BABEL Working Group (Ed.) - Cruising in The Ruins. The Question of Disciplinarity in The Post-Medieval University (2012)

cruising in the ruins
the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

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cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the

post/medieval university
2nd Biennial Meeting

BABEL Working Group
20-22 September 2012
Northeastern University
Boston, Massachusetts
*Co-hosted by: Boston College, College of Charleston, The George Washington

University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, Harvard University,
M.I.T., Palgrave Macmillan, punctum books, Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, and Tufts University
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cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval
university
© BABEL Working Group, 2012.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non

Commerical-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this
license, visit: http://creative commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0.
This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy,
distribute, display, and perform the work, and you may also adapt and
remix the work, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that
you make the terms of this Creative Commons license clear, and that you
do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever. That is
what the Creative Commons legalese tells you.
BABEL encourages you to do whatever you want to do with this work, as

long as it advances the general well-being of anyone or anything at all,
including yourself, an aardvark, or a coffee cup, and everything and
anything else you can think of. Turn this book into a trim sports jacket, use
it to shelter a pigeon with a broken wing or to prop up a broken table,
convert its lines into heroic couplets and read it aloud on street corners for
nickels and dimes from kind passers-by, do not swat but shoo flies with it,
cover it with marginalia and then store it in a shoebox for a retro future-
archaeology. Vive la commons!
First published in 2012 by

punctum books
Brooklyn, New York
http://punctumbooks.com
ISBN-13: 978-0615697659
ISBN-10: 0615697659
The BABEL Working Group is a collective and desiring-assemblage of

scholar-gypsies with no leaders, no followers, no top and no bottom, and
only a middle. BABEL roams and stalks the ruins of the post-historical
university as a multiplicity, a pack of misfits, looking for other roaming
packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build temporary shelters
for intellectual vagabonds.
Cover image by Lori Nix, from The City (http://www.lorinix.net/the_

city/02.html), with kind permission of the artist. All black-and-white
photos of “Boston Ruins” by Genie Giaimo (geniegiaimo@gmail.com), and
Martyr-Saint I, Martyr-Saint II, and Other Half by Robb N. Johnston
(www.robbjohnston.com). Cover design (as well as design of conference
poster) by Megan Roche Tarquinio.
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d ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The BABEL Working Group would like to thank the following groups and
individuals for their more than generous financial and managerial support of
our 2nd biennial meeting in Boston, and also for their organizational esprit de
corps:
Arthur Bahr (Literature Section, M.I.T.), Alexis Kellner Becker (Department of

English, Harvard University), Erika Boeckeler (English Department,
Northeastern University), James Buzard (Head, Literature Section, M.I.T.),
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Department of English, George Washington University),
College of Arts and Sciences (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), College
of Humanities and Social Sciences (Northeastern University), Linda Collins
(English Department, Northeastern University), Committee on Medieval Studies
(Harvard University), Mary Crane (English Department, Boston College),
Cheryl Delaney (English Department, Northeastern University), Jean Duddy
(English Department, Northeastern University), English Department
(Northeastern University), Deborah Fitzgerald (Kenan Sahin Dean, School of
Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, M.I.T.), Genie Giaimo (English Department,
Northeastern University), James Glaser (Dean of Academic Affairs, School of
Arts and Sciences, Tufts University), Laura Morgan Green (Chair, English
Department, Northeastern University), Maureen Hays (Interim Dean, School of
Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Charleston), Diana Henderson
(Dean, Curriculum and Faculty Support, M.I.T.), Humanities Center
(Northeastern University), Institute for the Liberal Arts (Boston College), Mon.
Sparkles Joy (Director of Marketing, punctum books), Marina Leslie (English
Department, Northeastern University), Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Institute (George Washington University), Julie Orlemanski (English
Department, Boston College), Karen Overbey (Department of Art and Art
History, Tufts University), Peter Probst (Department of Art and Art History,
Tufts University), Rosalind Pyne (Palgrave Macmillan), School of Arts and
Sciences (Tufts University), Aldemaro Romero (Dean, College of Arts and
Sciences, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), School of Humanities, Arts
& Social Sciences (M.I.T.), School of Humanities and Social Sciences (College of
Charleston), Myra Seaman (Department of English, College of Charleston),
Wendy Shaw (Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville), Robert Stanton (English Department, Boston College),
Megan Roche Tarquinio (English Department, Northeastern University),
Georges van den Abbeele (Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Northeastern University), Nicholas Watson (Department of English, Harvard
University), Amy West (Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University),
and Jean Whitman (Palgrave Macmillan).
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A very special gratitude and a thousand loud huzzahs are extended to Kathleen
Kelly (English Department, Northeastern University) for her duties as chief
meeting strategist extraordinaire. This gathering simply would not have been
possible without her. BABEL showers her with dozens of virtual Chinese tree
peonies and a case of virtual Veuve Cliquot.
Otis Kelly welcomes you to Boston.
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SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
REGISTRATION + BOOK/JOURNAL DISPLAY + COFFEE, ETC.
BALLROOM, CURRY STUDENT CENTER, 2ND FLOOR
THURSDAY, NOON – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
SATURDAY, 8:30 AM – 2:00 PM
*ALL SESSIONS, EXCEPT FOR PLENARY TALKS, ARE IN NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY’S

CURRY STUDENT CENTER, 2ND & 3RD FLOORS
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THURSDAY
20 September
1:00-3:30 pm
Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as

structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. This is why
the university should not exchange the rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous
interdisciplinary space in the humanities (as if we could still organize knowledge around the figure of
“Man”). Rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the
installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of
what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so
grouped in the past.
~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins
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SESSION 1. THE INTER-DISCIPLINE OF PEDAGOGY
MCLEOD C.322
Organizer: Mary Dockray-Miller (Lesley University)
Presider: Mary Dockray-Miller
This roundtable panel will explore issues around the place, value, and practice of
undergraduate pedagogy in the contemporary university. While university mission
statements routinely include references to excellence in teaching and learning, public
discourse around undergraduate education now focuses a sometimes vitriolic critique of
liberal arts faculty and academic processes that value research over teaching (for example,
see Derek Bok’s 2006 Our Underachieving Colleges or Craig Brandon’s 2010 The Five-
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cruising in the ruins :: BABEL 2012
Year Party). As a field of knowledge, medieval studies can seem increasingly quaint or
irrelevant given our culture’s current focus on professional training and post-
baccalaureate employment.
Discussants:
• Mary Dockray-Miller (Lesley University)
• Robert Stanton (Boston College)
• Eliza Garrison (Middlebury College)
• Karolyn Kinane (Plymouth State University)
• Sherri Olson (University of Connecticut)
• Jennifer Brown (Marymount Manhattan College)
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SESSION 2. GETTING MEDIEVAL ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES
MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Organizer: Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College)
Presider: Elly Truitt
This roundtable panel will explore the concatenation of medievalism in popular culture
and medieval studies. Put more bluntly and in less boring terms, how can the Potterverse,
Westeros, the World of Warcraft, “The Knights of Badassdom,” “Your Highness,” and
LARPing teach students about the Middle Ages and the various ways that the medieval
period is portrayed in contemporary culture? We will also debate the reasons that
Medieval Studies is often still seen as marginal or arcane within the academy at the same
time that MMORPGs have tens of millions of unique users, Rennaissance Faires are held
every weekend throughout the country, and Game of Thrones is the hottest new show on
HBO. Panelists will give short presentations, followed by questions, debate, and
discussion.
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THURSDAY :: 20 September
Speak Friend and Enter: The Curious Lure of Dungeons, Dragons, Middle-Earth, and
Medieval Derring-Do
Ethan Gilsdorf (independent critic and journalist, author of Fantasy Freaks and
Gaming Geeks)
Maximilian I, The Last Medieval Knight: Then and Now

Darin Hayton (Haverford College)
Medieval Drag, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SCA
Myra Seaman (College of Charleston)
The Curious Margery Kempe

Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr College)
Sex, Stoners, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Screening Medieval History

Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College)
RESPONSE: Christine Neufeld (Eastern Michigan University)
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Figure 1. Rob N. Johnston, Martyr-Saint I
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THURSDAY
20 September
3:15-4:45 pm
The intimacy with an unknown body is the revelation of . . . distance at the very moment we appear to
be crossing an uncrossable interval. Otherness, unlocatable within differences that can be known and
enumerated, is made concrete in the eroticized touching of a body without attributes. A non-
masochistic jouissance (one that owes nothing to the death drive) is the sign of that nameless, identity-
free contact — contact with an object I do not know and certainly do not love and which has,
unknowingly, agreed to be momentarily the incarnated shock of otherness. In that moment we relate to
that which transcends all relations.
~Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising”
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SESSION 3. MEDIEVAL TOUCHSCREEN
BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR
Co-Organizers: Bettina Bildhauer (University of St Andrews) + Elizabeth Robertson

(University of Glasgow)
Presider: Elizabeth Robertson
This session will consist of seven short papers by people working in different disciplines,
each responding to a single object: a piece of skin, the relic of Mary Magdalene’s forehead
in St Maximin, France, supposedly miraculously preserved because this was where Christ
touched her just after he rises from the dead (see Katherine L. Jansen, The Making of the
Magdalen: Preaching and Devotion in the Later Middle Ages). Although speakers are in
no way constrained to represent their discipline, we expect the session to illustrate the
different (or perhaps similar) insights that emerge when observers trained in various
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disciplines approach the same object. The session therefore will be a practical enactment
of what different disciplines do and how disciplinary collaboration can enhance (or
perhaps diminish) understanding. Although this particular piece of skin will not be
present in the room, it is hoped that the materiality of the concrete object will focus
discussion. Members of the audience are encouraged — dare we say required? — to
contribute their responses to this single object to the discussion.
Don’t Touch Me, But Let Me Touch You: Mary Magdalene and the Enigma of Touch
Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow)
Skin Deep
Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado at Boulder)
When Mary Runs: Fleeting Touch, Surface Theology

Cary Howie (Cornell University)
TouchingVirtue
Holly Crocker (University of South Carolina)
Isaac’s Touch
Kirk Ambrose (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Skinning Saints: Mary Magdalene’s Scalp, Christ’s Foreskin, and Madeleine Sophie’s
Lips
Catherine Mooney (Boston College)
Getting Under the Skin in Psychiatry

Gerda Norvig (Clinical Psychologist)
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SESSION 4. FAMILIES OLD AND NEW
MCLEOD C.322
Co-Organizers: Peter Buchanan (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) +

David Buchanan (North Dakota State University) + Dan McKanan (Harvard Divinity
School) + Amy Virginia Buchanan (Independent Performer)
Presider: Peter Buchanan
In 1976, M. L. “Buck” Buchanan, Chair of the Department of Animal Sciences at North

Dakota State University, passed away. This panel is comprised of one of his children and
three of his grandchildren; at the time of his death, one of us was in graduate school, one
was a child, and the other two had yet to be born. However, long after his death, visits
with family were characterized by two things: the presence of Coca Cola and talks about
what’s been going on in our lives. We want to start with the fact that we are not atoms
propelled into motion by our interactions with universities, but are already in motion,
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bringing relationships with us into a porous structure that allows for relationships that
pre-exist and cross disciplinary divides. We recognize that our families are larger than the
ones we are given at birth. New communities and families reveal themselves to us in the
university as we sound the depths of our interests, and we are in a constant state of being
given back to ourselves by marvelous experiences in these new communities. Our families
old and new lead us to new things, pleasures we couldn’t imagine, and responsibilities to
groups both within and without the university. We would like to use our panel as a space
for the sharing of marvelous experiences enabled but not limited by our disciplinary
boundaries. We do not want to ask how a vaudeville performance artist enriches the
academic work of a religious historian or how a critic of Anglo-Saxon poetry brings new
perspectives to the population genetics of beef cattle, but rather wish to explore the types
of communities the university reveals to individuals set in motion together. Our
presentations will combine elements of performance, critical work, and personal
reflection in order to tell each other and our audience about the experiences that have
been made possible by our swerving within the university.
Agriculture and the Humanities: Education as the Family Business for the Children of
a Tinsmith and a Blacksmith
David Buchanan (North Dakota State University)
Serving Many Masters: Keeping Faith with Multiple Communities in Theological

Education
Dan McKanan (Harvard Divinity School)
Ritual and Relations: Life as a Clown

Amy Virginia Buchanan (Independent Performer)
Freely Given: Finding Community Within and Without the Academy

Peter Buchanan (University of Toronto)
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SESSION 5. GOING POSTAL: NETWORKS, AFFECT, AND RETRO-TECHNOLOGIES
MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Jen Boyle (Coastal Carolina University) + Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville)
Co-Presiders: Jen Boyle and Eileen Joy
This session will examine the question of network affects, specifically in relation to
(re)turns to outmoded communication technologies, such as the postcard (www.post
secret.com) and the cassette mixtape (www.tinymixtapes.com). In what ways do these
supposedly outmoded forms of communication serve as important switching stations or
branch offices for affective-communitarian postal systems that participate in what
Derrida would say is both a lack and an excess of address (The Post Card: From Socrates
to Freud and Beyond)? What is the historicity of various ‘postal systems’ (both real and
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imagined) and their relation to affect, as well as the ways in which they engage in what
Derrida termed ‘postal maneuvering,’ where we see the entangled operations of ‘relays,
delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating, network, the possibility, and
therefore the fatal necessity of going astray’? How to think more strategically about the
temporal lease-dates of certain ‘postal systems,’ especially in an age when the acceleration
of everything has become so profound (such that, celluloid cinema, now in its twilight,
had a good run of only about 100 years, DVDs have come and will likely be gone in less
than 20 years, and yet the printed book, somehow, hangs on after 500 years)? How might
we better explore how specific, networked engagements with older communication
technologies (pre-Internet and even premodern) enable valuable ‘virtual’ spaces for what
the social theorist Scott Lash calls ‘aesthetic reflexivity,’ and what affective communities
and sub- or extra-institutional spaces might be crafted through networks relying on
(re)turns to outmoded technologies, such as the letter, the book, the coded message, and
so on?
“I nevere dide thing with more peyne / Than writen this”: Hyperlinks, Dead Letters,
Intercepted Messages in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Man of Law’s Tale
David Hadbawnik (University of Buffalo, SUNY)
Post By a Thousand Cuts: Hotel of Magical Thinking

Wan-Chuan Kao (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Sir Orfeo in the Gutter: Repurposing an Old Story Through Found Objects
Emily Russell (George Washington University)
Return to Sender: Tracing the Ephemeral Networks of the Disputed 2009 Elections in
Iran
Nedda Mehdizadeh (George Washington University)
A Miltonic January
Ahmed S. Bashi (Artist-Artifacter)
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Thursday, Sep. 20th

5:30 – 7:00 pm @The Colonnade Hotel
[reception afterwards: 7:00-8:00 pm]
120 Huntington Avenue
Room: Huntington I
PL(AN)E(T)-NARY SESSION I:
JEFFREY JEROME COHEN (GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY) +

LINDY ELKINS-TANTON (CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE)
THE DEEP AND THE PERSONAL: THE EARTH, TIME, AND THOUGHT
In all disciplines researchers approach common questions: Where are we from? How do we
comprehend nonhuman scales of time and being? What is the relationship between Earth and life on
Earth? Do our all too human limitations compel us to apprehend the world only in
anthropomorphic terms? Critical theorists, historians, observational scientists, and artists use tools
so different as to be unrecognizable to each other, and as they reach each increment of new
understanding they describe their conclusions with incompatible vocabularies. To surpass the
barriers of understanding between disciplines, various frameworks and conclusions can all be
assessed together by answering the meta-questions, What interpretive power does your theory
convey? What does it reveal that previous theories did not? And what critical confusions does it clear
up? Does knowledge progress in a linear fashion? Can supposedly surpassed modes of knowing the
universe offer insights that resonate with and perhaps even advance contemporary modes? What is
the most effective way to convey knowledge about time scales and distances too vast to be easily
understood? Can art (which often works on an affective register) and science (which generally relies
upon a more cognitive method) ally themselves in a project of thinking beyond the local and the
merely human?
In this question-and-answer format, Cohen and Elkins-Tanton will take turns asking these common
questions, and answering them with attention to the meta-questions that allow us to bridge and
compare their seemingly remote disciplines. Elkins-Tanton will explain her research and the state-
of-the-art in planetary physics in understanding the timeline and mechanisms of the formation of
our solar system, and Cohen will speak about his recent work on medieval understandings of the
animate nature of matter (especially stone), the complicated ways that “deep time” have been
historically imagined, and the recent philosophical movement known as object oriented ontology.
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*join us at Brasserie JO from 10:00 pm to midnight-ish (Thursday, 20 Sep.)

Colonnade Hotel
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FRIDAY
21 September
10:00-11:30 am
. . . by relinquishing the claim to join authority and autonomy, the scene of teaching can be better
understood as a network of obligations. . . . As such, the transgressive force of teaching does not lie so
much in matters of content as in the way pedagogy can hold open the temporality of questioning so as
to resist being characterized as a transaction that can be concluded, either with the giving of grades or
the granting of degrees.
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SESSION 6. DIGGING IN THE RUINS: MEDIEVALISM AND THE UNCANNY IN THE
ACADEMY I
Co-Organizers: Laurie Finke (Kenyon College) + Martin Shichtman (Eastern Michigan

University)
Co-Presiders: Laurie Finke + Martin Shichtman
Flaneur: Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University)
On February 27, 1949 a fire broke out in Kenyon College’s oldest landmark building, Old
Kenyon, killing nine; there are reports that spirits walk in its ruins even after rebuilding,
swelling the ranks of college ghosts. The college archive actually has a folder labeled
“ghosts.” Doesn’t every university older than 100 years have similar tales? The two panels
on Medievalism and the Uncanny (Sessions 6 and 12) propose to explore the Uncanny
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that haunts the site of the university, a site dedicated to reason, critique, and empiricism.
How do we incorporate the mystical, the spectral, those things we cannot see but only
perhaps glimpse in the corner of an eye? In Shakespearean Negotiations, Stephen
Greenblatt writes, “I began with the desire to speak to the dead.” How literally are we to
take this rather macabre scholarly ambition? Did Greenblatt really hope to conjure the
spirits of the past? Is that what literature is for? Philosophy? History? Religion? Do the
sciences have their own Uncanny now that the mystic writing pad has become reality in
the iPad? The Uncanny, according to Nicholas Royle, “is concerned with the strange,
weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something
supernatural” (The Uncanny: An Introduction). In these two sessions we want to wonder
whether the medieval isn’t the Uncanny that haunts the rationalism of the university,
with medievalism serving as its avatar. Consider the various interventions scholarship
makes into the realm of the Uncanny, as well as the various interventions the Uncanny
makes into the realm of scholarship. We explore such topics as wonder, telepathy, magic,
automatic writing, the irrational, the ruin, superstition, awe, mystery, ghosts, déjà vu,
cannibalism, religion, premature burial, the afterlife, and phantom text.
Disciplinary Dark Matter

Amy S. Kaufman (Middle State Tennessee University) + Laura White (Middle
Tennessee State University)
Racialized Time: Formulating the Medieval Jew through English Chrononormativity

Molly Lewis (George Washington University)
Haunted by Stories: Translation, Ghostliness, and the Confessio Amantis

Shyama Rajendran (George Washington University)
Haunts in the Academy: Medievalists, Vampires and Witches (Oh My!)

