Index of Presenters

Fran Allfrey

Fran is an Associate Research Fellow at King’s College London, facilitates education workshops at the British Museum, and looks after digitisation volunteers at the Courtauld. She works on tracing how present communities are made and sustained with the medieval past. Her current research projects examine Sutton Hoo, Old English poetry, ethno-nationalism, and notions of the hyper local; and commemorative medievalism, regeneration, and art.

Heather Blatt

Heather Blatt is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. Her first book, Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2018) examines connections between reading practices in today’s digital media and 15th-century England. Her teaching focuses on medieval monstrosity and medievalism.

Alissa Nicole
Christopherson

Alissa Christopherson is a scholar who teaches at the University of Houston. Their work focuses on gender and sexuality in new media, with emphases on adaptation studies, Victorian literature, and video games. They hold an MA in literature and are currently a PhD candidate working on a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Rebecca Coleman

Rebecca Coleman is a PhD student who focuses on Literary and Cultural Studies and Rhetoric and Composition at Old Dominion University and an Associate Professor of English at Mt. San Jacinto College. Rebecca’s research interests include the English periodical press, English law, and English literature.

Lesley Coote

Dr. Lesley Coote has written lots of books and articles on prophecy, medievalism and film: her latest book is an exploration of the story worlds surrounding the medieval Robin Hood legend. She used to be a professor of English literature and culture at the University of Hull, but she’s just been “retired” – although she remains a Fellow.

Bruce A. Craft

Bruce A. Craft is an Instructor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, LA. He is also completing a PhD in English at Old Dominion University. Bruce’s current research interests involve the media ecology of digital spaces reflecting the South.

Anna Czarnowus

Anna Czarnowus is Associate Professor at the University of Silesia. She specializes in Middle English literature and medievalisms. She has recently co-edited (with M.J. Toswell) Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood (D.S. Brewer, 2020) and is working on a volume of articles devoted to George R.R. Martin’s saga.

Sarah Daiker

Sarah Daiker is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, with an emphasis on French architectural elements and their modern lives in museum collections. Sarah’s dissertation involves early collectors and the desire for medieval art in America during the early- to mid-twentieth century. Her broader research interests include relationships of the medieval and the modern, the history of collecting and collections, and reproductions and revivals.

Helen Dell

Helen’s work on 13th-century trouvère song includes her PhD thesis on desire in French medieval song, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2008 as Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song. More recently Helen’s work has explored the links between music and death. In 2017 she co-edited a collection, Singing Death with Helen Hickey. Her research mainly moves between medieval song and medievalism (usually musical) and she has published a number of chapters and articles on both, including a chapter, “Musical Medievalism and the Harmony of the Spheres,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016), edited by Louise D’Arcens.

Brian Egede-Pedersen

Brian Egede Pedersen’s fascination with the Templars goes far back and led to his Master’s thesis about the Knights Templar in modern popular culture. He spends most of his time teaching History and English at the upper secondary level in his native Denmark, but has also written textbooks and edited teaching material for the Danish Ministry of Education. In addition, he spent several terms as an assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark, teaching a course on the appropriation and communication of history. His current project is focused on how to teach online literacy by analyzing far-right use of the crusading movement in memes and manifestoes.”

Melissa Ridley Elmes

Melissa Ridley Elmes is assistant professor of English at Lindenwood University. She specializes in pre-Conquest-15th century British Isles and North Atlantic world literatures and cultures. Her main areas of interest are the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends, gender and violence, monsters, magic, and the supernatural, women and the law, and women’s literate practices. In addition to her scholarly publications, she has most recently published a collection of poetry, Arthurian Things: A Collection of Poems, with Dark Myth Publishing.

Michael R. Evans

Michael Evans is an instructor in History at Delta College, Michigan. His research interests include medieval monarchy, and the Robin Hood legend, neither of which has anything to do with cricket. He has two published books: The Death of Kings, and Inventing Eleanor.

