| PRESIDENT (2024-2025): Nicole Lopez-Jantzen Dr. Nicole Lopez-Jantzen is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she teaches courses on pre-modern Mediterranean, modern European, and women’s history, as well as methods and theory in history. Her recent research has focused on race, gender, and sexuality in early medieval Italy, as well as the uses of the early medieval past in modern Italian nation building. Additionally, she is on the editorial board of postmedieval, and is the early middle ages book review editor for Speculum. |
| VICE PRESIDENT (2024-2025): |
| SECRETARY (2024): Lucy C. Barnhouse Lucy C. Barnhouse is an Assistant Professor at Arkansas State University, having previously held positions at the College of Wooster and Wartburg College. Her forthcoming monograph, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland, examines hospitals as religious institutions in late medieval cities. She has also both taught and published on medievalism, leprosy, and religious women. |
| Treasurer & Membership Coordinator (2024-2026): Kersti Francis Postdoctoral Scholar, Boston University Society of Fellows Kersti Francis (she/they) is a premodernist working at the intersections of the history of science, networks of power, and identity studies in medieval and early modern literature. Her current book project, “Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin and The Supernatural, 1150-1650,” uses the premodern framework of sins contra naturam and transhistorical theories of fictionality to argue that contemporary authors used literary magic to engage in queer and trans imaginings of bodies, relationships, and sexual acts. Research Interests: Gender and sexuality, race and empire, queer and trans studies, the history of magic, Old French literature, Old Norse Literature Middle English literature, the history of science Recent Publications: “Fetishizing the Past: Troilus and Criseyde, Sadmomasochism, and the Historophilia of Modern BDSM,” in Painful Pleasures: Sadomashochism in Medieval Cultures (Manchester University Press, 2023); “Alchemy, the Liber Aureus, and the Erotics of Knowledge,” Medieval Feminist Forum (2023). |
| PAST PRESIDENT (2022-2023) Roberta Magnani, Swansea University |
| MEDIEVAL FEMINIST FORUM EDITOR: Jennifer Edwards Professor and Chair of History Manhattan College jennifer.edwards@manhattan.edu Research interests: history of monasticism; the cult of the saints; women, gender, and power; medieval France; medicine, healing, and disease. Recent publications: Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority in Poitiers’ Abbey of Sainte-Croix (Oxford, 2019), and Daily Life of Women in Chaucer’s England (ABC-CLIO, 2022) Current projects: A monograph on “Holy Healing: Saints and Leprosy in Medieval Europe,” and a Reacting to the Past game on “Christine de Pizan and the Querelle des Femmes.” |
| MEDIEVAL FEMINIST FORUM ASSOCIATE EDITORS: E. Ann Matter, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania Lynn Shutters, English, Colorado State University |
| MEDIEVAL FEMINIST FORUM BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: Suzanne Edwards, Lehigh University |
| SMFS ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS: Daisy Black (2022-2024) Dr. Daisy Black is a lecturer in English literature, and has published on gender, anti-Semitism and time in medieval biblical drama. Her other research interests include the performance of food on the medieval stage; medieval depictions of Jews; spectatorship; medieval lay theology; women and queer figures in performance and medievalism in modern board game cultures. As a theatre practitioner, medieval storyteller and playwright, Daisy has produced creative work for bodies as diverse as the Royal College of Physicians, Manchester Cathedral and the National Waterfront Museum. She is one of the BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinkers. Suzanne M. Edwards Suzanne M. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Her scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality in medieval English literature, especially questions of sexual violence, consent, and survival, and on women’s medievalisms. Recent publications include “‘A Beginning for Them All’: The Medieval Pluriverse of Gloria Naylor’s ‘Sapphira Wade'” (forthcoming in postmedieval) and “Rape, Rapture, and Writing the Book of Margery Kempe” in Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, edited by Sarah Baechle, Carissa Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov. She is currently working on an edited volume on women’s medievalisms with Matthew X. Vernon. Sharon Farmer, Founding Editor Representative (2020 and 2021) Lucy R. Hinnie Lucy is an independent scholar, currently working in alt-ac as a Wikimedian. From 2021-23 she was Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library. She completed her PhD on the medieval querelle des femmes in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. Following her viva, she held a Leverhulme Study Abroad Scholarship as a white settler scholar on Treaty Six Territory and the Homeland of the Métis at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research interests include late medieval and early modern literature, Older Scots poetry, medieval feminist criticism and the pedagogical potential of the digital humanities. She is an enthusiastic advocate for open knowledge and the use of Wiki platforms in academic contexts, and is a prolific pop culture podcaster on the Podcastica network. Amy Livingstone (2022-2024) Amy Livingstone is the Head of the School of History and Heritage and Professor of History at the University of Lincoln. UK. Her research focuses on the history of the aristocracy in eleventh and twelfth-century France. She has published widely on the history of women and the aristocratic family. Her books include Out of Love for My Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, c. 1000-1200 and Medieval Lives: The World of the Beaugency Family, c. 1000-1292. In 2017 she was awarded the Medieval Academy/CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Livingstone is the co-editor of the newly re-launched journal, Medieval People. Her current research project is writing the life of Countess Ermengarde of Brittany. Sara McDougall (2022-2024) Becky Straple-Sovers (2022-2024) Becky Straple-Sovers is the marketing specialist for Medieval Institute Publications, the managing editor at Arc Humanities Press, and a freelance academic editor. She completed her PhD on moving bodies in Old English saints’ lives at Western Michigan University in 2019. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, poetry of the First World War, and the public humanities. She is also the administrative director of Early Music Michigan, an early music choir with which she’s performed since 2015, and an occasional choreographer and dancer. |
| GRADUATE STUDENT ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS: Christine James Zepeda (2022-2024) Christine Zepeda is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Advised by Dr. Joan Holladay and Dr. Jeffrey Smith, her doctoral research reexamines court art, material culture, and elite architectural spaces from the point of view of royal women in medieval England. Her dissertation employs the principles of anthropology, aesthetic phenomenology, and sensory theory to create individualized sensory models and reception scenarios for England’s Plantagenet queens with the aim of recovering the ways in which these women would have perceived, interpreted, and interfaced with their material environments. Christine holds a B.A. in History with a minor in Philosophy from the University of North Texas, an M.A. in Medieval Studies from Fordham University, an M.S. in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and an M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, Christine curated an exhibition for the Blanton Museum of Art at UT as part of an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship. The exhibition, entitled Medieval x Modern, explores nineteenth and twentieth century medievalisms using a wide range of objects drawn from across the Blanton’s collections. Basil Arnould Price (2023-2025) Basil Arnould Price is a Wolfson Scholar and Ph.D candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. His research focuses on medieval Iceland and Old Norse-Icelandic literature, with a particular interest in postcolonial and queer approaches to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Old Norse-Icelandic sagas. His current project – generously funded by the Wolfson Foundation – centres on how the discursive construction of space in the so-called ‘postclassical sagas’ serves to challenge and contest the institution of Norwegian rule in Iceland, following the dissolution of the independent commonwealth in 1262/1264. He is the editor of Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements in the Middle Ages (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) and he has written on colony, race, and queerness in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English literature. |