Susan Aronstein (University of Wyoming)
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SESSION 7. FUTURE-PHILOLOGY
MCLEOD C.322
Sponsor: Society for Future Philology [SFP]
Organizer: Daniel Remein (New York University)
Presider: Daniel Remein
Future-Philology (FP) is a sub-discipline/methodology of Philology writ large. Philology

is often mischaracterized as only interested in the past. Philology remains perhaps most
commonly characterized as a discipline or method to be brought to bear on the vast
corpus of texts from human history, especially in relation to those languages slandered as
‘dead,’ and is also often seen as hostile to presentist or future-oriented thought. FP
distinguishes itself from Philology writ-large negatively as a corrective to this partial error
and positively as a science fiction avant-garde from within the ranks of those most trained
to read languages from the past. The philia (love) of philology is directed at Logos and not
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FRIDAY :: 21 September
limited to incarnations of no-longer-spoken human language. Nor is it so certain that
philology writ large, much less the specific and particular focus of FP, could be
circumscribed as either discipline or methodology. This panel will herald the Society for
Future Philology (SFP) with a set of remarks delineating the field of FP and modeling its
practice around a set of central questions: is Philology in general or FP to be understood
as discipline, as method, as theory, or as what else (field, orientation, etc)? How is SFP to
care for the future? What is the future of language and who is attending to it and why?
How do we read/love the logos of the future? What can FP do that nothing else can —
how and why should it be distinguished as a part of the humanities?
Future-Philologists:
• Matthieu Boyd (Fairleigh Dickinson University)
• Michael E. Moore (University of Iowa)
• Chris Piuma (University of Toronto)
• Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (University of Aberdeen)
• Michelle Warren (Dartmouth College)
• Lisa Weston (California State University-Fresno)
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SESSION 8. INTELLECTUAL CRIMES: THEFT, PUNKING, AND ROGUISH
BEHAVIOR
MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Craig Dionne (Eastern Michigan University) + Steve Mentz (St John’s
University)
Presider-Flaneur: Diana Henderson (M.I.T.)
All our ideas come from somewhere else. We may claim possession for a while, but they
never start as ours, and never stay ours for long. Once in a while we think certain ideas
are our own, or that they materialize from some mysterious unknown place, or that they
emerge from the fleeting-ness of the literary encounter. But mostly — we may as well
admit it — we steal them, hold on to them for a while, and then misrepresent them on
their way out. This session reveals the not-so-scandalous truth of intellectual theft to
think past simplistic ideas about intellectual property toward more dynamic, open, and
uncomfortable misappropriations, misreadings, and other forms of exchange.
Marlin Twine
Steve Mentz (St John’s University)
On Getting Punked
Craig Dionne (Eastern Michigan University)
I Was So Right About That: Social Class and the Academy

Sharon O’Dair (University of Alabama)
Mentoring, Influence, and Theft

Adam Zucker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
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Figure 2. Robb N. Johnston, Martyr-Saint 2

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FRIDAY
21 September
1:30-3:00 pm
‘Take ecstasy with me’ . . . becomes a request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying
temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional . . . .
We know time through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality. But let us
take ecstasy together.
~José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
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SESSION 9. IMPURE COLLABORATIONS
Co-Organizers: Brantley L. Bryant + Sakina Bryant (Sonoma State University)
Co-Presiders: Brantley L. Bryant + Sakina Bryant
Flaneur: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University)
This panel explores collaborations that challenge the customary professional expectations
of academic being-together. What kinds of shared work beckon beyond the sanitized
templates for “objective” (“pure”) and “professional” academic collaboration? How can
we best make visible the ways in which that affinity, friendship, eros, identity, political
engagement, and other off-the-CV connections give us ways of working outside of often
constrictive and normative academic hierarchies and working conditions?
Our Childhoods: A Sororal Collaboration

Natalia Cecire (Yale University) + Maria Sachiko Cecire (Bard College)
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Mimesis, Scavenging, Collaborative Encounter, and the Ethnographic Sensibility:
Scenes from an Impure Discipline
Caroline Osella (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) +
Sean Furmage (American University)
Playing (with) Music: A Two-Voice Rondeau

Elizabeth R. Upton (University of California, Los Angeles) + Brian Upton (Senior
Game Designer, Sony PlayStation)
A Collaboration: Fuck That // Fuck That: A Collaboration

Melissa J. Jones (Eastern Michigan University) + Maura J. Smyth (Harvard
University)
Who Are The We?

Tom Prendergast (College of Wooster) + Stephanie Trigg (University of
Melbourne)
You and Only You: Writing to/for/with Our Friends, and with No Apologies
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) + Anna Kłosowska (Miami
University, Ohio)
RESPONSE: Michael O’Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin)
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SESSION 10. ENJOYING THE END (AGAIN)
MCLEOD C.322
Organizer: Brianna Jewell (University of Texas at Austin) + Jenni Sapio (University of

Texas at Austin)
Presider & Respondent: Michael Johnson (University of Texas at Austin)
Our proposed panel is a political, polemical, and at times personal intervention. We are a
group of five graduate students from the English Department at the University of Texas at
Austin, working together to articulate a raison d’etre, a methodology, and an ethos that
will carry us through — and anticipate — the coming decades of scholarship. As students
of medieval literature, and as people excited about the culture of the Middle Ages, we are
concerned especially with the fate of medieval studies, both within the university and
outside of it. Our investment in medieval studies joins us. But we are separated even as we
begin to imagine our communion. Some of us think that theorizing affective relation-
ships to the past is productive, and ethically imperative, while others of us argue that
focusing on the body is historically irresponsible and masturbatory. Some of us relish
print culture and issues of translatio in order to find our bearings in the medieval past,
while some hear medieval women’s voices where others have not yet heard them, and
some trace the travel of Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English texts to queer and
unforeseen locations. Where we rub up against each other, we feel and begin to identify
the ends of our approaches. And we wonder how open we are to — or how we change
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through — an encounter with an other’s end. Do we maintain ourselves, our positions,
our approaches, so that we can continue to generate friction with the bodies outside of us
— so that we can enjoy the end again (and again)?
Each panelist will perform an act of reading, a pedagogical and critical model of touching
the past, which will vary as our own personal and erotic inclinations diverge. Cruising,
fucking, poking, erotica, sluts, promiscuity, and orgasm will be figures in our discourse
about the field, about our shared medieval objects and our fractious academic desires. We
will be cruising through various methodologies (philological, technological,
psychoanalytic, geographic, popular, biographic, and ritualistic) in order to test the
rigidity of their boundaries and to discover their amorphous points of contact.
Discussants:
• Raul Ariza Barile (University of Texas at Austin)
• Brianna Jewell (University of Texas at Austin)
• Aaron Mercier (University of Texas at Austin)
• Jenni Sapio (University of Texas at Austin)
• Christopher Taylor (University of Texas at Austin)
SESSION 11. TEXTUAL FAULT-LINES
MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Anne Laskaya (University of Oregon) + Eve Salisbury (Western Michigan

University)
Presider: Christina V. Cedillo (Northeastern State University-Broken Arrow)
This session discusses fault-lines as discrepancies, erasures and “errors” in manuscripts,

editions, and visual materials that lead to productive meditation, analysis, and
disagreement. We explore generally unacknowledged erasures that — precisely because of
their performance as an “unseen” or “unremarked” fault/error/revision — allow
productive work and thought. We offer five short presentations that focus on medieval
English textual studies and book history, Andalusian/Arabic maps, and late-medieval
Spanish manuscript miniatures. Emily Burnham considers the “fault-line” as the chasm
between maps and their verbal contexts in Andalusian geographies. Katherine
Millersdaughter finds that the erasure of the Geat woman’s lament co-occuring with
damage in the Beowulf manuscript offers an opening for her own meditation. Megan
Cook explores one specific copy of Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer that harbors
the spectre of Francis Thynne whose copious annotations fill the margins with
commentary, complaint, and emendation. Anthony Cárdenas-Rotunno explores a triple
fault-line between a Galician-Portuguese poetic text, Castilian marginal prose text, and a
seismic shift in meaning created by lavish manuscript miniatures accompanying one of
the Cantigas de Santa Maria found in a thirteenth-century codex. Anne Laskaya and Eve
Salisbury reflect on errors, choices, and dilemmas in their first TEAMS edition of the
Middle English Breton Lays and invite feedback (scholarly and pedagogical) as they
prepare a second edition. Together, we will celebrate, regret, grieve, refuse, interrogate,
explore, love, and rapelle the textual/editorial “fault.”
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Lines Drawn on an Unseen Map: Invisible Cartography and a Textual Earth
Emily Burnham (New York University)
Fire, Smoke, the Missing Word, the Thrown Voice, the Geatwoman
Katherine Millersdaughter (Community College of Denver)
The Book as a Haunted House

Megan Cook (Bowdoin College)
The Fault-Line between Frauendienst and Mariendienst: Alfonso X’s Love-Stricken

Knight
Anthony Cárdenas-Rotunno (University of New Mexico)
Whose Fault Is It? Ave/Eva Speak Again

Anne Laskaya (University of Oregon) + Eve Salisbury (Western Michigan
University)
20
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FRIDAY
21 September
3:15-4:45 pm
The university is where thought takes place beside thought, where thinking is a shared process without
identity or unity. Thought beside itself perhaps. The University’s ruins offer us an institution in which
the incomplete and interminable nature of the pedagogic relation can remind us that ‘thinking
together’ is a dissensual process; it belongs to dialogism rather than to dialogue.
a
SESSION 12. DIGGING IN THE RUINS: MEDIEVALISM AND THE UNCANNY IN THE
UNIVERSITY II
Co-Organizers: Laurie Finke (Kenyon College) + Martin Shichtman (Eastern Michigan

University)
Co-Presiders: Laurie Finke + Martin Shichtman
Flaneur: Marget Long
On February 27, 1949 a fire broke out in Kenyon College’s oldest landmark building, Old
Kenyon, killing nine; there are reports that spirits walk in its ruins even after rebuilding,
swelling the ranks of college ghosts. The college archive actually has a folder labeled
“ghosts.” Doesn’t every university older than 100 years have similar tales? The two panels
on Medievalism and the Uncanny (Sessions 6 and 12) propose to explore the Uncanny
that haunts the site of the university, a site dedicated to reason, critique, and empiricism.
How do we incorporate the mystical, the spectral, those things we cannot see but only
! 21
perhaps glimpse in the corner of an eye? In Shakespearean Negotiations, Stephen
Greenblatt writes, “I began with the desire to speak to the dead.” How literally are we to
take this rather macabre scholarly ambition? Did Greenblatt really hope to conjure the
spirits of the past? Is that what literature is for? Philosophy? History? Religion? Do the
sciences have their own Uncanny now that the mystic writing pad has become reality in
the iPad? The Uncanny, according to Nicholas Royle, “is concerned with the strange,
weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something
supernatural” (The Uncanny: An Introduction). In these two sessions we want to wonder
whether the medieval isn’t the Uncanny that haunts the rationalism of the university,
with medievalism serving as its avatar. Consider the various interventions scholarship
makes into the realm of the Uncanny, as well as the various interventions the Uncanny
makes into the realm of scholarship. We explore such topics as wonder, telepathy, magic,
automatic writing, the irrational, the ruin, superstition, awe, mystery, ghosts, déjà vu,
cannibalism, religion, premature burial, the afterlife, and phantom text.
Richard II Buried Alive: The Specter of Sovereignty and the Shakespearean Uncanny
Hannah Markley (Emory University)
Gathering (of the) Dust: Medieval Reliquaries and Modern Remains

Miriam Stanton (Williams College Museum of Art)
The Uncanny Space of the University

Tom Prendergast (College of Wooster)
Lux et Veritas: Dropping Acid on Institutional Memory

Mary Ramsey (Eastern Michigan University)
a
SESSION 13. ALL IN A JURNAL’S WORK: A BABEL WAYZGOOSE
MCLEOD C.322
Sponsor: continent. journal
Co-Organizers: Nico Jenkins (Husson University) + Isaac Linder (European Graduate

School)
Presider: Nico Jenkins
Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in
the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the
Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains
them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or
Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night
out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of
revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes
that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and
22
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doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the
classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs.
Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself.
Journals have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific
modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the
classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an
old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against
themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging.
All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up
publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals
and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a
challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and
the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to
(d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing
and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the
General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as possibilistic
site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster.
Jurnalistes:
• Nico Jenkins (Husson University + continent. journal)
• Adam Staley Groves (National University of Singapore, Tembusu College +
continent. journal)
• Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (University of Aberdeen + continent. journal +
Uitgeverij)
• Daniel Remein (New York University + Whiskey & Fox)
• Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville + punctum books)
a
SESSION 14. ECOMATERIALISM
MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) + Lowell Duckert

(West Virginia University)
Presider: Joseph Donaldson (Northern Illinois University)
Flaneur: Lindy Elkins-Tanton (Carnegie Institution for Science)
This session previews work that will be included in a special issue of postmedieval: a
journal of medieval cultural studies in 2013 (Vol. 3, Issue 1: Ecomaterialism, eds. Jeffrey J.
Cohen and Lowell Duckert). Taking up Jane Bennett’s challenge in the last chapter of her
book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things to rethink environment and landscape
from an actor-network point of view, the papers focus upon the meeting of ecocriticisim
with other modes of theoretical and critical inquiry. Rather than a traditional ecocritical
mode that traces the interface of human with landscape, we are interested in reconceiving
ecomaterial spaces and objects as a web of co-constituitive and hybrid actants.
! 23
• Fire: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) + Stephanie Trigg

(University of Melbourne)
• Water: Sharon O’Dair (University of Alabama)
• Air: Steve Mentz (St Johns University)
• Earth: Alfred Siewers (Bucknell University)
• Abyss: Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY)
• Glacier: Lowell Duckert (West Virginia University)
Figure 3. Robb N. Johnston, Other Half
24
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Friday, Sep. 21st
5:30 – 6:45 pm @Northeastern’s Alumni Center
[reception afterwards: 6:45-7:45 pm]
716 Columbus Place
6th Floor Pavilion + Faculty Club
PLENARY SESSION II
JANE BENNETT & DAVID KAISER
JANE BENNETT (JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY)
SYMPATHY AS MATERIAL POWER

The alchemist-physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) experienced the natural world as held
together by a complex system of divinely implanted sympathies and antipathies, likes and
dislikes, resemblances and distorted repetitions. Paracelsus was both materialist and
Christian in sensibility: he believed that a meticulous attentiveness to the physical
attributes of, say, a plant would provide to man hints about the uses for which God
intended it. “The chicory stands under a special influence of the sun; this is seen in its
leaves, which always bend toward the sun as though they wanted to show it gratitude.
Hence it is most effective while the sun is shining . . . .”
Is there a way to keep Paracelsus’s exquisite attunement to the sensuous specificities of

bodies, but lose or loosen his theology, anthropocentrism, organicism? In this talk, I try to
theorize sympathy — the presence of affecting affinities between bodies — within the
!
context of recent attempts (in the new materialisms, in object-oriented philosophy, in
neo-vitalisms, in ecological theory) to articulate a distinctively material form of agency or
efficacy. I find help for this project in Walt Whitman’s invocations of “sympathy” in
Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). For Whitman as for Paracelsus, sympathy is a force that
often goes unremarked as the ordinary fact that materials always have some leanings:
sunflowers tilt toward the sun, stones tend toward the ground, human heads have a
propensity to tilt slightly to one side when listening closely. I examine both the kind of
sympathy that Whitman sees at work between the bodies of people and the bodies of
animals or landscapes, and then the even stranger mimesis by which a set of bodily
postures (tilted head, bent back, open mouth) can, he avers, align itself with a set of
democratic moods or ethical dispositions (nonchalance, industriousness, civic affection).
DAVID KAISER (M.I.T.)
HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS

In recent years, the field of quantum information science — an amalgam of topics
ranging from quantum encryption, to quantum computing, quantum teleportation, and
more — has catapulted to the cutting edge of physics. The tremendous excitement marks
the tail-end of a long-simmering Cinderella story. Long before the big budgets and
dedicated teams, the field moldered on the scientific sidelines. In fact, the pre-history of
the field stretches back, in part, to the hazy excesses of the 1970s New Age
movement. Many of the ideas that now occupy the core of quantum information science
once found their home amid an anything-goes counterculture frenzy, a mishmash of
spoon-bending psychics, Eastern mysticism, LSD trips, CIA spooks chasing mind-reading
dreams, and comparable “Age of Aquarius” enthusiasms. For the better part of a decade,
the concepts that would, in time, blossom into developments like quantum encryption
were bandied about in late-night bull sessions and hawked by proponents of a burgeoning
self-help movement — more snake oil than stock option. This talk describes the field’s
bumpy transition from New Age to cutting edge.
!
!
punctum books ✶"brooklyn, ny
punctum books seeks to pierce and disturb the wednesdayish, business-as-usual protocols of both
the generic university studium and its individual cells or holding tanks. We solicit and pimp
quixotic, sagely mad engagements with textual thought-bodies. This is a space for the imp-orphans
of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds. We also take in strays.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Editor
Dark Chaucer: An Assortment

Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro, Editors
Speculative Medievalisms: Discography

The Petropunk Collective, Editors
punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand publisher dedicated to radically creative

modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage
http://punctumbooks.com
!
!
Thomas Meyer reads from his translation of Beowulf

(published by punctum books in August 2012)
Friday, Sep. 21st @10:00 pm*
Kitchen
www.kitchenbostonmass.com
560 Tremont Street
*after midnight, inspired by Meyer’s reading, longships will depart from the
Boston Harbor for raids along the New England coast in search of chintz, lobster
rolls, and arable land
!
!
SATURDAY
22 September
9:30-11:00 am
Under fortuitous conditions, the good humor of enchantment spills over into critical consciousness and
tempers it, thus rendering its judgments more generous and its claims less dogmatic. I pursue life with
moments of enchantment rather than an enchanted way of life. Such moments can be cultivated and
intensified by artful means. Enchantment . . . is an uneasy combination of artifice and spontaneity.
~Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics
a
SESSION 15. THE URMADIC UNIVERSITY
MCLEOD A.318
Organizer: Tony Fry (Griffith University, Australia)
Presider: Tony Fry
Flaneurs: Sans façon (Charles Blanc + Tristan Surtees)
The Urmadic University is a project that confronts the ‘defuturing’ nature of ‘education
in error’ — a fundamental condition now intrinsic to higher education globally. It
recognises that it is not sufficient to find ways to work within ‘the ruins’ of the institution
(Bill Readings), nor to revitalise the spirit of the Enlightenment’s university project
(Derrida). Rather, in worlds of unsettlement — those worlds within ‘the world’ made
unsustainable — new knowledge, educational practices and institutional forms are
urgently needed. ‘Nomadic education’ starts to talk of such new knowledge (Semetsky et
al), and a very basic start has been made to advance institutional transformation by
developing the idea and content of ‘the university that can move’ (the Urmadic
!
SATURDAY :: 22 September
University). However, to create knowledge able to remake the university, and break the
extant institution from its instrumentalised and degenerate service provision to the status
quo, a major reframing of what there is to learn is required. Against this background and
challenge, the panel will present a historical analysis, contemporary argument and a
politico-pedagogic strategy.
The Critic: Looking Back at Two Epochs of the University and the Urmadic Form of
its Futuring
Tony Fry (Design Futures, Griffith University)
The Educator: How to Learn and How to Teach in the Frame of the Urmadic
Cameron Tonkinwise (Design Thinking and Sustainability, Parsons The New
School of Design)
The Student: What I Have Learned So Far in the Proto-Form of the Urmadic
University
Bec Barnett (Design Practice Intern, Goldsmiths College, University of London)
RESPONSE: Georges Van Den Abbeele (Northeastern University)
a
SESSION 16. SYNAESTHETICS: SENSORY INTEGRATION AGAINST THE DISCIPLINES
ROOM 333 [SENATE CHAMBERS]
Co-Organizers: Holly Dugan (George Washington University) + Lara Farina (West

Virginia University)
Co-Presiders: Holly Dugan + Lara Farina
That the University’s task is the production of “abstraction” from sensory perception is
readily apparent from both its division of the senses among the disciplines and its
resistance to incorporating some sensory experiences altogether. While sight and sound
find their disciplinary homes in Art History and Music, for example, taste, smell, and
touch are generally relegated to the non-academic study of connoisseurship (such as
perfumery, wine tasting, and other forms of luxury expertise). Yet the division of the
senses into the traditional five divisions, each with its proper field of use, has seldom gone
unchallenged in the past or the present. Recent studies of sensation have argued in
particular that it is time to heed the interaction of supposedly distinct senses and to think
about new constellations of sensory experience. Whether they take the form of the
neurologist’s “multimodal” sensory integrations or the alternative sense organs described
by “disabled” writers and performers, these re-organized sensations suggest a need for
(interdisciplinary?) (anti-disciplinary?) methods of understanding.
Transmodal Poetics: Medieval Neurology, Synaesthesia, and Literary Disability

Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University)
! 31
Ekphrasis and the Dreaming Imagination
Emily Gephart (School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University)
Sex and Synaesthesia

Will Stockton (Clemson University)
Tendered Objects
Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria)
A Pointless Subject: Jacques Lacan on Cartesian Perspective