Karl Fugelso

Karl Fugelso is Professor and Area Coordinator (Chair) of Art History at Towson, Editor-in-chief of the serial Studies in Medievalism, and Co-editor (with Chris Jones) of Boydell & Brewer’s book series Medievalism.

Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra

Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra holds a Licentiate in History from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and is a master’s candidate at the same institution. He is the former editor of the open journal Temporalidades and a current member of the Linhas, the first official group for the study of medievalism in Brazil.

Suzanne Gut

Suzanne is an associate professor of English & Communications at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, MI, and she is currently earning her PhD in Rhetoric & Composition from Old Dominion University. Her research area focuses on how technology affects language and its application as well as communication across generations.

Robert Houghton

Rob Houghton is a Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester and is an editor of The Public Medievalist. His recent publications include “Hugh, Lothar and Berengar: The Balance of Power in Italy 945-950” (2020) and “World, Structure and Play: Digital Games as Historical Research Tools” (2018). He is currently working on the representations of the Middle Ages in modern games and on the utility of historical games as teaching and research tools.

Ann F. Howey

Ann Howey is an Associate Professor at Brock University, teaching and researching Victorian and post-Victorian Arthurian medievalism. Her latest book, Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat, has just been published (Palgrave 2020).

Valerie B. Johnson

Valerie B. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montevallo. Her research explores eco-political symbolism in Middle English literature, ecocriticism, medievalism and neomedievalism, and Robin Hood studies. She is co-editor of the journals The Year’s Work in Medievalism and The Bulletin of the International Association of Robin Hood Studies.

Dina Khapaeva

Dr. Dina Khapaeva is Professor at the School of Modern Languages, the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research comprises Russian studies, death studies, cultural studies, historical memory, and intellectual history. Dr. Khapaeva has authored six monographs, including The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (The University of Michigan Press, 2017 (Russian translation «Занимательная смерть: развлечения эпохи антигуманизма», The New Literary Observer, 2020), and Nightmares: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013), Portrait critique de la Russie: Essais sur la société gothique (Les éditions de Aube, 2012). Her works have been reviewed by Cultural Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Journal of Books, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, The Russian Review, The Slavonic and East European Review, Journal of Russian Communications, The New Literary Observer, The Polish Review, among others. Her numerous articles have appeared in journals including Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Social Research, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Le Débat, Merkur, Social Sciences Information, The South Atlantic Quarterly, and Russian Literature. Recently, she received an Invited Professorship at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Justina Martin

Justina Martin is a PhD student at Old Dominion University. Her research interests include social discourses and language and power structures in online composition classrooms.

Ami R. Martinez

Ami Martinez earned her B.A. in English in 1993 from Wichita State University and M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction in 2008 from Wichita State University. After nine years of teaching English at the secondary level, Ms. Martinez accepted a position at McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas where she is an assistant professor of English. This is her eighth year at McPherson College. Ms. Martinez is currently pursuing her doctorate in English at Old Dominion University.

Stefanie Matabang

Stefanie is a PhD student (on the cusp of dissertating!) in Comparative Literature at UCLA. She received her B.A. in English and Celtic Studies at UC Berkeley where she explored medieval Celtic remnants in Arthurian Philippine literature from the Spanish colonial period. Her current research focuses on postcolonial medievalism in the Philippines and its relationship with Filipino identity and nationalism.

Alicia McKenzie

Alicia McKenzie teaches in the Medieval and Medievalism Studies Program and the Ancient Studies Program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She is currently completing a manuscript for University of Toronto Press on the representation of premodern history in digital RPGs.

Kara L. McShane

Kara McShane is an assistant professor of English at Ursinus College, where her research and teaching focus on medieval English literature and the digital humanities. She is coordinator of Ursinus’s digital studies program, and editor of a forthcoming new edition of the Middle English Titus and Vespasian.

Marisa Mills

Marisa (muh-REE-suh) Mills is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her academic interests include chivalric romances, ecocriticism, and all things Arthurian.

