Sea Monsters: Things from the Sea, Volume 2

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Published: 09/29/2017

Beaches are places that give and take, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. Through monsters, we confront our tiny time between catastrophes and develop a recognition of Otherness by which an ethical understanding of difference becomes possible. Learning to read the monster’s environmental signs often helps humans determine the scope[…]

An Open Letter of Concern to the Medieval Academy of America

by Eileen Joy Responses to the website of prominent Anglo-Saxonist Allen Frantzen (Loyola University, Emeritus) have generated a wide conversation, centering especially on the need for what we might call ‘truth and reconciliation’ in the field of academic medieval studies, conducted in person, by phone, and on social media (which was also partly sparked by[…]

Illegitimate

Figure 1. still image from Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996) by EILEEN JOY I am recently returned from the 4th Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, held at the University of Toronto (Oct. 9-11; see full program HERE), where I participated as a speaker on a session co-organized by Craig Dionne[…]

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page

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Published: 09/11/2015

The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very[…]

Still Thriving: On the Importance of Aranye Fradenburg

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Published: 04/09/2015

The work of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for the past 20 or so years. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to the[…]

Medieval Hackers

Published: 01/16/2015

Medieval Hackers calls attention to the use of certain vocabulary terms in the Middle Ages and today: commonness, openness, and freedom. Today we associate this language with computer hackers, some of whom believe that information, from literature to the code that makes up computer programs, should be much more accessible to the general public than[…]

Inhuman Nature

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Published: 09/23/2014

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This collection of essays maps the[…]

Hang On to the Emails: Collaboration Across the Divide, In Life and In Death

by EILEEN JOY cross-posted at In The Middle I am thrilled to announce today the publication, by punctum books, of The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, co-authored by Alexander Doty and Patricia Ingham. As part of punctum’s Dead Letter Office series, this book means a lot to me in[…]