Ian Sampson (Brown University)
a
SESSION 17. HOARDERS
MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Sponsor: The Material Collective
Presider: Maggie Williams (William Paterson University)
Flaneur: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University)
Discovered in 2009 near Litchfield, England, the Staffordshire Hoard is the largest
collection of Anglo-Saxon metalwork yet found: over 3500 items of gold and silver, all
probably martial in character and all of exceptional craftsmanship. The Hoard may have
been battle treasure, stripped and buried for safekeeping, and never recovered — though
little is known of its origins or context. Taking as our trysting place this “object” which is
at once singular and collective, these two sessions, Session 17: Hoarders (in which we
operate in the perspectives of individual disciplines: art, art history, conservation,
museology) & Session 19: Hordes (in which we perform collaborative and collective
approaches, and migrate across disciplinary borders), feature responses to the
Staffordshire Hoard from medievalists, artists, scientists, performers, poets, curators, art
historians, educators, and philosophers. This unfolding depends on conversation across
temporal and methodological divides: curious collaborators will explore both the
particularly inflected knowledge[s] of disciplinary approaches, and the possibilities for
collective insight.
Mediating Meanings: Conservation of the Staffordshire Hoard

Brian Castriota (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
Garnets, Gold, and Dirt: The Edges of Materiality

Karen Overbey (Tufts University)
The Hoard Speaks

Nancy Thompson (St Olaf College) + Ben C. Tilghman (Lawrence University)
! 32
From Hoarders to the Hoard: Giving Disciplinary Legitimacy to Undisciplined
Collecting
Jennifer Borland (Oklahoma State University) + Louise Siddons (Oklahoma State
University)
Thieves and Reivers

Charles Fetherolf (Graphic Novelist)
A Performative Think-Fest
You (yes, You)
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SATURDAY
22 September
11:15 am-12:45 pm
Play values experimentation. When we play, we are more open to the new, from within and without.
We become ‘neophiles’ and innovators, making active use of our imaginations. Playing and pretending
are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . Play
teaches ‘vital skills’; it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it.
And it is highly contagious, a powerful medium of affect transmission.
~Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer”
a
SESSION 18. PARTS, WHOLES, AND THE NEW
MCLEOD A.318
Sponsor: Organism for Poetic Research [OPR]
Co-Organizers: Daniel Remein (New York University) + Ada Smailbegovic (New York
University) + Rachael Wilson (New York University)
Presider: Erika Boeckeler (Northeastern University)
A number of recent methodologies have been emerging across a range of disciplines and
fields in an attempt to think anew the problem of parts, wholes, and the new, and to re-
frame this question as of pressing importance to both the humanities and the sciences.
Briefly put, this question asks how things can seem at one point discrete and radically
particular, and yet also seem either subsumed as mere parts of a larger phenomena or to
give way to entirely new phenomena which do not seem reducible to their previously
extant constituent parts. Systems theorists have considered how a system can produce
! 34
something anew which is irreducible to the parts which precede it diachronically or
which make it up at any synchronic moment. Between the CERN accelerator, the Hubble
telescope, and String Theory, experimental, observational, and theoretical physics all
remain poised to significantly reframe the question of emergence on both micro and
macro scales.
Given the recent reframing of this question as essential for contemporary philosophers,
critics, poets, and scientists, this panel will measure the capacities and limits of these and
other discrete disciplinary approaches to the question of parts, wholes, and the new.
While it is tempting to proceed via an interdisciplinary patchwork, we would like to
explore what a reliance on disciplinary differences might bring to this set of questions.
What can different disciplines do in relation to this problem that others cannot? What
irreducible disciplinary or methodological differences does this problem bring into relief
and why? To what extent are different disciplines or methodologies capable or desirous of
describing the relations of parts, wholes, and the new, as opposed to producing,
multiplying, or inflecting such relations (and to what extent could this reframe the
question of disciplinarity in terms of an odd realignment of parts of the sciences and of
the humanities: observational science/descriptive criticism vs. experimental science/
poetics)?
Discussants:
• Aranye Fradenburg (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Deirdre Joy (Evolutionary Biologist)
• Dorothy Kim (Vassar College) + Laura Lebow (Vassar College) + Jillian Scharr
(Vassar College)
• Ada Smailgebovic (New York University)
• Dan Rudmann (University of Texas at Austin)
• Daniel Remein (New York University)
RESPONDENT: Michael O’Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin)
a
SESSION 19. HORDES
Sponsor: The Material Collective
Presider: Karen Overbey (Tufts University)
Discovered in 2009 near Litchfield, England, the Staffordshire Hoard is the largest
collection of Anglo-Saxon metalwork yet found: over 3500 items of gold and silver, all
probably martial in character and all of exceptional craftsmanship. The Hoard may have
been battle treasure, stripped and buried for safekeeping, and never recovered — though
little is known of its origins or context. Taking as our trysting place this “object” which is
at once singular and collective, these two sessions, Session 17: Hoarders (in which we
operate in the perspectives of individual disciplines: art, art history, conservation,
museology) & Session 19: Hordes (in which we perform collaborative and collective
! 35
approaches, and migrate across disciplinary borders), feature responses to the
Staffordshire Hoard from medievalists, artists, scientists, performers, poets, curators, art
historians, educators, and philosophers. This unfolding depends on conversation across
temporal and methodological divides: curious collaborators will explore both the
particularly inflected knowledge[s] of disciplinary approaches, and the possibilities for
collective insight.
Crafting the Hoard

Jennifer Borland (Art History, Oklahoma State University) + Barbara Robertson
(Visual Artist & Art Conservation, Seattle Art Museum)
Unpacking Meaning in the Hoard: “Somebody now forgotten had buried the riches of
a high born race in this ancient cache” (Beowulf) and We See It Today Through our
Imaginations and our Training
Gale Justin (Educational Technology/History, Pratt Institute) + Diane Marks
(English, Brooklyn College, CUNY)
Rebuilding Fabulated Bodies of the Hoarders

Asa Mittman (Art History, California State University, Chico) + Patricia
MacCormack* (English/Film & Media, Angela Ruskin University)
*McCormack will be present in “virtual” but not bodily form
Stimulacrum: Virtual Stones and Real Desires

Anne Harris (Art History, DePauw University) + Jim Mills (Geosciences, DePauw
University) + Daniel Gurnon (Biochemistry, DePauw University)
Violent Remains: Past and Future

Carlee Bradbury (Art History, Radford University) + Karie Edwards
(Photographer) + Courtney Lee Weida (Art Education, Adelphi University)
a
SESSION 20. WILL IT BLEND? EQUIPPING THE HUMANITIES LAB
MCLEOD B.320
Co-Organizers: Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria) + Myra Seaman (College of

Charleston)
Co-Presiders: Allan Mitchell + Myra Seaman
Flaneur: David Kaiser (M.I.T.)
This session will be a laboratory in which participants will test hypotheses about what, in
addition to sexy metaphors, might be the product of humanist encounters with the hard
sciences. The working question will be: can the humanities and the sciences interface, and
if so, what might that look like? Such hypotheses might seem belated and unnecessary,
given the growing evidence, for example, of humanists’ application of information
! 36
technology in sites such as the digital humanities, literary forensics, and distant reading,
or the development of a cognitive literary studies or so-called “new” materialisms. The
aim of the session will be to retool the laboratory such that light and not only heat will be
generated from the collision of the sciences and the humanities. Can smashing the two
together produce new ways of knowing? Can it affect the core content of the humanities
as well as its styles? The organizers anticipate that humanist experimenters will pursue a
range of possibly competing hypotheses.
Collaborative ARGs: Modeling Heart and Science Among the Ruins

Tina Kelleher (Towson University)
Is Physics a Discipline?
Liza Blake (New York University)
What if Everything is Always Unruly Complexity? From Mathematical Ecology to

Raymond Williams and into Open Spaces Beyond
Peter Taylor (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Caliban’s Umwelt: A ‘Dream’ of Biological Carpentry

Haylie Swenson (George Washington University)
Cabbages and Kings: Mathematics and the Humanities

Elizabeth Sklar (Wayne State University) + Jessica Sklar (Pacific Lutheran
University)
Alchemical Allegory
Kathryn Vomero Santos (New York University)
a
SESSION 21. WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?
MCLEOD C.322
Co-Organizers: Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Justice, CUNY) + Ruth Evans (Saint
Louis University)
Presider: Alexis Kellner Becker (Harvard University)
Everyone in educational institutions claims to exercise “critical thinking,” yet few agree
on what it means. The use and abuse of the phrase creates an empty/full semantic
category, powered by hot air yet still somehow meaningful: a kind of pedagogical and
intellectual equivalent of the over-used term “excellent” that was the subject of Bill
Readings’ critique of “the culture of excellence” promoted by US and UK universities in
the 1990s and beyond in his book The University in Ruins. Before we trot out “critical
thinking” on next semester’s syllabus as a skill we aim to practice ourselves and develop in
our students, or before we claim that its true home is in our discipline rather than anyone
else’s, let us use this session to think further — think “critically” — about its meanings.
Having read some common texts in advance (see below), we aim to generate no answers,
! 37
only a list of good questions, maybe some useful background knowledge and some partial
insights.
Reading List
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking? Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York:
Harper and Row, 1968.
Hollywood, Amy, “Reading as Self-Annihilation.” In Polemic: Critical or Uncritical.
Ed. Jane Gallop. New York: Routledge, 2004. 39–63.
Horkheimer, Max (1976). “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937). In The
Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. Ed. Fred Rush. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.
Latour, Bruno. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’” New Literary History
41 (2010): 471–90.
Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004):
225–48.
Readings, Bill. “The Scene of Teaching.” In The University in Ruins. Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1996. 150–65.
Warner, Michael. “Uncritical Reading.” In Polemic: Critical or Uncritical. Ed. Jane
Gallop. New York: Routledge, 2004. 13–38.
What Does a Critical Thinker Look Like?

Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Justice, CUNY)
A Critical Theory of Critical Thinking

Matthew H. Bowker (Medaille College) + Patrick Fazioli (Medaille College)
Medieval Pedagogy Informs ‘Critical Thinking’: Affective Response and Ethical Pause
Candace Barrington (Central Connecticut State University)
The End of Critique?

Ruth Evans (Saint Louis University)
a [lunch break: 12:45-2:00 pm] a
! 38
SATURDAY
22 September
2:00-3:30 pm
The University (and, more especially, says Derrida, the ‘Humanities’) have a responsibility to foster
events of thought that cannot fail to unsettle the University in its Idea of itself. For this to happen, the
special institution that the University is must open itself up to the possibility of unpredictable events
(events ‘worthy of the name’ as Derrida often says, being by definition absolutely unpredictable) in a
way that always might seem to threaten the very institution that it is. On this account, the University is
in principle the institution that ‘lives’ the precarious chance and ruin of the institution as its very
institutionality.
~Geoffrey Bennington, “Foundations”
a
SESSION 22. #OCCUPY BOSTON: HUMANITIES AND PRAXIS
MCLEOD C.322
Organizer: Julie Orlemanski (Boston College)
Presider: Julie Orlemanski
How do we experience the relationship between the humanities and political praxis? How
do we conceive the connections between reading and doing, interpretation and action —
as well as what separates them? This panel is composed of participants whose paths
crossed in the course of the #Occupy Boston movement. We first encountered one
another as protesters, citizens, or members of the 99%, but we also share the fact that we
study or teach in the humanities. The coincidence of those two circumstances, like the
coincidence of terms in this session’s title, creates the occasion for our conversation.
Topics to possibly consider during this session: economic inequalities within higher
! 39
education; reimaginings of the “public intellectual”; activist genealogies and traditions;
didactic art; “committed” and “autonomous” literature (and scholarship); the purpose of
the humanities; critique; the ancient opposition of “sophism” and “philosophy”;
pedagogical tactics; disruptions of historical linearity through the study of the past;
“liberation philology”; the “impossibility” of the humanities under capitalism; forms and
forums for humanistic discourse; the risks of holding the humanities and praxis too close
together, or too far apart, and so on . . . .
Discussants:
• Christian Beck (University of Central Florida)
• Ian Cornelius (Yale University)
• Carl Martin (Norwich University)
• Julie Orlemanski (Boston College)
• Monica Poole (Bunker Hill Community College)
• Joseph Ramsey (University of Massachusetts, Lowell)
a
SESSION 23. SE7EN UNDEADLY SCIENCES: THE TRIVIUM AND QUADRIVIUM IN
THE FORKING MULTIVERSITY
Co-Organizers: Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston) + Alex Mueller

(University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Presider: Alex Mueller
What do you do with a “university in ruins”? Stick a fork in it. Better yet, stick two forks
— the trivium and quadrivium — in it.
In David Fincher’s nineties neo-noir film, Se7en, a serial killer is determined, à la Bill
Readings, “not to let the question of disciplinarity disappear.” Rather than bemoaning a
generalized (or interdisciplinary) “corruption” or “rottenness” at the heart of modern
culture, he seeks to remind the world of the specificity medieval theologians once
attributed to the seven deadly sins. Likewise, this panel calls attention to the particularity
of the seven liberal arts — aka the seven liberal sciences — at the heart of medieval
curricula and attempts to reimagine the relevance and resonance of these capacious
categories vis-à-vis today’s “posthumanities” and tomorrow’s “multiversity.”
How might the trivium and quadrivium reconstitute “the university in ruins” as a
Borgesian “garden of forking paths”? Such a labyrinthine vision of higher education is
often the object of critique from those who insist that postsecondary schooling should be
a career-driven, efficient, straight line (the shortest possible distance) to employment
rather than a wandering series of “left” turns through the liberal arts that result in less
tangible manifestations of personal, communal, civic, or environmental enrich-
ment. Furthermore, our understanding of the liberal arts has been immeasurably
transformed by discourses of humanism that have privileged human cognition and
! 40
experience over and above those of the non-human animal, the vibrant object, and belief
in the metaphysical or transcendent. Ultimately, this session aims to track the past,
present, and future of the seven liberal arts, not only as they were defined by Martianus
Capella and medieval schoolmasters, but also as they might have been defined and might
yet be defined in postmedieval curricula and disciplinary fields.
• Grammar: Christopher Cannon (New York University)

• Rhetoric: Jill Ross (University of Toronto)
• Logic: Eleanor Kaufman (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Geometry: Maura Smyth (Harvard University)
• Arithmetic: Shankar Raman (M.I.T.)
• Music: Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia)
• Astronomy: Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
a
SESSION 24. WILD FERMENTATION: DISCIPLINED KNOWLEDGE AND DRINK
MCLEOD A.318
Co-Organizers: Nathan Kelber (University of Maryland) + Rob Wakeman (University of

Maryland)
Co-Presiders: Nathan Kelber + Rob Wakeman
In the shadows of every university, the Alehouse provides a common font for our very
best (and very worst) non-hierarchical thinking. If we “re-sound our disciplinary wells,”
we will find that the aquifer beneath is infused with alcohol. Our goal is the inebriation of
disciplinary limits: how might beer and wine prickle, tingle, blur, buzz, and nauseate the
academic conversation? How might the abrogation of our disciplinary inhibitions
encourage originality and creativity, new conversations, and new forms of knowledge-
making? We propose to re-imagine the paper session as a drinking game, with rules for
engaging, celebrating, and disciplining academic thought. Because discipline means more
than mere memory and theory, but also praxis, we will be offering our own 14th-century
style craft brew as a catalyst for discussion. Our aim is to bring post-conference
conviviality into the conference session. We will examine the alehouse (like the after-
conference) as a space that breaks down academic hierarchies and disciplinary limits. The
result, we hope, will have the atmosphere of the anti-salon — a space for serious thinking
in the Dionysian raw. What vigorous meditations, narrations, ramblings, and other forms
of learned storytelling does Harry Bailey’s game provoke? What generic investigations
result from the experiences and expertises of a diverse band “hooked up,” in the
Democritean sense, at the Tabard Inn? Shunning the droning of papers, our commedia
dell’arte takes place within the performative social order of the alehouse. The
relationships between panel and audience will be liquid, allowing sufficient room for risk,
error, openness, and honesty. This session will also seek to invoke the spirits of all ale-
squires and ale-wives, tapsters and ostlers, butlers and chamblerlains, pot-companions,
lick-wimbles, malt-wormes, and vine-fretters.
! 41
Tapsters:
• David Swain (Southern New Hampshire University)
• Will Meyers (Cambridge Brewing Company)
• Susan Forscher Weiss (Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University)
• April Oettinger (Goucher College)
a
SESSION 25. THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC GHOST
MCLEOD B.320
Organizer: Stephen Higa (Bennington College)
Presider: Stephen Higa
In this session, historians (of many kinds) present creative pieces about the encounter
with the historiographic ghost. In the course of our work, at what point do the ghosts of
our subjects — the remnants, shadows, fragrances, muffled voices, sudden shifts in
temperature or fleeting brushes against the skin — come back to haunt us? How do we
take into account the apparition, the revenant, and the necromantic in historical
inquiry? How do historians navigate the danger and taboo of flirting with the
dead? How does taboo affect history as discipline, structure, and institution? In engaging
such questions, this session will gesture toward a history that claims the power to
transgress, endanger, frighten, and transform.
Let a Sleeping Horse Lie

Christopher Guilbert (Poet)
Danse Macabre
Maura Coughlin (Bryant University)
Set Fire to the Canon: What Ethnographic Naïveté Can Offer to Historiography
Saffo Papantonopoulou (The New School for Social Research)
Rhode Island Murder and Horror Stories in Performance: Adam Emery, Mercy
Brown, and the Devil’s Footprint
Jacob Richman (Brown University)
Mucking Around in the Time Machine: Historians and the Archival Gaze
Michael Becker (Brown University)
Le Romaunt Noir
Sarah Langley (University of Montana)
Video-Poem
Sarah Golda Schwartz (Poet)
! 42
The Golem’s Ghost: The Tech of the Rabbi of Prague, Comics, Science, Fiction, and
the “Skin I Live In”
Gila Aloni (Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur)
IMAGES, APPARITIONS
Beryl Schlossman (Northeastern University)
! 43
!
Saturday, Sep. 22nd
4:15 – 5:30 pm @Gordon Chapel
Old South Church
645 Boylston Street
PLENARY SESSION III
SANS FAÇON & CAROLYN DINSHAW + MARGET LONG
SANS FAÇON [CHARLES BLANC + TRISTAN SURTEES]
WHAT’S ART GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Your language is of a remarkable purity, hygienic. But we don’t make, you have to understand,
children with Hygiene. Quite the opposite! Creation is always a filthy fight. ~Louis Ferdinand Céline,
Lettre à Ernzt Bendz, Cahiers de l’Herme
Sans façon began as an investigation between an architect and an artist and this discussion across
disciplines has been the backbone of our art practice over the past 12 years. The desire to explore
further the possibilities of working between ‘traditional’ fields and facilitating cross-fertilization has
culminated in one of our current projects Watershed+, which we’ll talk about in this session. As we
focus on function, efficiency and economy, the capacity of science and engineering to engage the
public, or to contribute to our enjoyment of a place, becomes ever more obscure. Answers cannot
come from any one specialty or field of expertise, quite the opposite. There is a need for an expanded
dialogue between disciplines in the way we build and understand our environments.
Watershed+ originated from the ambition to create a stronger connection between the public and
their watershed – natural and constructed. Hosted by the Water Services department (UEP) of the
City of Calgary, Watershed+ represents an innovative approach to public art. The focus of
Watershed+ is not the creative object or the aesthetic but the development of the creative thinking.
The program aims to develop awareness and pleasure in the environment, not by changing water
!
management practice, nor developing a uniform visual language, but by creating a climate of
opportunity for water initiatives. Through a range of initiatives, new commissions, creation of multi-
disciplinary design teams and general creative dialogue, Watershed+ involves creative practitioners
and develops creative practice from the conception stage. The program represents a major step in
implementing new working methods and processes by embedding artists and, more specifically, their
creative process within UEP core activities.
CAROLYN DINSHAW + MARGET LONG
(UN)EARTHLY PARADISE
This talk explores two sites of frustrated desire: medieval depictions of Eden and modern
representations of mirages. Sir John Mandeville’s account of a paradise that is forever lost and ever
longed for — an inaccessible place that is nonetheless on the map — eerily prefigures that of the
Arctic explorer looking for a continent that was seen but never existed. Looking at maps and travel
narratives from the Middle Ages, along with nineteenth- and twentieth-century explorers’ journals,
movies, cartoons, and Marget Long’s original photographs, we ask where these scenes of promise
and breakdown might lead us, a text-oriented scholar and a visual artist, in the cruel and uncertain
terrain of the university today.
!
!
Figure 4. A “collegial” gathering, circa 1963