Ken Mondschein

Ken Mondschein is a full-time adjunct and fencing master, a part-time jouster, and former Fulbright grantee to France. He has a PhD from Fordham University and is currently a full-time M.Ed. student at UMass-Amherst, and is the author of a dozen or so books, most recently On Time from Johns Hopkins University Press. He also writes on
Medievalisms for Medievalists.net.

Mohammed Muqtadir

Mohammed Muqtadir holds a specialization in automobiles. He has experience in the crane industry of over 10 years. Simultaneously, he takes care of the family-run school.

Martine Mussies

Martine Mussies is a Ph.D. candidate at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and a professional musician. Her other interests include autism, (neuro)psychology, Japanese martial arts, video games, King Alfred, and science fiction. More: martinemussies.nl.

Hediye Özkan

Dr. Hediye Özkan teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aksaray University. Her areas of research interests are 19th century British and American literature, life writing, social justice, activism, and intersectional feminism.

Carol L. Robinson

Carol L. Robinson researches how European medieval ideologies, particularly as they are reflected in medieval British literature, continue and are manipulated in film, video games, and literature of today (multimedia and multimodal communications). Robinson also researches how American Deaf culture English writing and speaking, particularly the works of Willy Conley (including his play For Every Man, Woman and Child—a modern morality play inspired by Everyman) and of Peter Cook (including his ASL/Sign-Mime DVD, “Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle” and Other Fingerliscious Stories). What fascinates Robinson most is the semiotics of narrative structures as they are adapted from one language form to another—from the silenced world of the medieval printed word to the (visually and/or aurally) noisy multimedia world of now. Overall, Robinson’s work is directed under studies of human rights—particularly women’s rights, Deaf rights, and LGBTQ rights—particularly in the ways that (mis)representations of European medieval ideologies are used/abused in the treatment of people today.

Keith C. Russo

After one of the longest ABD’s in the history of Western Michigan University, Keith finally finished his dissertation, Playing Merlin: Authorship from Monmouth to Neomedievalisms, in 2019. He enjoys teaching boarding-school seniors British Literature and sending them to you prepared for college-level research and writing. He also loves experimenting with medievalisms upon said British Literature students.

John Sandy-Hindmarch

John holds an MA in Viking and Anglo-Saxon studies from the University of Nottingham in 2018. While still keenly interested in the period and its history, John’s research interests have since shifted from analyzing these early-medieval peoples in their historical context towards how they have been perceived and remembered since their historical occurrence, particularly within present society.
Now conducting a PhD in Media and Cultural studies at the University of Lincoln, John’s project explores how the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings are understood, received, and connected with by reenactors and living historians who interpret them. Employing a qualitative method, John looks to uncover the nature of these individuals’ understanding of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking past, how this understanding is formed, and the extent to which their connections to the period are emotionally charged. Through this research John hopes to make a valuable contribution to the field of medievalism, producing a body of empirical data exploring how a period of the distant medieval past is brought into relation with the present.

Carl B. Sell

Dr. Carl B. Sell is the TRIO SSS Writing Specialist at Lock Haven University. Carl has recently defended his dissertation, which explored appropriations of Arthurian legend narratives, characters, and themes in popular culture as an extension of the medieval adaptive tradition. Carl serves as a member of the Advisory Board for The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.

Bhumika Sharma

Bhumika Sharma is pursuing Ph.D. from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, India. Her research interest include labor welfare, women rights, cyber-laws, business laws, and human rights. She has published more than fifty research papers in various journals of national repute and chapters in edited books. She also has a flair for poetry on social issues and problems.

Andrew Lee Sigerson

Andrew is a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University. His main research interests include L2 literacy, critical pedagogy in EFL, and technology-enhanced language learning. He is also a Professor of English at Instituto de Lingüística y Literatura, Universidad Austral de Chile.

Clare Simmons

Clare Simmons is a Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She has written widely on nineteenth-century medievalism. Her latest book, Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer in 2021.

