| PRESIDENT (2022 and 2023): Roberta Magnani r.magnani@swansea.ac.uk |
| VICE PRESIDENT (2022-2023): 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. |
| SECRETARY (2020-2023): Kathryn Maude Kathryn Maude is assistant professor of women and gender studies at the American University of Beirut, where she also directs the Women and Gender Studies Initiative. She works on early Medieval English women and writing, and her book Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts came out with Boydell and Brewer in 2021. She is also interested in the history of borders, and her new project focuses on letters and letter writing. |
| Treasurer & Membership Coordinator (2018-2024): Amy Vines Associate Professor of English Director of Undergraduate Studies University of North Carolina – Greensboro anvines@uncg.edu Research Interests: literature and culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, with concentrations in women’s readership, textual studies, patronage, and medieval romance. Recent Publications:Who-so wylle of nurtur lere: Domestic Capabilities in the Middle English Emare, The Chaucer Review, 53.1 (January 2018), pp. 82-101; Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance, Sexual Culture in Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins, Robert Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 133-147; The Rehabilitation of Patronage in Hoccleves Series, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 2.2 (Fall 2012), pp. 201221; Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011) ; “Fictions of Patronage”: The Romance Heroine as Sponsor in John Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes’ Journal of the Early Book Society 13 (2010), pp. 139-168; “Lullaby as Lament: Learning to Mourn in Middle English Nativity Lyrics” in Laments for the Lost: Medieval Mourning and Elegy, Jane Tolmie and M. Jane Toswell, eds. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), pp. 201-223. Current projects: Chivalric Apocrypha: Alternate Constructions of Knighthood in Medieval Literature (monograph in progress); Wooing Women and Rape Culture in Medieval Romance (article in progress for edited collection). |
| PAST PRESIDENT (2020 and 2021): Melissa Ridley Elmes Assistant Professor of English Lindenwood University MElmes@lindenwood.edu Research interests: Literatures and cultures of the British Isles, including Old and Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Welsh, and Old Norse; Arthuriana; violence; feasts and feasting; women and gender Recent publications: Failed Ritualized Feasts and the Limitations of Community in Branwen ferch Lyr. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Studies Colloquium 38 (2018; pub. 2020). 201-215; Treason and the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame. Ed. Larissa Tracy. (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 320-339; Public Displays of Affliction: Women’s Wounds in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, Modern Philology 116.3 (2019), 187-210; Compassion and Benignytee: A Reassessment of the Relationship Between Canacee and the Falcon in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. Medieval Feminist Forum 54.1 (2018), 50-64. Current projects: Negotiating Violence at the Feast in Medieval British Texts (monograph in progress); Violence and the Feast in Arthurian Literature (monograph in progress); Teaching Celtic Literature in the Generalist Classroom (ed. with Mathieu Boyd); Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Texts (ed. with Kristin Bovaird-Abbo), essays on female friendship in medieval literature, fairies and power, and teaching Beowulf. |
| 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: Jessica Barr, Comparative Literature, University of Massachussetts-Amherst Liz Herbert McAvoy, English, Swansea University E. Ann Matter, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania Lynn Shutters, English, Colorado State University |
| MEDIEVAL FEMINIST FORUM BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: Melissa Ridley Elmes |
| SMFS ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS: Lucy C. Barnhouse (2022-2024) 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. 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) Kersti Francis (2023-2026) Doctoral candidate, English, UCLA kerstifrancis@ucla.edu Research Interests: Gender and sexuality studies, the history of magic, Old French 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 (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2021); “Alchemy, the Liber Aureus, and the Erotics of Knowledge,” Medieval Feminist Forum (forthcoming, 2021). Current projects: Dissertation project: Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages Carissa Harris (2021-2023) Associate Professor of English Temple University carissa.harris@temple.edu Research Interests: late medieval English and Scottish literature; gender and sexuality; rape and consent; trans-historical connections; women’s anger; misogyny and misogynoir Recent Publications: Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (co-edited with Sarah Baechle and Elizaveta Strakhov; Penn State, 2022); “The Ethical Challenge of Chaucerian Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century” (co-edited with Sarah Baechle), The Chaucer Review 56.4 (2021); “Teaching Consent: Medieval Pastourelles in the Undergraduate Classroom,” New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 2.1 (Spring 2021): 10-17; “Crooked Instruments: Obscene Scribal Creativity in Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 416,” Modern Philology 118.4 (2021): 447-69. Current Projects: The Poetics of Rage: Women’s Anger, Misogyny, and Political Power in Premodern Britain (monograph in progress) 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. Boyda Johnstone (2021-2023) Dr. Boyda Johnstone (bjohnstone@bmcc.cuny.edu) is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College (City University of New York). Her research interests include late medieval dream visions and interpretation, rape and consent, ekphrasis, manuscript circulation, and early theatre. In addition to composition and literature survey courses, she teaches early period literature and drama at BMCC. She is also a delegate for the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union that represents 30,000 faculty and staff at CUNY. Laura Kalas (2021-2023) Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature Swansea University l.e.kalas@swansea.ac.uk Research Interests: Writings for and about medieval women; gender and sexuality; visionary, or mystical, texts; medieval medicine; medieval bodies; science and materiality; medieval literary culture. Recent Publications: Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life Course (Boydell and Brewer, 2020); Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. with Laura Varnam (Manchester University Press, 2021); ‘Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Female Spirituality’, in The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature, ed. by Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir (Routledge, 2023). Current Projects: Women in Christianity in the Medieval Age: 1000-1550, ed. with Roberta Magnani (Routledge, forthcoming). 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) Amanda McVitty (2021-2023) Amanda McVitty is a Lecturer in History at Massey University in Aotearoa New Zealand and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research focuses on intersections of gender, law, and political culture and she is the founder and convener of the Masculinities and Law Research Network, which fosters interdisciplinary scholarship on gender, law and the legal professions in the premodern European world. Her monograph Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England was published with Boydell Press in 2020. Amanda’s work has featured in journals including Past & Present, Gender & History and the Journal of Medieval History, on topics including homosociality and violence in the early legal profession; gender and treason law; and popular protest and political dissent. Amanda is the recipient of a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund grant, which is supporting her current research project on masculinity, authority, and the evolution of the English legal profession. Basil Arnould Price 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. Becky Straple-Sovers 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. Thelma Trujillo (2021-2023) Thelma Trujillo is a third-year PhD student in the Department of English at The University of Iowa. Her previous work has focused on the construction of female sanctity and gender in Old English hagiography; on ethnic and racial boundaries in Beowulf; and on medieval appropriations in contemporary art and poetry. She is interested in premodern critical race studies, travel narratives, and the borderlands in the medieval period. |