[these people are so white]
j
Please join us Saturday evening for a collegial gathering:
22 September
9:00 pm-ish to midnight-ish or so
@Karen Overbey’s
160 East Berkeley Street

Apt. 306
Boston, MA 02118
corner of East Berkeley and Harrison

grey/brown building
*to be buzzed in, please call or text Karen [917.374.2629], Eileen [513.827.5888],
Myra [843.367.0094], or Kathleen [617.413.8819]
j
I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the
dancers and drink with the drinkers.
~Walt Whitman
!
what to wear on cool evenings in Boston?
www.thesartorialist.com
!
!
!
!
DIRECTIONS
v
On the subway: that is, the MBTA, or simply the “T.” Get an app: MBTA.com, MBTA
Tracker, OpenMBTA, NextTrainT. Here’s an article on navigation apps: www.boston.
com/travel/boston/gallery/nav_apps/. [Refer also to maps provided in registration
folders.]
Getting to NU: Sessions

All sessions are in the Curry Student Center. The McLeod Suites are on the third floor,
and the Ballroom is on the second. See http://www.northeastern. edu/campusmap/.
• Walking from the Colonnade or the Midtown, turn left on Huntington Ave and
stay left. Cross over Mass Ave, and pass the Huntington Theatre and the Boston
YMCA (where NU began, as a night school for working-class men). NU
immediately follows. Turn left at the quadrangle with the big NU sign:
Blackmun Auditorium/Ell Hall is right in front of you. Walk along either side
to the Curry Student Center, which is connected to Ell.
• From the Green Line, walk onto campus to the quadrangle with the big NU
sign.
• From the Orange Line (Ruggles Station/commuter rail), walk onto campus
down Forsyth to the first right. Take it past the Egan Center and follow the path
as it turns left past Snell Library and opens into a quad. Cross to the Curry
Student Center.
Getting to Plenaries
• Plenary 1, Thursday, 20 September: see the Back Bay map. From campus, take
a right on Huntington to the Colonnade Hotel, 120 Huntington Ave. About a
15-minute walk, or take the Green Line toward downtown to the Prudential
stop.
• Plenary 2 (NU Alumni Center), Friday, 21 September and Plenary 3 (Gordon
Chapel, Old South Church), Saturday, 22 September: see the maps in your
registration folders for directions.
Parking
You’re in competition with students for spots on the street, almost all of which are
metered, on Thursday and Friday. Saturday may be a tad better. You can park (and pay)
in the Renaissance Garage on Columbus Street, and access the campus through the
Ruggles T stop/commuter rail station. (It has a Dunkin Donuts.) Once on campus, turn
right to head to the Curry Student Center (see directions, above). Sometimes the
Renaissance is full, and the attendant will direct you to another garage.
Directions to and from Hotels
• The Colonnade (120 Huntington Ave)

o T: Prudential Stop, Green E Line.
o 12 to 15-minute walk to NU.
!
• The Midtown Hotel (220 Huntington Ave)
o T: Symphony Stop, Green E Line.
o 8 to 10-minute walk to NU.
• Boston Back Bay Hilton Hotel (40 Dalton Street)
o T: Prudential Stop, Green E Line.15 to 20-minute walk to NU.
• Best Western Boston-Inn at Longwood (342 Longwood Ave)
! Please look at the T map to orient yourself.
o T: Green Line at Longwood Station toward D-Riverside to Brookline
Village Station; get out and go west on Washington St/Rte 9 W to
Riverway Station, and take the Green Line toward Lechmere to the
NU station (30 minutes because you’re changing lines, and going out
to go in.) OR The Green Line at Longwood Station toward
Government Center; get out at Copley Center (you could walk from
here, down Huntington. About 15 minutes). Take the Green Line
toward E-Heath Street to the NU Station (40 minutes because you’re
changing lines, and going in to go out).
o Walking: go east on Longwood Ave toward Chapel St. Turn left onto
Riverway. Turn right onto Short St. Turn left onto Pilgrim Rd. Turn
right onto walkway. Proceed east through Simmons College. Turn left
onto Brookline Ave. Turn right onto walkway. Proceed southeast
through Emmanuel College. Turn left onto Avenue Louis Pasteur.
Turn right onto Fenway. Turn slight right onto walkway. Proceed
east through Back Bay Fens. (Don’t do this at night.) Turn left onto
Forsyth Way. Turn left onto walkway. Proceed southeast. Turn slight
left onto Fencourt St. Turn left onto Huntington Ave/RT-9
W/Avenue of the Arts (35 minutes).
! 50
!
RESTAURANTS/BARS + SIGHTS
ON IRISH BARS
While the Cambridge Brewing Company (www.cambrew.com; 1 Kendall Sq, Cambridge)

is the official BABEL go-to pub—see Session 25: “Wild Fermentation: Disciplined
Knowledge and Drink,” in which CBC brewer Will Meyers is presenting, and see the map
in your packet—you have many other choices.
The number of Irish pubs in Boston is legion. Legendary. Some are down-and-dirty bars,
others are tarted up for tourists, some are sports bars, and others feel like Ireland—not
that down-and-dirty, tarty, and loud and annoying sporty doesn’t. Many are simply
neighborhood bars. Most have live music. You may want to take the pilgrimage to
Dorchester and South Boston (Southie) for a few famous ones. However, for ease of
travel, consider our favorite Boston pub (pigs-in-blankets!), Emmet’s, near the State
House (6 Beacon: http://emmetsirishpubandrestaurant.com). Take the Green Line to
Park St. Also, and much more neighborhoody, the Brendan Behan Pub, 378 Centre S.,
Jamaica Plain (www.brendanbehanpub.com/). Take the 39 bus or the T (Jackson Sq,
Orange Line). An Tua Nua (835 Beacon St) plays 70s and 80s hits on weekends. The
Dropkick Murphys’s favorite spots are rumored to include the Silhouette Lounge (200
Brighton Ave., Allston), Joey’s (416 Market St., Brighton), and The Irish Village (224
Market St., Brighton). They’re playing the Bank of America Pavilion on the harbor on the
21st. And while not Irish, the Sunset Grill & Tap (130 Brighton Ave, Allston) offers craft
beer—and mead on tap.
In Cambridge, in descending order of greatness: The Druid (1357 Cambridge St), The
Plough and Stars (912 Mass Ave), and, because it’s easy if you’re in Harvard Square,
Tommy Doyle’s (96 Winthrop St). If you’re out this way, you might want to travel a bit
further to Davis Sq, Somerville (on the Red Line), and go to the Burren (247 Elm St). Two
others: Kinsale (2 Center Plaza, Cambridge St) and Asgard (350 Mass Ave).
The oldest pub in Boston is supposedly the Bell in Hand Tavern (45-55 Union St), est.
1795 (http://bellinhand.com/homepage), which you can visit going to or returning from
the North End.
!
RESTAURANTS
Dinner
The list of restaurants, below, represents favorites that some of us go to again and again.1
There are, however, many other options: one can stroll down Tremont (pronounced
trehmont) and Columbus in the South End and find any number of restaurants (such as
B&G Oysters, The Butcher Shop, two French restaurants—Aquitaine and Petit Robert—
and Columbus Café). One can go to Chinatown, where chefs come and go and
reputations rise and fall (take the Orange Line to the Chinatown stop, or the Green Line
to Park St, and cross through the mega downtown shopping area). We have a version of
Little Italy called the North End (Haymarket stop on the Orange Line or North End on
the Green Line) with small winding streets crammed with restaurants (don’t miss Mike’s
for pastry and espresso). If you decide to go to the Aquarium (which is a great way to see
the Boston Harbor), try the Black Rose, a once quite rascally Irish pub.
And of course there’s Faneuil Hall (pronunciation a point of contention in Boston: try
fannel) on the harbor, which is a complex of shops and restaurants. Near here is the
“oldest restaurant still operating under the same name”—the Union Oyster House, since
1714. The food is ok, but come for the oysters—unless you go to Neptune Oyster near the
North End. UOH = history in the uneven floors; NO = stylish and way delectable.
Charlestown, adjacent to the North End, is a piece of old Boston (Bunker Hill is here),
and Charles St (Beacon Hill) is another (on the Red Line, or a good sightseeing walk from
NU down Newbury St and through Boston Common): both neighborhoods have a galore
of restaurants. Try Lala Rokh for Persian food on Cambridge St, around the corner from
Charles St—and, since you’re in the neighborhood, check out Clink for a chic bar scene:
it’s in the Liberty Hotel, once a jail. Really. Also at the hotel is Scampo: amazing high-end
Italian food.
Finally, while the food is overpriced and not so great, you can sit at the bar at the Top of
the Hub at the top of the Prudential on a clear day or night, and get a spectacular 360º
view of the city. There’s also an observation deck at the Pru—but no champagne.
Not all restaurants listed below take reservations, but many have bars in which one can
wait or eat. Otherwise, reservations are recommended.
! If you’re staying at the Midtown, you get a 15% discount on all meals at Brasserie Jo at
the Colonnade. The tarte flambée classique! Ask for coupons at the front desk.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Contributors: Kathleen Kelly, Marina Leslie, Karen Overbey, and Robert Stanton.
! 52
Bars/Restaurants :: Sights
Boston, walkable (that is, within a mile and a half) from NU and points in the Back Bay (!
= closest to NU):
• !Addis Red Sea (www.addisredsea.com) 544 Tremont St Boston (South End);

1755 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge (617-426-8727)
o Boston isn’t crammed with Ethiopian restaurants, but this one is
excellent. Two locations. Yummy Ethiopian/Eritrean, with a small
beer/wine selection.
• The Beehive (www.beehiveboston.com) 541 Tremont Street, Boston (South
End) (617-423-0069)
o A huge space with lots of room at the bars and tons of seating for
dinner; live jazz, tasty whiskey selection. Also does a great weekend
brunch.
• ! Brasserie Jo (www.brasseriejoboston.com/) 120 Huntington Avenue, Boston
(617-425-3240)
o At the Colonnade. Great bar for hanging out. Love the steak tartare.
Fab mousse. A straight-ahead Americanized French Bistro menu,
with veg options. Good wine selection, beer selection uninspired.
Pricey.
• Bukowski Tavern 50 Dalton Street, Boston (Back Bay) (617-437-9999)
o A dive bar institution. Overhanging the Pike for even more of a
down-and-dirty feel. Basic menu. Two doors down from the Summer
Shack.
• Coppa (www.coppaboston.com) 253 Shawmut Ave, Boston (at Milford St)
(617-391-0902)
o Enoteca. Great for grazers.
• ! Darryl’s Corner Bar and Grill (http://darrylscornerbarboston. com) 604
Columbus Avenue, Boston (617-536-1100)
o The food is ok. But the blues and soul music make it worth it. If you
sit in the front room, be prepared to get blasted out of your seats. The
back room is quieter, but not as fun.
• DeLux Café 100 Chandler Street, Boston (Back Bay) (617-338-5258)
o Little corner dive bar, with good food.
• Franklin Cafe (www.franklincafe.com) 278 Shawmut Avenue, Boson (South
End) (617-350-0010)
o Great cocktails, very good food (at bar and booths); tiny, loud, cool
crowd.
• The Gallows (www.thegallowsboston.com) 1395 Washington Street, Boston
(South End) (617-425-0020)
o Excellent cocktail bar and restaurant; fun and crowded. Reservations
for 6 or more only.
• Jacob Wirth Restaurant (www.jacobwirth.com) 31-37 Stuart St, Boston
(Chinatown)
o Serving delicious schnitzel, wurst, and beer since 1868. Now with
gluten-free options. On Fridays, there’s a massive sing-a-long fest in
the main dining room. You can sing, or eat in the large bar.
! 53
• Kitchen (www.kitchenbostonmass.com) 560 Tremont Street, Boston (South
End) (617-695-1250)
o Historical American cuisine, like Wellfleet oysters, circa 1869, and
Lamb Pie, circa 1747, and so on and so forth. Currently celebrating
the tomato!
• Masa (www.masarestaurant.com) 439 Tremont Street, Boston (South End)
(617-338-8884)
o Upscale Mexican food, large dining room + a great bar with excellent
tequilas and mezcals; reservations accepted but there is often space
for dinner, and food is also served in the bar.
• Myers and Chang (www.myersandchang.com) 1145 Washington St, Boston
(South End) (617-542-5200)
o Funky Asian-Fusion diner in the South End with many vegetarian
options; gluten-free and cilantro-free menus available; gets packed on
weekends, but reservations accepted (some tables saved for walk-ins).
• ! Sorellina (www.sorellinaboston.com) 1 Huntington Avenue, Boston (across
from the Colonnade) (617-412-4600)
o Has a huge backlit black and white mural on the wall, rather Fellini-
esque. A very chic, modern restaurant with excellent and very
expensive food. Sit at the bar for tizers, accompanied by small warm
crusty loaves of bread.
• Summer Shack (www.summershackrestaurant.com/Locations_ Boston.asp) 50
Dalton Street, Boston (Back Bay)
o Ok, you can go to Legal Seafood if you feel you must take the
pilgrimage to a Boston institution (fresh, yes, but unimaginative), but
this fun restaurant has great seafood, oysters, and lobster. Try the
Rhode-Island style fried calamari with hot peppers.
• ! Symphony Sushi (www.symphonysushi.com) 45 Gainsborough St, Boston
o Excellent sushi, reasonably priced, in the Symphony district, very
near NU. Pleasant atmosphere, veg options.
• Tapeo (www.tapeo.com) 266 Newbury Street, Boston (617-267-4799)
o See Dali, in Cambridge, for details. Inventively decorated. On the
most famous shopping strip in Boston.
• Tremont 647 (www.tremont647.com) 647 Tremont Street Boston (617-266-
4600)
o Innovative new American with Asian and Caribbean influences.
Sunday brunch in pajamas.
• Trident Booksellers & Cafe (www.tridentbookscafe.com) 338 Newbury Street,
Boston (Back Bay) (617-267-8688)
o Books, beer, sandwiches. Many veg and vegan options.
Boston, by T or cab:
• Elephant Walk (www.elephantwalk.com) 900 Beacon St, Boston (Fenway);

2067 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge; 663 Main St, Waltham
o Excellent Cambodian and French-Cambodian cuisine. Three
locations.
! 54
• Fugakyu (www.fugakyu.net) 1280 Beacon St, Brookline
o First-rate Japanese restaurant in Coolidge Corner. Exotic cocktails
and great food. The largest Japanese restaurant in New England,
according to the website. Sit at the bar and watch dishes float by. Sit
on cushions in an “authentic” Japanese dining room. Check out the
chrome, red and black bar straight out of a James Bond film.
• Meritage (www.meritagetherestaurant.com)
o Expensive and lovely menu where food is all paired with wines.
• Pho Lemongrass (www.pholemongrass.com/specials.htm) 239 Harvard St,
Brookline
o Excellent, reasonably priced Vietnamese food in Coolidge Corner.
• Sol Azteca (www.solaztecarestaurants.com/bostonmenu.htm; www.solazteca
restaurants.com/newtomenu.htm) 914 Beacon St, Boston; 75 Union St, Newton
o People don’t come to New England for the Mexican food, but this is
excellent. Two locations (the Newton one is tucked away in a
courtyard in Newton Center, with a beautiful leafy deck).
• Taberna de Haro (www.tabernaboston.com/) 999 Beacon Street, Brookline
o Elegant, high-end tapas. Favorite dessert: chocolate truffles with
grilled crusty bread sprinkled with cocoa powder, salt, and olive oil.
• Trade (http://trade-boston.com/) 540 Atlantic Avenue, Boston (close to but not
on the waterfront) 617-451-1234
o A new, casual restaurant that is getting good reviews, and is open late:
www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/01/restaurant-review-dining
-out-at-trade/.
• O Ya (www.oyarestaurantboston.com) 9 East Street, Boston (near South
Station—the Leather District)
o Japanese. Rated by Frank Bruni the #1 restaurant in the Top Ten
Outside of New York in 2008 and chef Tim Cushman was named by
the James Beard Foundation as Best Chef, Northeast Category, 2012.
Tiny place where reservations are a must—but you can sometimes
score seats at the bar, which they book through Open Table. Super
expensive. Magical.
Cambridge and Somerville, by T or cab:
• Addis Red Sea (www.addisredsea.com) 544 Tremont St, Boston (South End);
1755 Mass Ave, Cambridge
o Again, Boston isn’t crammed with Ethiopian restaurants, but this one
is excellent. Two locations.
• Cambridge 1 (www.cambridge1.us) 27 Church Street, Cambridge
o Our favorite area pizza—simple, thin crust, fresh. Try to sit in the
back, which has tall windows overlooking the Old Burial Ground, est.
before 1635. Very reasonable.
• Dali (www.dalirestaurant.com) 415 Washington St, Somerville
o The flagship tapas bar of the Leon family, with several spinoffs (see
Tapeo). Richly, gaudily decorated, great tapas menu, and veg, vegan,
and gluten-free dishes. Always packed, and no reservations, so you
may have to squeeze up in the bar for a bit.
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• East Coast Grill (http://eastcoastgrill.net) 1271 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
o Exceptional bbq and oyster bar; great fish dishes with lots of Asian
and/or Caribbean spices and accompaniments. Great bar, and good
beer and wine list.
• Elephant Walk (www.elephantwalk.com) 900 Beacon St, Boston (Fenway);
2067 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge; 663 Main St Waltham
o Excellent Cambodian and French-Cambodian cuisine. Three
locations.
• Grendel’s (www.grendelsden.com) 89 Winthrop St, Cambridge (Harvard
Square)
o An old-time favorite in Harvard Square. Funky, basementy, still a bit
hippieish.
• Middle East (www.mideastclub.com) 472 Mass Ave, Cambridge
o Middle Eastern food and a very friendly bar. Many vegetarian and
vegan options. Entertainment downstairs. The premier venue for alt
and new music.
• Oleana (www.oleanarestaurant.com) 134 Hampshire Street, Cambridge (617-
661-0505)
o Worth making a reservation for now. Outstanding, inventive haute
Turkish food. Expensive, but you won’t eat like this anywhere else.
• True Bistro (http://truebistroboston.com) 1153 Broadway, Somerville
o Fine vegan dining. Cocktails, beer, wine. Very near Tufts University.
• Tu Y Yo (http://tuyyo2.com/Home.htm) 858 Broadway, Somerville (Powder-
house Square)
o A family Mexican restaurant in Somerville. Fascinating range of
dishes, very friendly atmosphere.
• Upstairs on the Square (www.upstairsonthesquare.com) 91 Winthrop,
Cambridge (Harvard Sq)
o Really two restaurants: a fine dining room, the Soirée Room, on the
top floor, done up in gilt and pink; the Monday Club Bar, more
casual with leopard-print carpeting on the first floor. Eclectic food
and cocktails. The bar is reasonable; you definitely pay for the pink in
the dining room.
• Veggie Galaxy (http://veggiegalaxy.net) 450 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge
o Excellent vegetarian diner, many vegan options. Beer and wine.
Amazing desserts (available for takeaway too).
Breakfast and Lunch near or on Campus

We’ll be serving coffee, tea, and water outside the session rooms. We’ll have a fruit bowl
and some snacks as well.
All the details for on-campus dining, including some venues not listed here, such as
campus cafeterias: www.northeastern.edu/registrar/husky-debitcard.html#restaurants.
Food Venues in Curry Student Center:
• Kigo Kitchen (Asian)

• On-The-Go (convenience store)
• Popeye’s Fried Chicken
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• Starbucks (in afterHOURS)
• Sweet Tomatoes Pizza
• Taco Bell
• The West End (mega salad bar)
• UBurger
Other On-Campus sites:
• Chicken Lou’s, on Forsyth off Huntington

o The oldest “food truck” on campus, now permanent. Breakfast
sandwiches and lunch options. Love the spicy fries: ask for ‘em well
done.
• Dunkin’ Donuts, Hayden Hall & Shillman Hall
• H3 Food Truck in the quad outside the CSC, in front of the library
o Various lunch options.
• International Village Cafeteria, Columbus Ave.
o All you can eat buffet for $11.60. A series of stations: American,
Chinese, Indian, Italian, Middle Eastern, with plenty of vegetarian
options.
Opposite the NU Campus on Huntington and/and near Forsyth:
• Au Bon Pain at the Marino Center