Jessica Stanley

Jessica Stanley is an English Instructor at John Tyler Community College in Richmond, Virginia, and a PhD student at Old Dominion University. She teaches literature, composition, and developmental writing. Her research interests include Children’s and Young Adult Literature, pop culture, and geek culture. She has contributed to the edited collections Resist and Persist: Essays on Social Revolution in 21st Century Narratives and Age of the Geek: Depictions of Nerds and Geeks in Popular Media. 

Jesse Swan

Jesse Swan is Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where he specializes in early modern English literature, including Elizabeth Cary, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. He publishes on postmodern literary history and criticism, including in bibliography and textual studies.

Colleen Thomas

Dr. Colleen Thomas is an art historian who researches and publishes on monumental stone sculpture and manuscripts made in Ireland and Britain in the early middle ages. The first phase of Colleen’s career was in art museums in the United States where she worked as part of curatorial, collections, and education staff at four museums. Returning to academia, she completed a doctorate at Trinity College Dublin. The main focus of Colleen’s research was the corpus of hermit images on the monumental stone sculpture in early medieval Ireland and Britain and she is currently preparing a monograph on this topic, tentatively titled Hermits and their Habitats: Constructing Ascetic Space in Early Medieval Art. Colleen was the Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Early Irish Manuscripts Project at TCD and has been a lecturer in the History of Art & Architecture Department there. Her research interests include the biographies and multiple lives of monuments and this informs her ongoing project about nineteenth-century medievalism, Victorian interventions into medieval ornament design, and the revival of the high cross monumental form, called Inventing the Celtic Cross.

Michael A. Torregrossa

Michael A. Torregrossa is a graduate of the Medieval Studies program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and works as an adjunct instructor in English in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His research interests include adaptation, Arthuriana, Beowulfiana, comics and comic art, Frankensteiniana, medievalism, monsters, science fiction, and wizards. 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; he also serves as editor for these organizations’ various blogs and moderator of their discussion lists.

M. J. Toswell

M. J. Toswell teaches English and Medieval Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where her current courses are a first-year Medieval Studies course which meets twice a week, with half the class in person and the other half on zoom, swapping about depending on whether it’s Monday or Wednesday; and a course called Tolkien and Old English which includes fourth-year undergrads and master’s/doctoral students in a three-hour class every Monday.  She has authored and edited numerous works on medievalism and medieval studies, including Medievalism in English Canadian Literature, co-edited with Anna Czarnowus (Boydell & Brewer, 2020) and Today’s Medieval University (Arc Humanities Press, 2017).

Richard Utz

Richard Utz is Chair and Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. He has taught a wide range of topics, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval poetry through Bruce Chatwin’s postmodern prose, and his scholarship centers on medieval culture, medievalism, the interconnections between humanistic inquiry and science/technology, reception study, and the formation of cultural memories and identities. He is president of the International Society of the Study of Medievalism.

Renée Ward

Dr. Renée Ward is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. Her research concerns the literature and culture of the high to late medieval period, with particular emphases on monsters/monstrosity in medieval romance and outlaw literature. She also works on modern medievalism in children’s literature from the nineteenth-century to the present. Her current projects include The Werewolf in Medieval Romance (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan) and, with Miriam Edlich-Muth (Univeristy of Düsseldorf) and Victoria Coldham-Fussell (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), Arthurian Worlds, a project for the Routledge Worlds Series. With Valerie B. Johnson, she also co-edits The Year’s Work in Medievalism.

Angela Jane Weisl

Angela Jane Weisl is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Seton Hall University. She’s the author of The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture and the co-author, with Tison Pugh, of Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. She is working on a project on Global Medievalism and the Contest of Space with Robert Squillace.

Mary Ann Zehr

Mary Ann Zehr is an English doctoral student at Old Dominion University. Ms. Zehr is an adjunct writing instructor at Eastern Mennonite University and at Blue Ridge Community College in the Harrisonburg, Virginia, area. She was a journalist for 14 years for Education Week and then an English, history, and English-as-a-second-language teacher in public high schools for eight years. She has taught English in universities in China and writing as an adjunct instructor at the University of Maryland.