegory, psychoanalysis, and performance studies. Being an aspiring medievalist, these interests culminate in a focus on Langland and medieval disidentification. His interests outside of medieval studies are in drag performance, Vh1 reality shows, haute cuisine and iced coffee. THEME SONG: MGMT, “Electric Feel”

Lawrence Warner, University of Sydney (lawrence.warner[at]usyd.edu.au)

• Lawrence Warner is Lecturer in Middle English at the University of Sydney. His main interests are Piers Plowman and its textual tradition, and he’s also published on texts ranging from Obadiah the Proselyte’s twelfth-century Hebrew autobiography to Othello. When not co-editing The Yearbook of Langland Studies he likes to meditate to his THEME SONG: Elvis, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall University (weislang[at]shu.edu)

• 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.”

Robin Wharton, Georgia Institute of Technology (robin.wharton[at]lcc.gatech.edu)

• Robin Wharton is the Assistant Director of Writing and Communication at Georgia Tech. She holds a law degree (1999) and a PhD (2009), both from the University of Georgia. Her dissertation examined the emergence of the individual as a target of regulatory authority in 13th and 14th century English law and literature, and her current project involves tracing the influence of common law poetics in Middle English writing. Since 2005, she has been a collaborator on the <emma> project, and she is interested in how multimodal writing and communication instruction might be enhanced through the strategic application of technology. Prior to graduate school, she clerked for a federal district court judge and practiced as an intellectual property attorney. A not-entirely-recovered-lawyer, she continues to write about contemporary law and ethics, especially as they relate to digital humanities work, and to consult in legal matters involving new and traditional media. Theme song: Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive.”

Bonnie Wheeler, Southern Methodist University (bwheeler[at]smu.edu)

• 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).

Michael Widner, University of Texas at Austin (mwidner[at]mail.utexas.edu)

• Michael is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation “Genre Trouble: Embodied Cognition and Medieval Literature” deploys findings in the cognitive sciences about how the mind categorizes and the role of bodies in cognition to construct a pliable theory of genre. He uses this theory to examine how bodies–of characters, audiences, and authors–interact to influence meaning and promote varying ideologies in the fabliaux, chivalric romance, and chronicles. He is also deeply involved in the Digital Humanities and is currently at work on building a new research tool for humanistic scholarly work called Bibliopedia, which will be the greatest thing since sliced bread. You can read more about both projects and his other work on his website: http://www.michaelwidner.com THEME SONG: “Blue in Green” from Kind of Blue.

Anna Wilson, University of Toronto (apwilson62[at]gmail.com)

• Anna Wilson is a PhD candidate in medieval studies at the University of Toronto. She works on the erotics of reception in Petrarch, Middle English devotional literature, Chaucer, and modern science-fiction fandom. She’s interested in the intersections of fandom/amateurism/academia/professionalism, and the way both modern and medieval discourses of passionate reading get mixed up with discourses of queerness and immaturity. She’s also interested in temporality, historiography, and the history of the future. Her (very) preliminary thesis title is “Immature pleasures: affective reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and modern fan communities.” In her spare time she writes stories about robots in love, and cooks vast quantities of soup.

Karen Marie Williams, University of California, Berkeley (karenwilliams[at]berkeley.edu)

• 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’”

Maggie McEnchroe Williams, William Paterson University (williamsm11[at]wpunj.edu)

• Maggie McEnchroe Williams is an accidental medievalist who revels in teaching Art History to reluctant studio artists, math majors, and assorted undergraduates. She is happily employed byWilliam Paterson University in New Jersey. Her youthful self studied Irish high crosses as emblems of cultural identity, and her work often meandered into the areas of costume and personal adornment, as in her 2002 article, “Dressing the Part: Depictions of Noble Costume in Irish High Crosses.” In her present incarnation, she has turned to contemporary reproductions and recreations of medieval Irish imagery in jewelry, souvenirs, and body art. She’s currently working on a book that has her frequenting tattoo studios in the New York City area. Her proudest medieval moment was getting married in Siena’s late thirteenth-century Palazzo Pubblico. THEME SONG: L.L. Cool J, “Mama Said Knock You Out”

Meg Worley, Pomona College (meg[at]dci.pomona.edu)

• 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.”

Julian Yates, University of Delaware (jyates[at]english.udel.edu)

• Julian Yates received his B.A. (Hons.) from St. Anne’s College in 1990, Oxford and PhD in English Literature from UCLA in 1996. He makes his home at University of Delaware, where he teaches courses on Medieval and Renaissance British Literature, literary theory, and material culture studies. His first book, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minnesota, 2003) examined the social and textual lives of what contemporaries named “cunning” or “curious conveyances”—that is manufactured objects whose effects appeared to exceed the powers of the human agents that made them (relics, portrait miniatures, the printed page, secret hiding places) and was a finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize in 2003.  His recent work focuses on adapting the critical language of material culture studies to deal with “things” that were once alive (plants, animals, fungi) and is evolving into a book with the working title “Strange Tables: Ingredients for Post-humanist Table Talk.” This project has been supported by a long-term NEH fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (2006-2007), a Francis Bacon Foundation award at the Huntington Library in San Marino CA (2007), and a Franklin Research Award from the American Philosophical Society (2007). He is currently finishing two essays: “Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry 6,” and “Animal Otium: The Ruminant Legacies of Renaissance Humanism.”  An early essay deriving from the project is available online here. THEME SONG: Roxy Music, “Remake/Remodel”

Karl S., Blaire, and Mary Kate H. being ridiculous at the Scottish Arms while Anne Clark Bartlett and Cindy Ho make wild hand hestures in the background (Saint Louis, Oct. 2008)

Blaire Zeiders, University of Wisconsin-Madison (zeiders[at]wisc.edu)

• Blaire Zeiders is a graduate student at Wisconsin-Madison. Specifically, she is interested in intersections between conceptions of the early modern nation and the Arthurian printed text as they manifest in the traces left by readers, actual and imagined. Generally, she enjoys speaking about herself in the third person, smirking in the presence of pretension, and listening to her THEME SONG: Barenaked Ladies’ “What a Good Boy.” She is very excited to be included in BABEL, on which she has long had a crush.