• Boloco
• Boston House of Pizza
• Boston Shawarma
• Conor Larkin’s (standard college bar and bar food)
• Qdoba Mexican
• Wollaston’s at the Marino Center (convenience store, sandwiches)
At the Corner of Huntington and Gainsborough St. (if you are coming from the Colonnade
and the Midtown, before campus; if you are on campus, turn left on Huntington toward
downtown):
• Uno Chicago Grill (280 Huntington)

• Panera (289 Huntington)
• Pho and I (267 Huntington)
• Our House East (52 Gainsborough) bar, bar food
• Pavement Coffeehouse (44 Gainsborough)
Other Locales Close to Campus:
• Woody’s Bar & Grill (fresh pizza and other dishes) 58 Hemenway St (take a
right on Gainsborough and left on Hemenway)
• Symphony 8 (8 Westland Ave) restaurant and bar
• Siánsa 8 (8 Westland Ave) Irish casual, pub food and more
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Two Great Lunch Options: The Museum of Fine Arts, right past NU on Huntington on
the right as you look away from downtown, has a fine dining restaurant (Bravo) and two
casual restaurants, the Garden Cafeteria and the American Café near the new American
wing—a great open space. Dinner is also available. Or cjeck out the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, a bit more of a walk (walk past the MFA to Louis Prang St, take a
right, stay left on the Fenway, and the Gardner is on your left, on Palace Rd.).
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SO MANY THINGS TO DO, TO SEE
e
• The Museum of Fine Arts | 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts
02115 | MFA T Stop (a short walk for NU) | www.mfa.org
• The Institute of Contemporary Art | 100 Northern Avenue, Boston,
Massachusetts 02110 | World Trade Center T Stop (or get out at the Aquarium
stop (Blue Line) and walk along the harbor) | www.icaboston.org
• The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum | 280 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115 |
MFA T Stop (a short walk for NU) | www.gardnermuseum.org
• Boston Public Library | 700 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116 | Copley T Stop
| www.bpl.org (go for the Edward Austin Abbey Murals: www.bpl.org/central/
abbey.htm)
detail of Edward Austin Abbey mural at Boston Public Library
• The Freedom Trail & Other Popular Boston Tourist Destinations | Park Street
T Station | www.cityofboston.gov/freedomtrail/bostoncommon.asp
• Shopping on Newbury Street | Hynes & Copley T Stops (also Downtown
Crossing, Copley Place, and the Prudential Mall) | www.newbury-st.com/
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• Sam Adams Brewery Tour | 30 Germania Street, Boston, MA 02130 | Stony

Brook T Stop | www.samueladams.com/age-gate.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2findex.
aspx
Get outdoors: the Arnold Arboretum was designed by Frederic Law Olmstead as part of
the “Emerald Necklace” — a series of linked green spaces in Boston (http://
arboretum.harvard.edu; Orange Line, Forest Hills stop or 39 bus, Custer Street).
Boston Harbor cruises are another outdoor option. The New England Aquarium (Blue
Line, Aquarium stop; http://www.neaq.org/index.php).
One might want to go across the river to Harvard Square (Red Line, Harvard Sq stop) for
sightseeing, dining, and shopping, as well as for the museums on Harvard’s Campus
(www.harvard.edu/arts-museums). The Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums are
undergoing renovations, but the best of the collections are on view at the Sackler.
Mt. Auburn Cemetery (www.mountauburn.org/) is a short bus ride (the 74 or 73; pay
when you get off) from Harvard Sq. Not only a great place for a walk on a fine September
day, one might visit the graves of John Bartlett, Edwin Booth, Buckminster Fuller, Julia
Ward Howe, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many other notable
Americans. Climb the tower for a great view of Boston.
Runners and walkers: head to the Charles River. One can cross back and forth between
Boston and Cambridge over various bridges. Great views of the city and harbor.
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!
!
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GLOSSARY OF PROPER NAMES
h
. . . it smells like teen spirit in here
ALLEN, VALERIE [SESSION 21] | Valerie Allen is a professor of English literature at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, CUNY. She teaches new teachers at the Graduate Center and in the
Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay. She has published (with Ares Axiotis) on philosophy
of education in relation to Heidegger and to Nietzsche. She’s wickedly stylish. (Email:
vallen@jjay.cuny.edu)
ALONI, GILA [SESSION 25] | La Signora Aloni has, at any rate, no fear that she will shock anybody.
Her ambition is to create a sensation, to have parsons at her feet, seeing that the manhood of
Barchester consisted mainly of parsons, and to send, if possible, every parson’s wife home with a
green fit of jealousy. None will be too old for her, and hardly any too young. None too sanctified, and
none too worldly. She is quite prepared to entrap the bishop himself, and then to turn up her nose at
the bishop’s wife. She does not doubt of success, for she has always succeeded; but one thing is
absolutely necessary; she must secure the entire use of a sofa. (Email: gilaaloni@aol.com)
AMBROSE, KIRK [SESSION 3] | Whether Kirk shall turn out to be the hero of his own life, or whether
that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin Kirk’s life with the
beginning of his life, we record that he was born (as we have been informed and believe) on a Friday,
at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and he began to cry,
simultaneously. (Email: kirk.ambrose@colorado.edu)
ARIZA-BARILE, RAÚL [SESSION 10] | Raúl Ariza-Barile is a doctoral candidate in the English
Department at University of Texas at Austin. His interests are in comparative medieval literature,
especially Middle English, Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Iberian. He is currently writing his
dissertation and working on an article tracing the development of the Alexander legend in Norman
England and Iberia. (Email: arizab.raul@gmail.com)
ARONSTEIN, SUSAN [SESSION 6] | Susan Aronstein is the author of Hollywood Knights: Arthurian
Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and the New Perspectives on
Medieval Literature volume, An Introduction to British Arthurian Narrative (Florida, 2012). She is
also co-editor, with Tison Pugh, of The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past. (Email:
aronstei@uwyo.edu)
BAHR, ARTHUR [MEETING HOST] | Arthur Bahr joined MIT’s Literature Faculty in 2007 with a PhD
from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 received the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award
for Excellence in Teaching, and his first book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of
Medieval London, will be published by University of Chicago Press in early 2013. Arthur can also be
found serving as a National judge with the United States Figure Skating Association; undertaking
long, involved, and sometimes overly ambitious cooking projects; listening to Casiotone for the
Painfully Alone, Vampire Weekend, Ra Ra Riot, and a wide range of baroque opera. (Email:
awbahr@mit.edu).
BARNETT, REBECCA [SESSION 15] | Rebecca (Bec) Barnett is a redirective practitioner working in the
field of design. One of her current areas of focus is the transformation of education. Through this she
is involved in the development of the Urmadic University. Rebecca is currently working on a
number of projects with Pi Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London. (Email: rebeccabarnett@
live.com)
!
BARRINGTON, CANDACE [SESSION 21] | Candace Barrington is a professor of English at Central
Connecticut State University. In addition to teaching and writing about late medieval English
literature and American medievalisms (her most recent book is American Chaucers) she is collecting
Chauceriana from any century, in any language, for her in-progress work on Global Chaucers.
(Email: BarringtonC@mail.ccsu.edu)
BASHI, AHMED S. [SESSION 5] | In consideration of the day and hour of Ahmed’s birth, it was
declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively
interest in Ahmed several months before there was any possibility of their becoming personally
acquainted, first, that he was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that he was privileged to
see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of
either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night. (Email: theahmadbashi@gmail.com)
BECK, CHRISTIAN [SESSION 22] | Christian Beck works primarily at the confluence of medieval
literature, literary theory/philosophy, the history of emotions, and cognitive linguistics. While in an
English department, he can often be found (pedagogically, intellectually and physically) elsewhere.
Recently, he has been devoting a lot of time to anarchy (practice, theory, pedagogy, etc.) and is in the
early stages of trying to establish a free school/university in the Orlando/Central Florida area. (Email:
christianbeck479@gmail.com)
BECKER, ALEXIS KELLNER [SESSION 21] | Alexis Kellner Becker is a PhD student in English at
Harvard University, where she works on medieval English literature, book history, and ecocriticism.
(Email: akbecker@fas.harvard.edu)
BECKER, MICHAEL [SESSION 25] | Michael Becker works at the crossroads of Africana philosophy,
Caribbean history, literary studies, and historical anthropology. He is currently an undergraduate in
Africana Studies at Brown University and is planning to attend graduate school in the near future.
One of his primary interests is figuring out how one might tell a history of ideas of the enslaved, and
how that project might re-shape contemporary narratives of colonial modernity. He is deeply
committed to building new models of knowledge production and community accountability inside
and outside the academy. (Email: Michael_becker@brown.edu)
BENNET, JANE [PLENARY II] | Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins
University and the author of Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Sage, 1994), The
Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (Princeton, 2001), and Vibrant Matter:
A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010). She is the eldest Bennet sister. Twenty-two years old when
the conference begins, she is considered the most beautiful young lady in the neighbourhood. Her
character is contrasted with Elizabeth’s as sweeter, shyer, and equally sensible, but not as clever; her
most notable trait is a desire to see only the good in others. (Email: janebennett@jhu.edu)
BLAKE, LIZA [SESSION 20] | Liza Blake is a PhD student at New York University, where she is writing
a dissertation entitled “Early Modern Literary Physics,” which looks at the interface between literary
practice, materialisms, and cosmologies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She specializes in
medieval and early modern literature, history of science and philosophy, and critical theory. She
apologizes for not being very interesting. (Email: liza.blake@nyu.edu).
BOECKELER, ERIKA [SESSION 18] | Ericka Boeckeler is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern
University, where she specializes in Shakespeare, Alphabets & Alphabetic Literature, Language
Theory, Renaissance Lyric Poetry, History of the Book, Early Modern Northern European Visual
Art, and Early Slavic Print Culture. He current book project is “Playful Letters: The Dramatization of
the Alphabet in the Renaissance. (Email: e.boeckeler@neu.edu)
BORLAND, JENNIFER [SESSION 17] | Jennifer Borland is an art historian who usually identifies as a
medievalist, but sometimes finds herself equally drawn to other areas of the field, particularly
contemporary art. This may be in part due to her preoccupation with the phenomenological and
corporeal experiences of viewers, and how past and present might inform one another. She thus
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Glossary :: Proper Names
feels extremely fortunate to have found other rabble-rousers committed to shaking up medieval art
history, resulting in the recent formation of the Material Collective. (Email: jennifer.
borland@okstate.edu)
BOYD, MATTHIEU [SESSION 7] | Matthieu Boyd is Assistant Professor in the Department of

Literature, Language, Writing, and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s College at
Florham (Madison, NJ), and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard.
He takes a multilingual approach to the literary history of Britain and Ireland, working in nearly all
the medieval and modern Celtic languages and literatures (Irish, Breton, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic),
and their neighbors Old and Middle English, Old Norse, Medieval Latin, and especially Old French
and Anglo-Norman. Most recently, he is the editor of Coire Sois/The Cauldron of Knowledge: A
Companion to Early Irish Saga, by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh (forthcoming from the University of Notre
Dame Press), and a co-translator of the fourteenth-century French Ovide moralisé for Baylor
University Press. (Email: mwboyd@fdu.edu)
BOYLE, JEN [SESSION 5] | Jen Boyle is Associate Professor of English and New Media and Director of
the Masters of Arts in Writing at Coastal Carolina University. She is the author of Anamorphosis in
Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect (Ashgate, 2010), co-editor (with Martin Foys) of
“Becoming Media,” a special issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (Vol. 3,
Issue 1: 2012), and a co-collaborator and author of the new media installation, The Hollins
Community Project. She is currently working on a new hybrid monograph, The Distributed
Sovereign, a multi-media, multi-genre exploration of the reproduction and re-distribution of
theological, political and sexual sovereignty within networks, across early modern and digital time-
space. (E-mail: jboyle@coastal.edu)
BRADBURY, CARLEE [SESSION 19] | Carlee Bradbury is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department
at Radford University. Though her research focuses on anti-Semitism in medieval English art, her
first love is early Insular art. (Email: cabradbur@radford.edu)
BROWN, JENNIFER [SESSION 1] | Jennifer N. Brown is Associate Professor of English and World
Literature at Marymount Manhattan College. She works on devotional literature written by, for and
about women and has published on Middle English mystical texts, Barking Abbey, Middle Scots
poetry and various hagiographical texts. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, Jeff; her son,
Nathaniel; and her miniature dachshund, Dante. (Email: jbrown1@mmm.edu)
BRYANT, BRANTLEY L. [SESSION 9] | Brantley L. Bryant teaches English literature at Sonoma State
University in California. He has published work on fourteenth-century bureaucracy, Chaucer, H. P.
Lovecraft’s medievalism, medieval studies blogs, and post-historicism. Currently he’s trying to plan a
long-term project on affect, parliament, and documentary culture in late medieval England. Som say
he doth resemble Chaucer, that lytel poppet. (Email: Brantley.bryant@sonoma.edu)
BRYANT, SAKINA [SESSION 9] | Mr. and Mrs. Bryant are bran-new people in a bran-new house in a
bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Bryants is spick and span new. All their furniture
is new, all their friends are new, all their servants are new, their plate is new, their carriage is new,
their harness is new, their horses are new, their pictures are new, they themselves are new, they are as
newly married as is lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a
great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch
upon him, French polished to the crown of his head. (Email: gerhards@seawolf.sonoma.edu)
BUCHANAN, AMY [SESSION 4] | Amy Virginia Buchanan is an actor, writer, musician and clown
living and working in New York. She has a BGS in theatre from the University of Kansas and trained
at the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. Kafka based his short story “The Hunger
Artist” on her. (Email: Buchanan.amyvirginia@gmail.com)
BUCHANAN, DAVID [SESSION 4] | Dr. David Buchanan is Associate Dean, College of Agriculture,
Food Systems and Natural Resources at North Dakota State University. He is also Professor of
! 65
Animal Sciences at NDSU and was, for 28 years, a member of the faculty at Oklahoma State
University. His career has focused on genetic improvement of the efficiency of production of beef,
pork and lamb and he has taught more than 20 different courses from the first-year to the PhD level.
He has won numerous teaching awards, including the USDA Food and Agricultural Sciences
Excellence in Teaching Award. He served as Chair of the Faculty Council at OSU and is a past
President of the American Society of Animal Science. (Email: david.s.buchanan@ndsu.edu)
BUCHANAN, PETER [SESSION 4] | Peter Buchanan is a PhD student at the University of Toronto
working on a dissertation entitled “Phenomenal Anglo-Saxons: Adaptation, Perception, and the
Poetic Imagination.” His primary research interests are in Anglo-Latin and Old English poetry, with
secondary interests in manuscript studies, Middle English, phenomenology, and 20th-century poetry.
Guthlac is his favorite saint and peanut butter his favorite cookies. (Email: peter.buchanan@
mail.utoronto.ca).
BURNHAM, EMILY [SESSION 11] | Emily Burnham studied Greek and Latin at Catholic University,
Arabic and medieval history at New York University. She has recently defended a dissertation
(NYU) on Arabic geographies and maps produced in (roughly) 12th-century Spain and North
Africa, and is currently teaching at St. John’s University in Queens while looking for a permanent
home. (Email: ejb227@nyu.edu)
CANNON, CHRISTOPHER [SESSION 23] | Christopher Cannon is Professor of English at New York
University and is currently working on the relationship between elementary education (or
grammatica in all its institutional forms) and literary work. (Email: Christopher.Cannon@nyu.edu)
CASTRIOTA, BRIAN [SESSION 17] | Brian Castriota is a third-year student at the Institute of Fine Arts,
New York University completing a dual Masters degree in art history and conservation. Brian has
interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, and Birmingham Museum and Art
Gallery, and spends his summers as a conservator at the Harvard-Cornell Excavations of Sardis. His
research interests include aspects of continuity in Late Antique/Migration Period ornament and
dress, and conservation theory of damage, destruction, and cataclysm. (Email: bec258@nyu.edu)
CECIRE, MARIA SACHIKO [SESSION 9] | Maria Sachiko Cecire is Assistant Professor of Literature at
Bard College, where she teaches courses on children’s literature, medieval literature and its reception,
media studies, and cultural studies, and is director of the Experimental Humanities concentration.
Her publications include essays in the collections Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination
(2010) and The Disney Middle Ages (forthcoming in 2012), and articles in The Journal of Children’s
Literature Studies (2008) and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (2009). Her most recent media
projects are documentary films about new stagings of John Skelton’s Magnyfycence and John Bale’s
Three Laws, in association with Early Drama at Oxford. She received her DPhil from Oxford
University in 2011. (Email: mcecire@bard.edu)
CECIRE, NATALIA [SESSION 9] | Natalia Cecire is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in English at Yale
University. Her current book project is titled “Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics
of Knowledge.” The book examines (and questions) the aesthetic function of epistemological values
like precision, objectivity, and the “hands-on” in the body of literature that has come to be called
“experimental.” (Email: nataliacecire@gmail.com)
CEDILLO, CHRISTINA VICTORIA [SESSION 11] | Christina is Assistant Professor of English at

Northeastern State University-Broken Arrow. She is interested in medieval and contemporary
women’s rhetorics, particularly how their depictions of the body can be seen to problematize and
contest prevalent gender norms. In particular, she looks at texts by medieval women mystics and
memoirs by survivors of female gential mutilation to explore how these authors transform their
bodies into topoi that rewrite our understanding of “traditional” value systems, and can be used to
create new histories by and for women's empowerment. When she is not being an academic, she
sings/screams for several political hardcore punk bands in Spanish. (Email: cvcedillo@gmail.com)
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COHEN, JEFFREY JEROME [PLENARY SESSION I, SESSION 14] | Jeffrey Jerome Cohen was discovered in
the New England woods at the age of 10, where he had been raised by wolves. After a brief period of
domestication, he entered the groves of academia and began polishing his mind, which was soon as
sleek as his fur. Be careful around him: although he has penned and edited many books and is
beloved as a teacher of medieval literature, he cheats at cards, has been carrying on an affair with a
tiny plastic figurine named “Tiny Shriner” for years, and he also disappears for a brief period every
month, leaving his clothes under a rock. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is based on Jeffrey’s
teen exploits. (Email: jjcohen@gwu.edu)
IAN CORNELIUS [SESSION 22] | Ian Cornelius is Assistant Professor of English at Yale. His research
interests are in medieval social history, grammar and rhetoric in the Middle Ages, and Middle
English alliterative poetry and prose. (Email: ian.cornelius@yale.edu)
COUGHLIN, MAURA [SESSION 25] | Maura Coughlin is an art historian who works on the visual
culture of late nineteenth-century France and its understanding of prehistoric and
medieval Brittany. Her work in video is quite recent and is an attempt to bridge scholarship with
creative visual production. (Email: mcoughli@bryant.edu)
CROCKER, HOLLY [SESSION 3] | Holly Crocker is Associate Professor of English at the University of
South Carolina, who recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am
Main. She is the author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and is currently
working on a book manuscript entitled “The Reformation of Feminine Virtue from Chaucer to
Shakespeare,” investigating women’s ethical remaking. She is also Book Reviews and FORUM Editor
for postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. (Email: HCrocker@mailbox.sc.edu)
DINSHAW, CAROLYN [PLENARY III] | Carolyn Dinshaw is Professor of English and Social and
Cultural Analysis at New York University, and the author of Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Wisconsin,
1989) and Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Duke, 1999). In her
current book in progress, How Soon is Now? Problems of the Present, Medieval and Modern, she looks
directly at the experience of time itself, as it is represented in medieval works and as it is experienced
in readers of those works. She was also the founding editor, with David Halperin, of the field-
defining journal GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. (Email: carolyn.dinshaw@nyu.edu)
DIONNE, CRAIG [SESSION 8] | Craig Dionne is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Eastern
Michigan University, where he teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature. He has
published on the construction of the Renaissance as a disciplinary field, Shakespeare adaptations in
film, the Elizabethan underworld, and international appropriations of Shakespeare. He has co-edited
Disciplining English: Alternative Perspectives/Critical Perspectives (SUNY, 2002), Rogues and Early
Modern English Culture (Michigan, 2005), and Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a
Global Stage (Ashgate, 2008). He is senior editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. He recently
co-edited the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2012), a special
issue on the post/human, and he is currently completing an edited collection of essays, “Bollywood’s
Shakespeare: Cultural Dialogues through World Cinema and Theater.” (Email: cdionne
@emich.edu)
DOCKRAY-MILLER, MARY [SESSION 1] | Professor of English and medieval studies in the humanities
program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, Mary Dockray-Miller is currently writing a book
about Judith of Flanders, an eleventh-century aristocrat and art lover. The editor of the Wilton
Chronicle and the author of Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England, Mary is one of the
few humans left on the planet without a facebook account. Contact her instead at mdockray@
lesley.edu.
DONALDSON, JOSEPH [SESSION 14] | Joseph Donaldson recently received his MA with a focus in
Renaissance literature from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where his critical oeuvre
included some of the deepest ecologies of Milton, the most biblical linguistics of Shakespeare, and
! 67
the sexiest metaphysics of Donne that anyone will ever read. He is currently busy seeking his PhD at
Northern Illinois University. (Email: donaldsonjes@gmail.com)
DUCKERT, LOWELL [SESSION 14] | Lowell Duckert is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia
University. His interests include early modern literature, actor-network theory, and ecocriticism.
Give him a John Muir quote and a Neil Young song, and he'll go backcountry camping
anywhere. No one can spin out more worse puns based on Eagles songs than him. He is tall and will
loom over you with an inscrutable grin. (Email: Lowell.Duckert@mail.wvu.edu)
DUGAN, HOLLY [SESSION 16] | Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at the George
Washington University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in
Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins, 2011) and the co-editor, with Lara Farina, of a special issue
of postmedieval on “The Intimate Senses” (Vol. 3, Issue 4: 2012). She is also working on a book, co-
authored with fellow BABEL participant, Scott Maisano, on Shakespeare and primatology. She likes
expensive perfume and cheap beer. (Email: hdugan@gwu.edu)
ELKINS-TANTON, LINDY [PLENARY I] | Lindy Elkins-Tanton is Director of the Department of

Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Science and former Associate Professor of
Geology at MIT. She is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets and is
currently working on NSF-funded projects on continental dynamics and on the chemistry and
physics that control planetary evolution in the first tens of millions of years of the solar system. She’s
an expert on the “end-Permian extinction”: look it up, fool. (Email: ltelkins@dtm.ciw.edu)
EVANS, RUTH [SESSION 21] | Ruth Evans teaches in the Department of English at Saint Louis
University. At the moment she is interested in a number of different ideas: the status of critique in
the humanities and social sciences; memory in the Middle Ages and today; distributed cognition in
the Middle Ages; feminist theory and criticism; historical and psychoanalytic theories of sexual
complementarity — and why love goes wrong. Along with Valerie Allen, a style maven. Don’t mess
with her; she can kill you with one look, but it will be a very pleasant death. (Email:
revans19@slu.edu)
FARINA, LARA [SESSION 16] | Lara Farina is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia
University. She is the author of Erotic Discourse in Early English Religious Writing (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006) as well as articles on medieval women’s reading practices and queer approaches to
the history of sexuality. Her recent research focuses on sensory histories, tactile experience, and
bodily reconfiguration: she has an article on phantom limbs forthcoming in the “Cognitive
Alterities” issue of postmedieval [Vol. 3, Issue 3: 2012] and has co-edited (with Holly Dugan) a
special issue of postmedieval issue on “The Intimate Senses” (Vol. 3, Issue 4: 2012). (Email:
Lara.Farina@mail.wvu.edu)
FAULT LINES [SESSION 11] | What do Anne Laskaya, Eve Salisbury, Katherine Millersdaughter,
Megan Cook, and Anthony Cárdenas-Rotunno have in common? They are all in a session together
and we are dying to know juicy details about their work and personal lives, but they jointly neglected
to send us nifty bios. It’s possible they were all kidnapped and are locked up in a basement
somewhere and we should be worried about them . . . or something.
FAZIOLI, PATRICK [SESSION 21] | 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, SUNY.
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. (Email: kpf27@medaille.edu)
FETHEROLF, CHARLES [SESSION 17] | Charlie Fetherolf is a graphic novelist whose recent works,
Giants in the Earth and the forthcoming Sons of Cain, are published by Giant Earth Press. Charlie
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resides in New York City with his wife Claudia, two children, and two cats named Circe and Turtle.
See more here: www.charlesfetherolf.com. (Email: cwfetherolf@yahoo.com)
FINKE, LAURIE AND MARTIN SHICHTMAN [SESSIONS 6, 12] | We don’t have brief bios for Laurie and
Marty because they are too cool for that shit. If you don’t know who they are already, you don’t need
to know. Knowing that would be too dangerous for you, like sticking your hand in a fire. You can’t
handle it. (Email: finkel@kenyon.edu & mshichtma1@emich.edu)
FRADENBURG, ARANYE [SESSION 18] | Aranye Fradenburg is the Director of Literature and the Mind
at University of California, Santa Barbara and a Clinical Associate at the New Center for
Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, where she also teaches infant observation. She also has a private
practice in Santa Barbara. Her cat Mitzi Nin is the toast of Paris haute couture, and is currently
seeking assistants for her atelier who are good with thread and scissors and not too bitchy. (Email:
lfraden@english.ucsb.edu).
FURMAGE, SEAN [SESSION 9] | Sean Furmage is sometimes a graduate student half-heartedly working
towards a PhD in cultural anthropology at an appallingly neoliberal private institution in DC
(American “University,” and please don't ask, “yeah, but which one?”). His thesis topic tends to
change on a daily basis. His alter ego, Princess Q, is part geeky-girl who’s read too many books and
part sparkly hip-hop extravaganza ready to make you question everything and presume nothing. Or
at least would like to be when she grows a little more sideways. (Email: orange.aardvark@gmail.com)
FRY, TONY [SESSION 15] | Tony Fry heads the Masters program in Design Futures at Griffith
University’s Queensland College of Art. He was the founding director of the EcoDesign Foundation,
Sydney (1991-2001) and formerly Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building,
University of Technology, Sydney, (1998-2001); Honorary Research Associate, University of Sydney
(1996-2001); Associate Director, University of Sydney National Key Centre of Design Quality (1991-
92); Senior Lecturer in Design History and Theory, Power Institute, University of Sydney (1985-96).
He has held visiting professorships, lectureships and fellowships at universities in Australia, Asia,
Europe and the USA. He is also one of the lead ingenitors behind the Hothouse and Urmadic
University projects: www.theodessey.org. (Email: tonyfry@teamdes.com.au)
GARRISON, ELIZA [SESSION 1] | Eliza Garrison is Assistant Professor in the Department of the
History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College. She has published analyses of Ottonian
artworks and is slowly putting together a new project on early medieval copies, copying, and their
meanings. She also does weddings and bar mitzvahs. (Email: egarriso@middlebury.edu)
GEPHART, EMILY [SESSION 16] | Emily Gephart is an Art Historian in the Visual and Critical Studies
Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, affiliated with Tufts University.
Examining the visual and material cultures and intellectual history of the turn-of-the-20th-century
United States, her current work considers the diverse ways in which Americans have conceptualized
dreaming as a phenomenon, metaphor and mode of understanding conscious-ness. She welcomes
all stories about dreams that anyone cares to share with her. (Email: emily. gephart@smfa.edu)
GILSDORF, ETHAN [SESSION 2] | Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and
geek, and author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming
Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of
Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture
stories, essays and reviews regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com,
Washington Post and dozens of publications worldwide. He is also a book and film critic for the
Boston Globe; a core contributor to the blog GeekDad at wired.com; and his blog Geek Pride is seen
regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street in Boston.
He still owns all his original Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia from the 1970s and 1980s, and
continues to play the game. Follow Ethan’s adventures at: www.ethangilsdorf.com. (Email:
ethan@ethangilsdorf.com)
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GROVES, ADAM STALEY [SESSION 13] | There is a fiction that Mr. Staley Groves “examined” the
scholars once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair,
and give us Mark Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins’s
Ode on the Passions, wherein we particularly venerated Mr. Staley Groves as Revenge throwing his
blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the War-denouncing trumpet with a withering
look. (Email: a.staley.groves@gmail.com)
GUILBERT, CHRISTOPHER [SESSION 25] | Christopher Guilbert graduated from University of

Massachusetts, Dartmouth with a BA in English. His interests include poetry, meditation and
tournament Scrabble. (Email: christopher.guilbert@gmail.com)
HADBAWNIK, DAVID [SESSION 5] | David Hadbawnik is a PhD candidate at The University at

Buffalo, SUNY. In 2011, he edited Jack Spicer’s Beowulf for the CUNY Lost and Found Document
series (with Sean Reynolds), and published Field Work (BlazeVOX). In 2012 he edited Thomas
Meyer’s Beowulf translation for punctum books. His dissertation concerns Chaucer’s and Spenser’s
development of poetic language and authority. (Email: dhadbawnik@gmail.com)
HARRIS, ANNE [SESSION 19] | Anne Harris is an Associate Professor of Art History at DePauw
University who has been thinking about what it takes for a stone to become a statue, for matter to
become miracle, and for nature to become art. She comes at these questions from the field of art
history and its convoluted relationship to materiality, in which materiality is simultaneously prized
through rarity and flattened through iconography. The resistance that materiality has to human
comprehension in terms of time (the millions of years for stone to form) and space (the
infinitesimally small elements that make up any atom that make up stone) is where she hopes BABEL
will have her dwell. (Email: aharris@depauw.edu)
HAYTON, DARIN [SESSION 2] | Whither goest Darin Hayton and what does he do there? Know not I.
Something about the History of Science in early modern Europe. He never writes, he never calls, he
doesn’t send flowers. (Email: d.hayton@haverford.edu)
HENDERSON, DIANA [SESSION 8] Diana Henderson teaches in the Literature program at MIT and
her research interests include Shakespeare, gender studies, early modern poetry and drama,
modernism, media studies, and world drama. Her publications include the books Alternative
Shakespeares 3, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media, and A
Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. (Email: dianah@mit.edu)
HIGA, STEPHEN [SESSION 25] | Stephen Higa’s beard had been prepared in holy land, and is
patriarchal. He never shaves and rarely trims it. It is glossy, soft, clean, and altogether not
unprepossessing. It is such that ladies might desire to reel it off and work it into their patterns in lieu
of floss silk. His complexion is fair and almost pink; he is small in height and slender in limb, but
well-made; and his voice is of peculiar sweetness. (Email: stephen.higa@gmail.com)
HOLSINGER, BRUCE [SESSION 23] | Bruce Holsinger teaches English at the University of Virginia. His
current research, which explores the parchment record of the Western tradition from a number of
different angles (environmental history, animal studies, zooarchaeology, theologies of sacrifice, etc.),
will result in a book titled “Archive of the Animal: Science, Sacrifice, and the Parchment
Inheritance.” His debut novel, A Burnable Book, a historical thriller set in London in 1385, is
forthcoming from HarperCollins (UK) and William Morrow (US). Bruce is widely known for
creating, patenting, and executing in multiple countries the Holsinger Effect. It’s so top-secret we
can’t say any more about it. (Email: bh9n@eservices.uva.edu)
HOWIE, CARY [SESSION 3] | Cary Howie teaches medieval literature, religious studies, and gender
and sexuality studies at Cornell University, and is the author of one of our favorite books ever,
Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is a globally-recognized
research specialist in “sparkle studies,” and if you stand too close to him, his glitter will rub off on
you. (Email: caryhowie@cornell.edu)
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HSY, JONATHAN [SESSION 16] | Jonathan Hsy is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington
University and his interests include multilingual poetry, romance, textual studies, sociolinguistics,
and disability studies. His first book (forthcoming) is entitled Trading Tongues: Merchants,
Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State, 2013). Current projects include a monograph
on medieval authors who self-identify as disabled (blind or deaf), and an exploration of non-
anglophone adaptations of Chaucer in graphic novels and other media. He also blogs at In The
Middle (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com). When you see him at the conference, he will have on the
loosest possible blue coat, cut square like a shooting coat, and very short. It will be lined with silk of
azure blue. He will also have on a blue satin waistcoat, a blue neck-handkerchief fastened beneath his
throat with a coral ring, and very loose blue trousers which almost conceal his feet. His soft, glossy
beard will be softer and more glossy than ever. (Email: jhsy@gwu.edu)
JENKINS, NICO [SESSION 13] | Nico Jenkins is a Lecturer and Coordinator for Philosophy at Husson
University in Maine. He was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute, St. John's College in Santa
Fe, and most recently the European Graduate School in Saas-fee, Switzerland where he is ABD. His
extensive resume includes being an assistant sommelier in New York City, exhibiting as an artist
widely in NYC and Europe, selling yoyos in Hong Kong, and driving Jackie Chan through the back
alleys of San Francisco. He is at work on his dissertation about the difficulty of naming in Heidegger
and Dogen. (Email: nico@continent.continent.cc)
JEWELL, BRIANNA [SESSION 10] | Brianna Jewell is a PhD student in English at the University of
Texas at Austin. She thinks that describing and working to tell stories about the curious things that
we see happening in medieval literature can tell us something about how we relate to others in our
lives today. She likes eating tacos. (Email: Brianna.c.jewell@gmail.com)
JOHNSON, MICHAEL [SESSION 10] | You might begin to talk to Michael Johnson as though he were
your brother, and it would not be till your head was on your pillow that the truth and intensity of his
beauty would flash upon you, that the sweetness of his voice would come upon your ear. A sudden
half-hour with Jeffrey Cohen was like falling into a pit, an evening spent with Michael like an
unexpected ramble in some quiet fields of asphodel. (Email: mjohnson@mail.utexas.edu)
JONES, MELISSA [SESSION 9] | Melissa Jones is a name with rather a grand sound, suggesting on first
acquaintance brasses in country churches, scrolls in stained-glass windows, and generally the De
Joneses who came over with the Conqueror. For, it is a remarkable fact in genealogy that no De
Anyones ever came over with Anybody else. (Email: mjones89@emich.edu)
JOY, DEIRDRE [SESSION 18] | Deirdre Joy is an evolutionary biologist and Program Officer in Parasite
Genomics, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health.
She has published a lot of articles in important science journals having to do with the genetics of
malaria, and she can also write poetry, knit, play the violin, snowboard, and paint, but . . . so what?
Nothing she has ever done can compare to the work and life of her sister, Eileen Joy, who is smarter,
more talented, and most importantly, dresses better. Also, Deirdre should really stop smoking. This
is the last time we are going to tell her that. We don’t care if it is just one cigarette at 11:00 every
night when the kids are in bed. (Email: Deirdre.joy@gmail.com)
JOY, EILEEN [SESSIONS 5, 9, 13] | Eileen Joy is a machine hidden in the woods that distills spirits into
potency through a process of slow condensation. She is an expert in cocktail husbandry and in a
former life was Walt Whitman’s porter. Daily, she shovels the coals into the punctum books steam
engine (http://punctumbooks.com). (Email: eileenajoy@gmail.com)
JOY, SPARKLES [THE FIZZ] | Demi-Papillon extraordinaire, gadabout, style maven, acolyte to Adonis,
and provider of all the fizz at our biennial meeting; you can thank Sparkles for all the bling, candy,
cigars, and champagne showered upon you in Boston, all of which he has graciously sent us via
steampunk zeppelin from his private reserves in northern Italy.
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JUSTIN, GALE & DIANE MARKS [SESSION 19] | Among the ladies in Barchester who have hitherto
acknowledged Mr. Slope as their spiritual director must not be reckoned either Gale Justin or Diane
Marks. On the first outbreak of the wrath of the denizens of the close, none had been more animated
against the intruder than these two ladies. And this was natural. In such matters Gale and Diane had
but one opinion. (Email: dr.galejustin@gmail.com & DMarks@brooklyn.cuny.edu)
KAO, WAN-CHUAN [SESSION 5] | Wan-Chuan Kao recently completed his dissertation on medieval
deployments of whiteness at the CUNY Graduate Center. His other research interests include
medieval conduct, marriage, tomboyism, and hotel praxis. Wan-Chuan’s works have appeared in the
Journal of Lesbian Studies and Mediaevalia, and are also forthcoming in Studies in the Age of Chaucer
and postmedieval. Outside of academia, Wan-Chuan loves music, especially jazz. (Email:
wkao@gc.cun.edu)
KAISER, DAVID [PLENARY II] | David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science
and Department Head of MIT’s program in Science, Technology and Society, and a Senior Lecturer
in MIT’s Department of Physics. Kaiser’s historical research focuses on the development of physics
in the United States during the Cold War, looking at how the discipline has evolved at the
intersection of politics, culture, and the changing shape of higher education. His physics research
focuses on early-universe cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation. He
is author of the award-winning book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams
in Postwar Physics (Chicago, 2005), which traces how Richard Feynman’s idiosyncratic approach to
quantum physics entered the mainstream, and his latest book, How the Hippies Saved Physics:
Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W. W. Norton, 2011), charts the early history of
Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement. (Email: dikaiser@mit.edu)
KAUFMAN, AMY S. [SESSION 6] | Amy S. Kaufman is Assistant Professor of English at Middle

Tennessee State University where she teaches early European literature, medieval literature, and
feminist theory. Her publications focus on women in medieval Arthurian legend and medievalism in
popular American culture. She also edited the 2010 issue of The Year's Work in Medievalism and is
chair of Medievalism and Arthurian Legend for the National Popular and American Culture
Associations. (Email: Amy.Kaufman@mtsu.edu)
KAUFMAN, ELEANOR [SESSION 23] | Eleanor Kaufman is Professor of Comparative Literature,

English, and French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the
author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins,
2001), Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Johns Hopkins, 2012), and At Odds
with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben
(forthcoming, Columbia University Press). Thanks to Mellon New Directions funding, she recently
devoted a fellowship year to the study of medieval philosophy. (Email: eleanork@ucla.edu)
KELBER, NATHAN [SESSION 24] | Nathan Kelber is a University of Maryland Ph.D. candidate whose
dissertation focuses upon the cultural history of drama, play, and games. His other titles include
homebrewer and hacker. He and Eileen Joy once had a passionate affair in Ypsilanti, Michigan that
lasted for one day and mainly took place in a tornado shelter and at the Sidetracks bar. Good, yet
fleeting times. (Email: nkelber@gmail.com)
KELLEHER, TINA [SESSION 20] | Tina Kelleher is a handsome woman. Her dress is always perfect: she
never dresses but once in the day, and never appears till between three and four; but when she does
appear, she appears at her best. Whether the toil rests partly with her, or wholly with her handmaid,
it is not for us even to imagine. (Email: tkelleher@towson.edu)
KELLY, KATHLEEN [MASTER OF CEREMONIES] Kathleen Kelly is Professor of English at Northeastern

University where she specializes in medieval literature, medievalism in film, and ecocriticism. She
recently co-edited, with Tison Pugh, Queer Movie Medievalisms (Ashgate, 2009), and her dog Otis
gives Sparkles Joy a run for his money in the “coolest dog in town” category. (Email:
k.kelly@neu.edu)
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KIM, DOROTHY [SESSION 18] | Dorothy Kim is an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College
and works on women’s book culture in thirteenth-century England. Recently, she has been wrapping
her head around both theoretical and practical issues while trying to digitally edit texts in Oxford,
Bodleian Library MS Laud 108. In the process, she and her students have spent a lot of time thinking
about object-oriented ontology, philology (old and new), the problem with things, and the structural
use of stemmas. Along with her interests in TEI/XML editing, she is also working on a book that
thinks about Jews and crusader culture in devotional literature. (Email: dokim@vassar.edu)
KINANE, KAROLYN [SESSION 1] | My Lady Kinane has returned to her house in town for a few days
previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks, after which her
movements are uncertain. The fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, and it
knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to be unfashionable. (Email:
kkinane@plymouth.edu]
KŁOSOWSKA, ANNA [SESSION 9] | Anna Kłosowska is a Professor of French at Miami University of

