Sunday, May 6, 2018

Kalamazoo 2018 Session Bios

Here again is a listing of our sessions for this week's International Congress on Medieval Studies. Biographical statements are included for each participant. A PDF version can be accessed at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K09OVZRy8a2BDs4R495_U_bLn4n0aVMk/view?usp=sharing.


53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
10- 13 May 2018

Saturday, 5/12, at 1:30 PM
417 SCHNEIDER 1160
Past, Present, Future: Medieval Monsters and Their Afterlives I
Sponsor: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
 Organizer: Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent Scholar

Presider: Anna Czarnowus, Univ. of Silesia
Anna Czarnowus is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Silesia, Katowice (Poland). She specializes in Middle English literature and published her doctorate as Inscription on the Body: Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2009). Her Habilitatzionsschrift was published as the monograph Fantasies of the Other’s Body: Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature (Peter Lang, 2013). She has written on Chaucer and the Chaucerians, Middle English romance, medieval literature from the perspective of postcolonial and gender studies, medievalisms, and litanic poetry. Her recent interests include ecocriticism and the history of emotions.

Giants in the History of England: The Final Frontier and Steven Spielberg’s The BFG
Geneviève Pigeon, Univ. du Québec–Montréal
Geneviève Pigeon studies Medieval Literature and England’s Arthurian founding myth. She currently teaches at Université du Québec's Religous Studies Department and is a member of both the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique (Université de Bretagne occidentale, France) and the Centre de recherche internationale sur l'imaginaire. Most recently, Geneviève was a guest editor for the newly released number 35 issue of Religiologiques, in which she co-authored an article about the celebration of Halloween in Québec. The journal is free and can be accessed at http://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/. Her work often focuses on the written representation of landscapes as reservoirs of memory, and she is especially intrigued (as today’s paper illustrates) by their unusual inhabitants. Geneviève believes that these figures—fairies, giants, hermits, magicians, animals and other fascinating creatures—are the most interesting aspects of any story. 

The Monstrous Host: Hospitality and Hostility in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
Matthew Vernon, Univ. of California–Davis
Matthew Vernon is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of California, Davis. His current research project studies African-American mobilizations of medieval texts and iconography. He has published on Gerald of Wales and the problems of defining ethnicity as well as on race and nostalgia in the Marvel film Captain America: The First Avenger

Merlin the White(washed): The Entertainment Industry’s Evasion of Merlin’s Demonic Heritage
Michael A. Torregrossa
Michael A. Torregrossa is a graduate of the Medieval Studies program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and a devoted follower of Merlin’s career on screen. His published work on the subject includes “Merlin Goes to the Movies: The Changing Role of Merlin in Cinema Arthuriana” in Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, “Merlin at the Multiplex: A Filmography of Merlin in Arthurian Film, Television and Videocassette 1920-1998” in the 1999 Film & History CD-ROM Annual, “The Way of the Wizard: Reflections of Merlin on Film” in The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, and entries on “Television” in the 2001 and 2005 supplements to The Arthurian Encyclopedia.  In addition, Michael is founder of The Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, and The Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic, as well as the outgoing Fantastic (Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror) Area Chair for the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association, a position he has held since 2009. He welcomes your help in furthering the missions of these various groups. 

A Rapacious Daemon in King Arthur’s Court: Re-designating Merlin as a Demonic Rapist in Arthuriana [note corrected title]
Tirumular Narayanan, California State Univ.–Chico
Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan is a second-year art history graduate student at California State University, Chico. After finishing his B.A. in Medieval Studies at UC Davis, Drew became an adjutant to Dr. Susan Landauer, who was writing Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest., and he would later become the author of the illustrated chronology in Landauer’s book. Drew’s interest in scholarship heavily revolves around “othered” characters, whether they be demons, impaired persons, or double-chinned Roman emperors, and he is also a promising scholar of medieval-themed comics and, last year, presented at a Kalamazoo session where he discussed Ableism in Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. In addition, he hopes to be announcing the publication of his paper, Kull: To Be King, within the coming year. In his free time, Drew is a voracious consumer of Arthuriana and enjoys watching re-runs of Scooby Doo with his fiancé Kelsey.


