Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association 2021 Annual Conference
Virtual Event. Wednesday, 11/10, through Saturday, 11/13.
Create an account with MAPACA to register and access the full schedule.
Recalling the Middle Ages: Nostalgia, Relics, Ruins in Medievalisms
MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE / PANEL
Thursday, November 11, 9:30 am to 10:45 am EST (Camelot)
Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Session chair: Nick Katsiadas (Slippery Rock University)
Tolkien’s Medievalism as Romantic Nostalgia: The Longing for Aman, Gondolin, and Númenor
Nick Katsiadas (Slippery Rock University)
Nick Katsiadas is a lecturer in the English Department at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on graphic narratives, European Romanticism and its echoes in later experimental narratology. He is the author of "Mytho-Auto-Bio: Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the Romantics, and Shakespeare's The Tempest," "The Unwritten: Romanticism in Comics?" and a forthcoming book that is being published by the Rochester Institute of Technology Press, titled Romanticism in Comics: Faith, Myth, and Mood.
Blade and King, Lord and Ring: The Link Between Object and Identity and Story and (Arthurian) Source in Tolkien’s Aragorn son of Arathorn
Carl Sell (Lock Haven University)
Dr. Carl B. Sell is the TRIO SSS Writing Specialist at Lock Haven University. Carl’s research explores appropriations of Arthurian legend narratives, characters, and themes in popular culture as an extension of the medieval adaptive tradition. He serves as a member of the advisory boards for The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture and the Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, and he is the author of various film and literature reviews on medievalist and scholarly blogs, as well as articles on Arthurian topics and DC’s Aquaman.
Choose Wisely: The Grail in the Monstrous Matter of Britain
Michael A Torregrossa (Independent scholar)
Michael A. Torregrossa is a medievalist who researches adaptations of the medieval in popular culture. He is founder of The Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain and The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, and The Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic; he also serves as the Monsters and the Monstrous Area Chair for the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association.
Medievalisms on Screen
MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE / PANEL
Thursday, November 11, 3:15 pm to 4:30 pm EST (Camelot)
Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.
Session chair: Michael A Torregrossa (Independent scholar)
Knights, Swords, Roundtables and Quests: Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations of Arthurian Legend
Rachael Kathleen Warmington (Seton Hall University)
Rachael Warmington is an instructor at Seton Hall University. She earned her English M.A. from Seton Hall University, her MFA at CUNY City College and is ABD at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on themes of Arthurian Legend in medieval texts and in contemporary literature, film and television adaptations and appropriations and how these themes create the space that challenges oppression in its various forms, but have also been used to perpetuate racism, sexism and religious intolerance. Rachael is the editor-in-chief of the academic journal, Watchung Review and a New Jersey College English Association Board Member. She has been published in Journal of Pedagogic Development, The Tower Journal, Poetry in Performance and BigCityLit.
Victory Over Valhalla: Violence via Vikings Sampling in Acylum’s Kampf Dem Verderb
Nicholas Diak (Independent scholar)
Nicholas Diak is a pop culture scholar of sword and sandal films, Italian exploitation cinema, industrial and synthwave music, and horror studies. He is the editor of The New Peplum: Essays on Sword and Sandal Films and Television Programs since the 1990s, the co-creator and co-chair of the annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference, co-host of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast, and contributor to the Exotica Moderne magazine.
Heresy for Fun and Profit: Crusader Kings III, Systematized Religion, and Medieval Heresies
Jason Paelian Pitruzzello
Jason Pitruzzello is a professor of English at Victoria College. He specializes in medievalisms, the literature of Robin Hood, and film/video game adaptations of literary works.
Magic in Medievalism: White Wizards, Wicked Witches & Racialized Sorcerers
MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE / PANEL
Friday, November 12, 9:30 am to 10:45 am EST (Camelot)
Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.
Session chair: Carl Sell (Lock Haven University)
Mages on Stages: White Wizard Male Privilege in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Macbeth
Richard Fahey
Richard Fahey recently graduated from University of Notre Dame with a PhD in English (2020) and currently works as Blog Manager & Contributor at the Medieval Institute’s "Medieval Studies Research Blog," and Managing Book Review Editor for "Religion & Literature" at Notre Dame. Richard specializes in Old English, Middle English, Latin, Old Norse-Icelandic, and Old Saxon literature, and his research interests include medieval wonders, monsters, magic, riddles, heroism, syncretism, allegory, intellectual history, medievalism and public humanities. Richard is currently transforming his recent dissertation into a monograph, titled "Psychomachic Monstrosity in Beowulf,” and editing a collection of essays on the subject of “White Wizard Male Privilege.”
Bewitching Desire: Women’s Secrets, Seduction Magic, and Sexual Medievalism
Emily McLemore
Emily McLemore is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame, where she specializes in Medieval Literature and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on representations of women and the intersections of gender, sex, and violence in medieval texts. Her dissertation, titled “Desiring Women: Pleasure and Power in Late Medieval English Literature,” foregrounds desiring as a transgressive act, which she characterizes as an expression of agency always underpinned by gendered power dynamics. The project examines how women, as desiring subjects, seek pleasure, experience and engender eroticism, and exercise power in sexual contexts. Her paper today, "Bewitching Desire: Women's Secrets, Seduction Magic, and Sexual Medievalism," draws from the introductory chapter of her dissertation where she discusses the evolution of medicalized misogyny in Medieval Europe.
Veiling the Wizard: Orientalizing the Whiteness of Xaltotun in Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon
Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan
Drew Narayanan is a third-year Art History Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current projects focus on French and Italian depictions of Islamic Princes (both historical and imagined) in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. To this extent, he is interested in the nuances of “Race in the Middle Ages” as well as the memory of crusade. As a voracious consumer of early 20th century American pulp fiction, he also works on medievalisms and Americana. He has a publication in the magazine Current Affairs co-authored with Benjamin Bertrand titled “Medieval Dreams and Far-Right Nightmares.”
Race-Swapping Sorcerers on The Continent: The Multicolor Medievalism of Netflix’s "The Witcher"
Kristine Larsen (Central Connecticut State University)
Dr. Kristine Larsen has been an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including Gender and Science; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of the books Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19th Century, and Particle Panic! Her latest project is a book on Science and Magic in the world of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series.