Ohio, and is the author of Queer Love in the Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and the editor
and translator of Madeline de l’Aubespine’s Selected Poems and Translations (Chicago, 2007). She is
known for her prowess in adorning chaise lounges and her home is a well-known haven for wayward
pirates and Vikings. (Email: roberta2@muohio.edu)
LANGLEY, SARAH [SESSION 25] | Sarah Langley, as she is generally called, is popular with both sexes
— and with Italians as well as English. Her circle of acquaintance is very large and embraces people
of all sorts. She has no respect for rank, and no aversion to those below her. She has lived on familiar
terms with English peers, German shopkeepers, and Roman priests. (Email: sarah.langley@
umconnect.umt.edu)
LESLIE, MARINA [MEETING HOST] | Marina Leslie is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern
University, where she specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture. She is
also the Co-Chair (with Diana Henderson, MIT) of the Women and Culture in the Early Modern
World Seminar at the Harvard Humanities Center, and the author of Renaissance Utopias and the
Problem of History (Cornell, 1999). (Email: m.leslie@neu.edu)
LEWIS, MOLLY [SESSION 6] | Molly Lewis is a second-year PhD student at The George Washington
University studying medieval literature. Her research interests include the naturalization of time,
race, and nation, and what peoples are denied admittance to culture and society as a result of these
processes (though she also has a scholarly soft spot for anything related to Africa and a growing
interest in queer theory). (Email: lewis.mollyc@gmail.com)
LONG, MARGET [PLENARY III] | Marget Long works with photographs, video, and text to explore
questions of historiography, the limits of photographic representation, and the physical experience of
photography itself. She received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the Rhode Island
School of Design, where she was the recipient of the T.C. Colley Award in photography in 2002. She
lectures frequently on photography, most recently at Yale University’s Photographic Memory
Workshop and at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Her work has been screened
and exhibited at many venues including Anthology Film Archives, Art Institute of Chicago, The
Brooklyn Museum, The British Film Institute, Exit Art, Kunsthaus Bregenz, American
Cinémathèque in Los Angeles and in an upcoming group exhibition at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in
New York. She has just published Flash + Cube (1965-1975), a visual study of the Sylvania flashcube
(punctum books, 2012). (Email: marget.long@gmail.com)
MACCORMACK, PATRICIA [SESSION 19] | Patricia MacCormack is a Reader in Communication and

Film at Angela Ruskin University, UK, and her principal research interests are in continental
philosophy, particularly the works of Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Foucault, Bataille, Serres, Lyotard
and Blanchot, and she has published extensively in these areas. She has also written on a diverse
range of issues such as body modification, performance art, monster theory and European horror
film. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Ashgate, 2008). (Email: patricia.maccormack@anglia.ac.uk)
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MARKLEY, HANNAH [SESSION 12] | Hannah Markeley, sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship
Porters, reigned supreme on her throne, the Bar, and a man must have drunk himself mad drunk
indeed if he thought he could contest a point with her. (Email: hmarkle@learnlink.emory.edu)
MARTIN, CARL [SESSION 22] | Carl Martin is a man not given to much talking, but what little he does
say is generally well said. His reading seldom goes beyond romances and poetry of the lightest and
not always most moral description. He is thoroughly a bon vivant; an accomplished judge of wine,
though he never drinks to excess; and a most inexorable critic in all affairs touching the kitchen.
(Email: cmartin7@norwich.edu)
MAISANO, SCOTT [SESSION 23] | Scott Maisano is Associate Professor of English at The University of
Massachusetts Boston. He is currently working on two books: “Shakespeare's Revolution: The
Scientific Romances” and (with co-author Holly Dugan) “The Famous Ape: Shakespeare and
Primatology.” He is also currently writing the SparkNotes for Fifty Shades of Grey and editing The
Cambridge Companion to Workaholics. Neither SparkNotes nor Cambridge University Press has
endorsed or even expressed any interest in these projects. (Email: Scott.Maisano@umb.edu)
MCKANAN, DAN [SESSION 4] | Dan McKanan is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist
Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, which means he is responsible for renewing
the historic relationship between Harvard and the Unitarian Universalist tradition. He is the author
of four books, the most recent of which is Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical
Tradition (Beacon, 2011). (Email: dmckanan@hds.harvard.edu).
MEHDIZADEH, NEDDA [SESSION 5] | Nedda Mehdizadeh is a Ph.D. candidate at George Washington

University and is finishing her dissertation “Translating Persia: Safavid Iran and Early Modern
English Writing,” which explores linguistic (mis)translations that lead to identity conversions within
early modern plays and prose texts staging Anglo-Persian encounters. Her research interests also
include postcolonial studies, identity and performance, the relationship between space and time, and
material culture. When she is not reading or writing about one of these areas of interest, she is often
baking something sweet for friends and family. Things often catch on fire when she is in the kitchen
and trips to the hospital emergency room are often necessitated, and the cakes ultimately inedible,
but it’s the thought that counts. (Email: nmehdiz@gwmail.gwu.edu)
MENTZ, STEVE [SESSIONS 8, 14] | Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St John’s University in NYC,
where he teaches Shakespeare, early modern literature, and literary theory. His current work
explores maritime literature and ecology, and includes the book At the Bottom of Shakespeares Ocean
(Continuum, 2009) and articles in PMLA, Shakespeare, and other journals and collections. He also
blogs at The Bookfish (www.stevementz.com/blog), which venue is also helping him figure out what
a “swimmer poetics” might have to offer a world of ecological crisis. (Email: mentzs@stjohns.edu)
MERCIER, AARON [SESSION 10] | Aaron Mercier recieved his BA in English Literature at the
University of British Columbia in 2005, and an MA in Medieval Literature at The Ohio State
University in 2009. He is currently pursuing a PhD in medieval literature at the University of Texas
at Austin. His research interests include the history of the book in England, ideologies of power,
commerce and social structure in medieval narrative forms. These feed broader interests in digital
literacy and pedagogy and the activist potentials of academia. He collects eclectic jobs and has been,
among other things, a sauté cook, community organizer, lobbyist, stable hand, carpenter, kennel
assistant, housepainter, and travelling salesman. (Email: avmercier83@gmail.com)
MEYERS, WILL [SESSION 24] | Will Meyers is the Brewmaster, Cambridge Brewing Company,
Cambridge, MA. Will homebrewed his first beer twenty-two years ago and has subsequently enjoyed
a nineteen-year-long career at CBC. In addition to his authentic interpretations of traditional beers,
he crafts unique, adventuresome beers — some of which reference ancient brews of the world and
others which break new ground in the art of brewing. His focus on experimentation and the
development of CBC’s infamous Barrel Cellar have placed him at the forefront of America’s artisanal
brewers. (Email: will@cambridgebrewingcompany.com)
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MILLS, JIM & DANIEL GURNON [SESSION 19] | Jim Mills and Daniel Gurnon, a geologist and a
biochemist, are good-looking rather plethoric gentlemen of about sixty years of age. Their hair is
snow-white, very plentiful, and somewhat like wool of the finest description. Their whiskers are very
large and very white, and gives to their faces the appearance of benevolent, sleepy old lions. (Email:
jmills@depauw.edu & danielgurnon@depauw.edu)
MITCHELL, ALLAN [SESSIONS 16, 20] | Allan Mitchell is a member of English Department at the
University of Victoria. He has written two books on medieval rhetoric and ethics — Ethics and
Eventfulness in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Ethics and Exemplary
Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (D.S. Brewer, 2004) — and is currently completing a book project
called “Becoming Human: Essays on Organisms, Objects, and Premodern Ecologies.” (Email:
amitch@uvic.ca)
MITTMAN, ASA [SESSION 19] | Asa Simon Mittman is Associate Professor of Art History at California
State University, Chico. He is the author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge,
2006), and the editor of the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate,
2012), as well as articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages. He is the
president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of
Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application), accidentally founded at
Kalamazoo in 2008 to create a home for walkers in the margins of academia. His book on the
Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, co-written with Susan Kim, should be published
shortly, and his work on the Digital Mappaemundi, co-designed with Martin Foys, progresses well.
See his webpage for more: http://myweb.csuchico.edu/~asmittman. (Email: asmittman@csuchico.
edu)
MOONEY, CATHERINE [SESSION 3] | Cathy Mooney received her Masters in Theological Studies from
the Harvard Divinity School and her PhD in History from Yale University. Her research in
hagiography includes the books Philippine Duchesne: A Woman with the Poor; Gendered Voices:
Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, and a monograph on Clare of Assisi forthcoming from the
University of Pennsylvania Press. She has taught in Argentina and South Africa, and now teaches in
Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. (Email: Catherine.mooney@bc.edu)
MOORE, MICHAEL EDWARD [SESSION 7] | Michael Edward Moore is the author of A Sacred Kingdom,
on Carolingian political and religious culture. He has written on a number of medieval and modern
themes, including Czeslaw Milosz, Jean Mabillon and ecclesiastical history, canon law, the continued
possibility of humanism, and the continued existence of Arcadia. He is currently working on the
history of philology, hermeneutics, and criticism. For some reason, Michael Moore speaks with a
Scottish accent, and usually wears Australian hats and shorts with many pockets, although he is
clearly from Michigan. (Email: michael-e-moore@uiowa.edu)
MUELLER, ALEX [SESSION 23] | Alex Mueller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston and specializes in digital pedagogy and medieval studies. His recent work
examines the premodern principles that inform collaborative forms of knowledge production, such
as blogging, wiki-editing, and social networking. To maintain his (in)sanity, he runs marathons to
the beat of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend.” (Email: alex.mueller@umb.edu)
NEUFELD, CHRISTINE [SESSION 2] | My Lady Neufeld is looking out in the early twilight from her
boudoir at a keeper’s lodge and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising
from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining
figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, and she has been put quite out of temper. My
Lady Neufeld says she has been “bored to death.” (Email: cneufeld@emich.edu)
NORVIG, GERDA S. [SESSION 3] | Gerda Norvig is a practicing clinical psychologist in Cambridge,

MA and a former Professor of English at University of Colorado who also specializes in Romantic
poetry studies. (Email: Gerda.Norvig@gmail.com)
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O’DAIR, SHARON [SESSIONS 8, 14] | Sharon O’Dair is Hudson Strode Professor of English and directs
the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. Her writing often
is described as original and provocative. Called a Marxist by some and a neo-conservative by others,
she has disagreed with Cary Nelson and Richard Levin in the same sentence. A prominent
Shakespearean called her work iconoclastic, which she likes, even if she thinks the judgment an
exaggeration. She has edited a special issue of a journal, co-edited a book, written a book, and since
then has written and continues to write essays without their being attached to a “project,” especially a
“next project.” (Email: sodair@bama.ua.edu)
O’ROURKE, MICHAEL [SESSIONS 9, 18] | Michael O’Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin) is a

humanities gadfly extraordinare; if he is reading and thinking it, you should be, too. He makes things
happen and lights fires in the wildernesses of the post-historical university. He is the secret conduit
through which intellectual life flows and crackles. (Email: tranquilised_icon@yahoo.com)
OETTINGER, APRIL [SESSION 24] | April Oettinger is Associate Professor of Art History at Goucher
College in Baltimore, Maryland. She completed her PhD with a specialization in the art and literature
of Renaissance Venice, at the University of Virginia in 2000. Dr. Oettinger’s research interests
include Renaissance art and literature, Venetian painting, and the history of the book. Her recent
publications, which have appeared in journals including Artibus et Historiae and The Journal of
Word and Image, treat a variety of topics from the 16th-century Venetian painter, Lorenzo Lotto, the
1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and Aby Warburg’s reading of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, to
Michelangelo’s snowman, among his most famous ‘lost’ masterpieces. Most recently, Dr. Oettinger
co-curated an exhibition at the Walters Art Museum entitled, “Paradise Imagined: The Ideal Garden
in the Islamic and Christian World.” She is currently at work on a book entitled “Lorenzo Lotto and
the Poetics of Vision.” (Email: april.oettinger@goucher.edu)
OLSON, SHERRI [SESSION 1] | Sherri Olson is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the
Medieval Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests focus on rural
history and culture, monasticism, and the monk-peasant “interface” in medieval society. Her two
books, A Chronicle of All that Happens: Voices from the Village Court in Medieval England (1996)
and A Mute Gospel: The People and Culture of the Medieval English Common Fields (2009) were
published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto. She is just now
finishing a book about daily life in a medieval monastery for the ‘Daily Life in History’ series with
Greenwood/ABC-CLIO Press. (Email: sherri.olson@uconn.edu)
ORLEMANSKI, JULIE [SESSION 22] | Julie Orlemanski is Assistant Professor of English at Boston
College, where she specializes in medieval literature, the history of medicine, and literary and critical
theory. She is completing a book on medicine, embodiment, and narrative in late medieval England,
“Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Signs, and Narratives in Late Medieval England.” (Email: julie.
orlemanski@bc.edu)
OSELLA, CAROLINE [SESSION 9] | Caroline Osella is Reader in Anthropology of South Asia at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where she teaches South Asian Ethnography and
Ethnographic approaches to Sex, Gender, and Sexuality. Caroline does her research (since 1989) in
India and the GCC states. Recent publications range around food, fashion, Islamic reformism,
masculinities, entrepreneurship, migration and ‘love marriage.’ (Email: co6@soas.ac.uk)
OVERBEY, KAREN [SESSIONS 17, 19] | 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. (Email: karen.overbey@tufts.edu)
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PAPANTONOPOULOU, SAFFO [SESSION 25] | Saffo Papantonopoulou is a transgender anarchist
anthropologist and historian. She studied history of science, sexuality, and colonialism in her
undergraduate studies at Brown University, and is currently pursuing a Masters in Anthropology at
the New School for Social Research. One of her many interests is taking a gendered look at the
deployment of ancient history (Greece, Rome, Egypt) in the construction of the modern nation-state
and its boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. She has a passion for tearing down borders —
disciplinary, geopolitical, as well as biopolitical. (Email: saffo@riseup.net)
PASNAU, ROBERT [SESSION 3] | Robert Pasnau is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Colorado. His interests lie mainly in the history of metaphysics and mind. (Email:
pasnau@colorado.edu)
PIUMA, CHRIS [SESSION 7] | Chris Piuma is a word garbler and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for
Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, working on multilingual texts and the pleasures of
playing with the materiality of language. (Email: chris.piuma@utoronto.ca)
POOLE, MONICA [SESSION 22] | Monica Poole serves as Assistant Professor of History and Social
Sciences at Bunker Hill Community College, where she teaches history, philosophy, and ethical
hacking, and directs a program in the performing arts. As one of the organizers of Occupy Boston,
she facilitated and documented general assemblies, generated media content, and conducted teach-
ins on history and political thought. Her most recent academic work has focused on the role of
participatory media and political theater in the English Revolution. (Email: mcpoole@bhcc.mass.
edu)
PRENDERGAST, THOMAS [SESSION 9] | Thomas Prendergast is Associate Professor of English at the

College of Wooster. He is the author of Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus and co-editor
of Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602. He has
recently completed a manuscript entitled “Exhuming the Body Poetic: Public Culture and the
Invention of Poets' Corner 1400-2011” and is currently working on a book entitled “Medievalism
and Its Discontents” with Stephanie Trigg. (Email: tprendergast@wooster.edu)
RAJENDRAN, SHYAMA [SESSION 6] | Shyama Rajendran is a PhD student at George Washington