Saturday, 5/12, at 3:30 PM
469 SCHNEIDER 1160
Past, Present, Future: Medieval Monsters and Their Afterlives II
Sponsor: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Organizer: Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent Scholar

Presider: Whitney Dirks-Schuster, Grand Valley State Univ.
Whitney Dirks-Schuster is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University (MI).  She received her PhD in History at The Ohio State University in 2013.  Whitney specializes in early modern British social and medical history with an emphasis on bodies and unusual anatomies, and she is under contract with Amsterdam University Press for her first book, Monstrous Bodies and Knowledge Transfer in Early Modern England.  The book revolves around an unique legal case, involving the alleged kidnapping of a pair of neonatal conjoined twins born in 1680, which is contextualized in terms of broader cultural beliefs about monstrosity between 1450 and 1800.  She most recently published “ ‘Weighty Celebrity’: Corpulency, Monstrosity, and Freakery in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England” in Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (forthcoming).  Future projects will examine the centuries-long urban legend of a pig-faced woman residing in London and the popular versus medical understandings of intersexuality in early modern England.

Haunting Poltergeists: Historical and Cinematic Representations of Ghosts as Demonic Monsters
Rex Barnes, Columbia Univ.
Rex Barnes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where he has taught classes in early and medieval Christian history, as well as premodern magic and witchcraft. He holds a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of religion from Concordia University in Montreal, QC, and a bachelor’s degree in political theory from the same institution. Currently he is working to finish his dissertation, “Haunting Matters: Demonic Infestation in Northern Europe, 1400-1600,” under the direction of Euan Cameron. This interdisciplinary study investigates the twin discourses of social and religious reform in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the perspective of demonological literature. 

The Queer and the Dead: Medieval Revenants and Their Afterlives in In the Flesh [via Skype]
Elliot Mason, Concordia Univ. Montréal
Elliot Mason is a second-year PhD student in Concordia University's Department of Religions and Cultures, working under the supervision of Dr. Lorenzo DiTommaso. He has completed Master’s degrees in Russian language and literature at the University of Waterloo, Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and Religious Studies at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Elliot’s previous research has focused on both the biblical sea monster Leviathan and the fallen angel Azazel. As a queer, trans person, he is particularly interested in the ways in which the history of monstrosity intersects with queer marginalities and, especially, the re-purposing of historical monsters as queer icons.

The Witcher’s Anal Eye: Monstrous Technologies of the Medievalized Other in Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Kevin Moberly , Old Dominion Univ.; Brent Addison Moberly, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
Kevin Moberly is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Digital Media, and Game Studies in the English department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His research focuses on understanding how digital manifestations of popular culture reflect, contribute to, and transform contemporary cultural, political, and historical discourses. In particular, Kevin is interested in the ways that contemporary computer games encode labor, often blurring already uneasy distinctions between work and play. His work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals and scholarly collections, including Computers and Composition, Eludimos, Kairos, and Works and Days. Kevin has received a number of awards while at ODU, including a Hixon Fellowship from the ODU English department, a university Teaching with Technology Award, and an Entsminger Entrepreneurial Fellowship.
Brent Moberly is a software developer at Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the same institution. His dissertation focused on changing representations of labor in late-medieval England, and his current research interests include Victorian and Edwardian medievalism, contemporary popular medievalism (neo- or otherwise), and labor history and studies.
Kevin and Brent have collaborated on a number of articles on medievalism in contemporary computer games and popular culture, most recently: “Gay Habits Set Straight: Fan Culture and Authoritative Praxis in Ready Player One,” in The Year's Work In Medievalism 31 (2016); “Swords, Sorcery, and Steam: The Industrial Dark Ages in Contemporary Medievalism,” in Studies In Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins (2015); “Play,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Richard Usk and Elizabeth Emery (2014); and “There Is No Word For Work In the Dragon Tongue,” in The Year’s Work in Medievalism 28 (2013). They are currently working to finish a book-length study examining how contemporary medieval-themed computer games function within and against the larger material context of late capitalism. 

The Monstrous Mongols in Medieval Eurasia and Modern Day Film
Colleen C. Ho, Univ. of Maryland
Colleen C. Ho is a Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Recipient of national awards like NEH fellowships and a Fulbright, her current research projects include the portrayal of the Mongols in film and female piety in medieval Europe. Colleen’s teaching interests include world history from Jesus to the plague, race and religion in the Middle Ages, and the Mongol Empire. She confesses that she doesn’t watch Game of Thrones.

No comments:

Post a Comment