University, with a focus in medieval literature. She is interested in translation, temporality, bodies
and ideas of embodiment. She tends to write about Gower. (Email: sraj2404@email.gwu.edu)
RAMAN, SHANKAR [SESSION 23] | Shankar Raman is a Professor in the Literature Section at MIT. His
publications include Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford,
2002) and Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburg, 2011). He is currently writing a
monograph, tentatively entitled “Before the Two Cultures: Literature and Mathematics in early
modern Europe.” (Email: sram@mit.edu)
RAMSEY, JOSEPH [SESSION 22] | Joseph Ramsay’s great fault is an entire absence of that principle
which should induce him, as the son of a man without fortune, to earn his own bread. Many
attempts have been made to get him to do so, but these have all been frustrated, not so much by
idleness on his part as by a disinclination to exert himself in any way not to his taste. (Email:
jgramsey@gmail.com)
RAMSEY, MARY [SESSION 12] | Her father’s family name being Pirrip, and her Christian name
Philippa, her infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer nor more explicit than Pip. So,
she calls herself Pip, and comes to be called Pip. (Email: mary.ramsey@emich.edu)
REMEIN, DANIEL C. [SESSIONS 7, 13, 18] | Daniel Remein is a PhD student in medieval literature at
New York University who does not like to answer email, and hence, what holds his place here in the
Glossary is a yawning absence in which you can only hear the sound of dossiers flying through the
cold night air. If one holds this glossary entry very close to one’s eyes, you might be able to see some
of the interesting and cool things Dan is responsible for; that is, if you and Dan have special
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telepathic communication abilities and he knows what you are up to right now. (Email:
danremein@gmail.com)
RICHMAN, JACOB [SESSION 25] | Jacob Richman is a mixed-media composer whose work explores
the relationship between sight and sound in both live performance and fixed media. He is fascinated
by what he sees as the interconnectedness of things: people with places, sounds with textures,
humans with animals, plants and the natural world. He feels that exploring the relationships
between sounds and images in performance is an effective way to both investigate and convey these
greater connections that surround us. Jacob lives in Providence, Rhode Island and is a doctoral
candidate in the MEME program at Brown University.
ROBERTSON, BARBARA [SESSION 19] | Barbara Robertson is a visual artist who also works in art
conservation at the Seattle Art Museum. Her work explores ideas related to space, mapping, motion,
and light, inspired by current scientific inquiry in the fields of physics, astronomy and biology, and
you can see some samples of her artwork here: www.barbararobertsonart.com. (Email:
bqrobertson@comcast.net)
ROBERTSON, ELIZABETH [SESSION 3] | Elizabeth Robertson is the Samuels Chair of English at the
University of GLasgow. Co-founder of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, she focuses her
research primarily on gender and religion in Middle English literature from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries. Most recently she has become especially interested in literary form and the
history of the relationship between prose and poetry as well as the history of the senses. (Email:
Elizabeth.Robertson@glasgow.ac.uk)
ROSS, JILL [SESSION 23] | Jill Ross is Associate Professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature and
the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Figuring the
Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature (University of
Toronto Press, 2008), and co-editor of a forthcoming collection, The Ends of the Body: Identity and
Community in Medieval Culture (University of Toronto Press). She is currently working on a
monograph on metaphor in the Middle Ages and a project on comparative rhetoric in medieval
Iberia. (Email: jill.ross@utoronto.ca)
RUDMANN, DAN [SESSION 18] | Of Mr. Rudmann’s parentage we are not able to say much. We have
heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from that eminent physician who assisted at the birth
of Mr. T. Shandy, and that in early years he added an extra “n” to his name, for the sake of euphony,
as other great men have done before him. If this be so, we presume he was christened Obadiah, for
that is his name, in commemoration of the conflict in which his ancestor so distinguished himself.
(Email: danrud1@gmail.com)
RUSSELL, EMILY [SESSION 5] | Emily Russell is a third-year PhD student at George Washington
University where she studies medieval literature with a particular interest in marvelous, miraculous,
and super“natural” histories. She also works with alternative modes of thinking/doing theory. In
high school, she was well known for her haiku curses. (Email: erusse4@gwmail.gwu.edu)
SANS FAÇON [PLENARY III] | Sans façon is a collaborative art practice between French architect
Charles Blanc and British artist Tristan Surtees who undertake diverse projects, temporary and more
permanent, predominantly exploring the complex relationships between people and place. They
have temporarily moved their studio from Glasgow, Scotland to Calgary, Canada in order to work on
Watershed+, a unique public art program hosted by the Utilities and Environment
Protections department of the City of Calgary (www.watershedplus.com). See more about their
projects here: www.sansfacon.co.uk/. (Email: info@sansfacon.co.uk)
SANTOS, KATHRYN VOMERO [SESSION 20] | Kathryn Vomero Santos is a doctoral candidate in
English at New York University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Staging Translation in
Early Modern English Drama.” With Liza Blake, she is editing a volume in the MHRA Tudor and
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Stuart Translation Series entitled Arthur Golding's A Morall Fabletalke and Other Renaissance Moral
Fables. (Email: kathryn.vomero.santos@nyu.edu)
SAMPSON, IAN [SESSION 16] | Ian Sampson is a doctoral student in English at Brown University. He
studies poetry (especially British Romanticism), posthumanism, and psychoanalysis. A recovering
medievalist, he is also at work on a homophonic translation (à la Ezra Pound’s “Seafarer”) of the
Anglo-Saxon riddles from the Exeter Book. (Email: ian_sampson@brown.edu)
SAPIO, JENNIFER [SESSION 10] | Jennifer Sapio is a PhD student in the English Department at the
University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent work explored articulations of female desire and
sexual pleasure in early 14th-century English and French fabliaux. She is the proud parent of a
motley canine crew: a giant great Dane and a miniature Dachshund. (Email: jsapio@utexas.edu)
SCHLOSSMAN, BERYL [SESSION 25] | Beryl Schlossman has published widely on modern literature
and the arts, including three books on literature and the visual image: Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of
Language (on the sacred and the comic in Joyce's major works); The Orient of Style: Modernist
Allegories of Conversion (on style and the role of the writer in Flaubert, Proust, and Baudelaire); and
Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism (on love, poetics, and the visual image in
classical, Anglo-Irish, and French literature). Her poetry and prose fiction are published on both
sides of the Atlantic. Angelus Novus (Editions Virgile, Fontaine-Ičs-Dijon) and several artist’s books
have been published in France. Current projects include a sequence of short stories, a volume of
poems, and a study of Baudelaire and the poetry of Paris. (Email: berylfs@gmail.com)
SCHWARTZ, SARAH GOLDA [SESSION 25] | Sarah Golda Schwartz has about her a natural good
manner, which seems to qualify her for the highest circles, and yet she is never out of place in the
lowest. She has no principle, no regard for others, no self-respect, no desire to be other than a drone
in the hive, if only she could, as a drone, get what honey is sufficient for her. (Email:
sarahschw@gmail.com)
SEAMAN, MYRA [SESSIONS 2, 20] | Myra Seaman is Associate Professor of English at College of
Charleston who also co-directs the BABEL Working Group and co-edits postmedieval: a journal of
medieval cultural studies with Eileen Joy. Myra is widely reputed to the leader of an underground
gang that trades fifteenth-century household miscellanies on the black market. She likes pina coladas
and getting caught in the rain. (Email: mseaman@mac.com)
SIDDONS, LOUISE [SESSION 17] | Louise Siddons is an art historian whose research ranges from
eighteenth-century mezzotints to twenty-first century tintypes, and which centers on, but doesn’t
limit itself to, the United States. It’s all tied together by her insatiable curiosity about the historically
specific uses of print media and materials — a curiosity that most recently has drawn her to the
Material Collective. Often it also drives her to dance, and most of her free time is spent teaching
historic and folk dance forms. (Email: louise.siddons@okstate.edu).
SIEWERS, ALFRED [SESSION 14] | Dr. Siewers is not the man to allow anything to be omitted that
might be becoming to his new dignity. He understands well the value of forms, and knows that the
due observance of rank cannot be maintained unless the exterior trappings belonging to it are held in
proper esteem. He is a man born to move in high circles; at least so he thinks himself, and
circumstances have certainly sustained him in this view. He is the nephew of an Irish baron by his
mother’s side, and his wife is the niece of a Scotch earl. (Email: alf.siewers@bucknell.edu)
SKLAR, ELIZABETH [SESSION 20] | Elizabeth Sklar has recently waltzed out of a long-term
relationship with the English Department at Wayne State University, where as sole medievalist she
taught Old and Middle English language and literature, having happily traded in her professorship
for the relative freedoms of retirement (and, as it transpired, a Dell netbook, inaudible speeches, and
a mediocre meal). Her area of scholarly specialization is Arthurian Studies. She has published
extensively on the Matter of Arthur, both medieval and modern, and has presented papers and
published on Arthurian film. Her co-edited book, King Arthur in Popular Culture, appeared in 2002.
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Her most recent adventure has been the publication of Mathematics in Popular Culture, co-edited
with daughter Jessica K. Sklar. She shares Jessica’s passion for cats and word games, but prefers
mountain vistas to horror films. (Email: e.sklar@wayne.edu)
SKLAR, JESSICA K. [SESSION 20] | Jessica K. Sklar is an associate professor of mathematics at Pacific
Lutheran University. Originally an abstract algebraist, her current professional passion is math’s
popularization, as well as its intersections with disciplines such as literature, film studies, and art; she
recently coedited the book Mathematics in Popular Culture: Essays on Appearances in Film, Fiction,
Games, Television and Other Media (McFarland, 2012) with her mother, Elizabeth S. Sklar. Outside
of academia, Jessica is passionate about word games, Asian horror movies, and cats. (Email:
sklarjk@plu.edu)
SMAILBEGOVIC, ADA [SESSION 18] | The archdeacon’s wife, in her happy home at Plumstead, knows
how to assume the full privileges of her rank and express her own mind in becoming tone and place.
But Mrs. Smailbegovic’s sway, if sway she has, is easy and beneficent. She never shames her husband;
before the world she is a pattern of obedience; her voice is never loud, nor her looks sharp: doubtless
she values power, and has not unsuccessfully striven to acquire it; but she knows what should be the
limits of a woman's rule. (Email: adasmail2223@gmail.com)
SMYTH, MAURA J. [SESSIONS 9, 23] | Maura Smyth is shy, and unwilling to own to the name of
Maura, as being too aspiring and self-assertive a name. In her signature she uses only the initial M.,
and imparts what it really stands for, to none but chosen friends, under the seal of confidence. Out of
this, the facetious habit has arisen in the neighbourhood surrounding Mincing Lane of making
Christian names for her of adjectives and participles beginning with R. Some of these are more or
less appropriate: as Rusty, Retiring, Ruddy, Round, Ripe, Ridiculous, Ruminative; others derive their
point from their want of application: as Raging, Rattling, Roaring, Raffish. But, her popular name is
Rumty, which in a moment of inspiration had been bestowed upon her by a gentleman of convivial
habits connected with the drug-markets. (Email: maurajosephinesmyth@gmail.com)
STANTON, MIRIAM [SESSION 12] | Working as a curator at the Williams College Museum of Art,
Miriam Stanton has a predilection for transhistorical projects, and an accompanying fascination with
objects’ complex relationships to, and in, time. She recently curated On the Grid, an exhibition that
explores the myriad manifestations of the grid — as a visual framework and a subject in itself. She
has worked on everything from Winslow Homer's seascapes to ancient Greek bronze dancers, and
her outfits are frequently thematically aligned with these diverse creative pursuits. (Email:
miriam.stanton@gmail.com)
STANTON, ROBERT [SESSION 1] | Robert Stanton is Associate Professor of English at Boston College,
where he specializes in medieval English literature and translation studies. He is the author of The
Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Boydell & Brewer, 2002), and will tell you the best
places to eat in Boston if you are vegan. (Email: stantoro@bc.edu)
STEEL, KARL [SESSION 14] | Karl Steel is Assistant Professor of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY.
He’s responsible for How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio
University Press, 2011), and co-responsible, with Peggy McCracken, for the “Animal Turn” special
issue of postmedieval (Vol. 2, Issue 1: 2011). He has blogged at In the Middle (www.inthemedieval
middle.com) for dogs’ years. Though he’s conceiving a second book on feral children, worms and
putrefaction, naked philosophers, and grieving for animals, he’s somewhat cheery in person. (Email:
ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu)
STOCKTON, WILL [SESSION 16] | Will Stockton is Associate Professor of English at Clemson
University. He is the author of Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy. With
Vin Nardizzi and Stephen Guy-Bray, he co-edited Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward
Gaze. With James Bromley, he co-edited Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England.
(Email: wstockt@clemson.edu)
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SWAIN, DAVID [SESSION 24] | David Swain is Associate Professor of English at Southern New
Hampshire University, where he teaches the usual stuff. He is editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Tudor England and Twelfth Night for the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, and writes on
Renaissance medicine, comedy, and the history of drink. He is an avid birder and home-brewer.
(Email: D.Swain@snhu.edu)
SWENSON, HAYLIE [SESSION 20] | Haylie Swenson is a PhD student at George Washington
University. A former biology student and an environmental educator, her areas of focus include
critical animal theory, medieval and early modern literature, ecology, and thing theory. She is
especially interested in animals — including lions, pigs, and ticks — that figuratively or literally bite.
(Email: haylie@gwmail.gwu.edu)
TAYLOR, CHRISTOPHER [SESSION 10] | Chris Taylor is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at
Austin where he studies medieval literature. His dissertation project explores the unknown as a
narrative trope that allowed English writers to use well-known medieval figures to engage in the
politics of re-writing the past and impress visions of a global Christian future. He has published on
Prester John as a cultural nomad and on Julian of Norwich and the roots of Surrealism. He thinks
that he is getting pretty good at the mouth trumpet.
TAYLOR, JAMIE [SESSION 2] | Jamie Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College,
where she teaches medieval literature. Her first book, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature,
and Community, is coming out this spring from Ohio State University Press, and she is starting new
work on Anglo-Iberian cultural and literary exchanges in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries. (Email: jktaylor@brynmawr.edu)
TAYLOR, PETER [SESSION 20] | Peter Taylor is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston
where he directs the Graduate Program in Critical and Creative Thinking and the Science in a
Changing World graduate track. His research and writing links innovation in teaching and
interdisciplinary collaboration with studies of the complexity of environmental and health sciences
in their social context. This combination is evident in his 2005 book, Unruly Complexity: Ecology,
Interpretation, Engagement and in his co-written 2012 book, Taking Yourself Seriously: Processes of
Research and Engagement (see http://bit.ly/pjtaylor). (Email: peter.taylor@umb.edu)
THOMPSON, NANCY [SESSION 17] | Nancy Thompson teaches Art History and Women’s and Gender
Studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. She is tone-deaf and therefore not
able to sing in the choir or hang out with Garrison Keillor. (Email: thompsn@stolaf.edu)
TILGHMAN, BEN [SESSION 17] | Dr. Tilghman is an ambitious man, and before he was well
consecrated Bishop of Barchester, he had begun to look up to archiepiscopal splendour, and the
glories of Lambeth, or at any rate of Bishopsthorpe. He is comparatively young, and has, as he fondly
flatters himself, been selected as possessing such gifts, natural and acquired, as must be sure to
recommend him to a yet higher notice, now that a higher sphere has opened to him. (Email:
btilghman@gmail.com)
TINY SHRINER [OFFICIAL MEETING MASCOT] | The Tiny Shriner is the official mascot of the medieval
studies group weblog In The Middle (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com) 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 syphilis. Friend him on Facebook . . . at your peril.
TONKINWISE, CAMERON [SESSION 15] | Cameron Tonkinwise is the Chair of Design Thinking and
Sustainability at Parsons The New School of Design, and his research and professional activities
integrate the philosophy of design with a concern for sustainability. His work focuses on the design
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of commercial and nonmarket systems for shared product use, exploring how the emerging
discipline of service design might facilitate the development of less-material-dependent economies.
In his current research, Mr. Tonkinwise is investigating perceptions of convenience and autonomy
in shifts from “ownership” to “usership.” (Email: tonkinwc@newschool.edu)
TRIGG, STEPHANIE [SESSIONS 9, 14] | Dr. Trigg is, of course, a tall woman and angular. Her lord
being cherubic, she is necessarily majestic, according to the principle which matrimonially unites
contrasts. She is much given to tying up her head in a pocket-handkerchief, knotted under the chin.
This head-gear, in conjunction with a pair of gloves worn within doors, she seems to consider as at
once a kind of armour against misfortune (invariably assuming it when in low spirits or difficulties),
and as a species of full dress. (Email: sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au)
TRUITT, ELLY [SESSION 2] | Elly Truitt writes about medieval science, magic, literature, history,
technology, and the imagination. Her wide-ranging work has appeared in postmedieval,
Configurations, Early Science & Medicine, and the Journal for the History of Ideas, and has been
supported by the French government and the National Science Foundation. Her book, Medieval
Robots, is currently under review. (Email: etruitt@brynmawr.edu)
UPTON, BRIAN [SESSION 9] | Brian Upton is a senior game designer with Sony PlayStation. Working
out of Sony’s Santa Monica studio, he acts as a “script doctor” for indie games, providing design
critique and support to smaller development teams. Prior to joining Sony, he was the creative
director at Red Storm Entertainment where he invented the tactical shooter with titles like Rainbow
Six and Ghost Recon. He’s currently writing a book on the aesthetic of play, in which he examines
how critical frames developed for videogames can be applied to the analysis of presence in other
mediums including music and literature. (Email: bbupton@gmail.com)
UPTON, ELIZABETH RANDELL [SESSION 9] | Elizabeth Randell Upton is a musicologist at UCLA. She
is the author of Music and Performance in the Later Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2013), which approaches
late fourteenth and early fifteenth century polyphonic song using material culture and play theory to
uncover the relationships between composers, performers, and listeners in the medieval musicking
process. She teaches classes on medieval music, medievalism in music and popular culture, and the
Beatles. Her new book project examines the emergence of the early music movement in the 1970s
from the intersection of the classical, pop, and folk revival traditions. (Email: eupton@humnet.ucla.
edu)
VAN DEN ABBEELE, GEORGES [SESSION 15] | Georges Van Den Abbeele is the founding Dean of
Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities, and is a scholar of romance
languages and literature, who came to Northeastern University from his position as the Dean of
Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A prolific author and translator, his research
interests include French and European philosophical literature, literary theory and translation, travel
narrative and migration studies, media history and theory, as well as the intersection of humanities
and public policy. In 2008, he was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and received its
Blaise Pascal Award for outstanding achievement in humanities and social sciences.
VAN GERVEN OEI, VINCENT W.J. [SESSIONS 7, 13] | Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei studied
compostition, linguistics, conceptual art, and philosophy in the Netherlands, USA, and Switzerland.
He is visiting scholar at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen, and teaches
at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and the University of New York in Tirana, Albania,
where he lives. Van Gerven Oei runs the independent publishing house Uitgeverij and is
contributing editor of the journal continent. His current research interests are the histories of
etymology, politics, pain, and philology. (Email: Vincent@vangervenoei.com)
WAKEMAN, ROB [SESSION 24] | In personal appearance Rob Wakeman is the most singular of beings.
He is certainly very handsome. He has his sister Madeline’s eyes, without their stare and without
their hard, cunning, cruel firmness. They are also very much lighter, and of so light and clear a blue
as to make his face remarkable, if nothing else does so. On entering a room with him, Ethelbert’s blue
! 82
eyes will be the first thing you will see, and on leaving it almost the last you will forget. (Email:
rob.wakeman@gmail.com)
WARREN, MICHELLE [SESSION 7] | Michelle Warren is Professor of Comparative Literature at

Dartmouth College, and most recently, author of Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph
Bédier’s Middle Ages (Minnesota, 2011). (Email: michelle.r.warren@dartmouth.edu)
WEIDA, COURTNEY [SESSION 19] | Courtney Weida is Assistant Professor of art education at Adelphi
University in New York. Her research explores issues of gender, craft, and community in art and
education. Courtney also enjoys reading, creating, and researching zine culture. (Email:
cweida@adelphi.edu)
WEISS, SUSAN FORSCHER [SESSION 24] | Susan Forscher Weiss gives the orders, pays the bills, hires
and dismisses the domestics, makes the tea, carves the meat, and manages everything in the Weiss
household. She, and she alone, could ever induce her father to look into the state of his worldly
concerns. She, and she alone, could in any degree control the absurdities of her sister. She, and she
alone, prevents the whole family from falling into utter disrepute and beggary. (Email:
sweiss@jhu.edu)
WESTON, LISA [SESSION 7] | Lisa Weston is Professor of English at California State University,
Fresno. An Anglo-Saxonist by training, her recent work has focused on the literary culture of early
medieval monastic women. She has also published on Old English wisdom literature, however, and
has contributed the chapter on “Saintly Lives: Friendship, Kinship, Gender and Sexuality” to the
forthcoming Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature. (Email: lisaw@csufresno.edu)
WHITE, LAURA [SESSION 6] | Laura White is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Middle
Tennessee State University. Her research interests include postcolonial literature and theory,
ecocritical approaches to colonial and postcolonial fiction, feminist environmentalism, and the form
of the novel. She has published articles on South African, Indian and Australian fiction and is
currently working on a book project that investigates ways that narrative strategies manifest
conceptions of the human and position the human in relation to non-human nature in
contemporary Anglophone novels. (Email: Laura.White@mtsu.edu)
WILLIAMS, MAGGIE [SESSIONS 17, 19] | Maggie M. Williams is Assistant Professor of Art History at
William Paterson University in New Jersey. Her book, Icons of Irishness from the Middle Ages to the
Modern World, will be appearing this winter in Palgrave’s New Middle Ages Series. Currently, she's
most excited about the work she's doing with the Material Collective (www.thematerialcollective.org)
and she invites any and all interested parties to join in the collaboration. (Email:
williamsm11@wpunj.edu).!
ZUCKER, ADAM [SESSION 8] | Adam Zucker is an Associate Professor in the English Department at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on 16th and 17th century
literature. He is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge, 2011)
and the co-editor, with Alan Farmer, of Localizing Caroline Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
(Email: azucker@english.umass.edu)
! 83
!
W. dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends, thinker-lovers. He

dreams of a thought-army, a thought-pack, which would storm the
philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the
philosophical steppes, of thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances
would shine in their eyes!
~Lars Iyer
www.babelworkinggroup.org

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cruising in the ruins

the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the

2nd Biennial Meeting

*Co-hosted by: Boston College, College of Charleston, The George Washington

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non

BABEL encourages you to do whatever you want to do with this work, as

First published in 2012 by

The BABEL Working Group is a collective and desiring-assemblage of

Cover image by Lori Nix, from The City (http://www.lorinix.net/the_

Arthur Bahr (Literature Section, M.I.T.), Alexis Kellner Becker (Department of

Otis Kelly welcomes you to Boston.

REGISTRATION + BOOK/JOURNAL DISPLAY + COFFEE, ETC.

BALLROOM, CURRY STUDENT CENTER, 2ND FLOOR

THURSDAY, NOON – 5:00 PM

FRIDAY, 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

SATURDAY, 8:30 AM – 2:00 PM

*ALL SESSIONS, EXCEPT FOR PLENARY TALKS, ARE IN NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY’S

Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as

~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

Organizer: Mary Dockray-Miller (Lesley University)

Presider: Mary Dockray-Miller

Organizer: Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College)

Presider: Elly Truitt

Maximilian I, The Last Medieval Knight: Then and Now

The Curious Margery Kempe

Sex, Stoners, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Screening Medieval History

RESPONSE: Christine Neufeld (Eastern Michigan University)

Figure 1. Rob N. Johnston, Martyr-Saint I

~Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising”

BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR

Co-Organizers: Bettina Bildhauer (University of St Andrews) + Elizabeth Robertson

Presider: Elizabeth Robertson

When Mary Runs: Fleeting Touch, Surface Theology

Getting Under the Skin in Psychiatry

Co-Organizers: Peter Buchanan (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) +

Presider: Peter Buchanan

In 1976, M. L. “Buck” Buchanan, Chair of the Department of Animal Sciences at North

Serving Many Masters: Keeping Faith with Multiple Communities in Theological

Ritual and Relations: Life as a Clown

Freely Given: Finding Community Within and Without the Academy

Co-Presiders: Jen Boyle and Eileen Joy

Post By a Thousand Cuts: Hotel of Magical Thinking

Thursday, Sep. 20th

JEFFREY JEROME COHEN (GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY) +

*join us at Brasserie JO from 10:00 pm to midnight-ish (Thursday, 20 Sep.)

~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR

Co-Organizers: Laurie Finke (Kenyon College) + Martin Shichtman (Eastern Michigan

Co-Presiders: Laurie Finke + Martin Shichtman

Flaneur: Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University)

Disciplinary Dark Matter

Racialized Time: Formulating the Medieval Jew through English Chrononormativity

Haunted by Stories: Translation, Ghostliness, and the Confessio Amantis

Haunts in the Academy: Medievalists, Vampires and Witches (Oh My!)

Organizer: Daniel Remein (New York University)

Presider: Daniel Remein

Future-Philology (FP) is a sub-discipline/methodology of Philology writ large. Philology

Presider-Flaneur: Diana Henderson (M.I.T.)

I Was So Right About That: Social Class and the Academy

Mentoring, Influence, and Theft

a [lunch break: 11:30 am-1:30 pm] a

Figure 2. Robb N. Johnston, Martyr-Saint 2