Degrees

2009, BA English with Teacher’s Certification, Eastern Illinois University

2020, MA English, Wayne State University

Bio

Originally from central Illinois, Lindsay is a PhD student and teaching fellow focusing on post-conquest (c. 1100-1300) medieval literature.  Previous research has focused on food in medieval literature, early modern broadside ballads, and perceptions of mental illness in medieval Europe.  Outside of medieval literature, Lindsay is also interested in teaching pedagogy and taught high school English and special education before returning to academia.  She has also worked extensively with a group of instructors at UNC who design coursework focusing on publication in the PIT Journal.

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Publications:

Miller, Lindsay, Sarah Chapman and Lynn Losh 2019. Going beyond Lear: Performance and Taming of the Shrew. Dividing the Kingdoms:Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates: Performance: Wayne State University. https://guides.lib.wayne.edu/folgerkinglear/performance

Ragle-Miller, Lindsay et. Al. The Warrior Women Project: Wayne State University. https://s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen/

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, MA English, Virginia Tech

2019, BA English, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

Kara Rush is a first-year Ph.D. student specializing in early modern literature. In particular, Rush is interested in how early modern author’s used nature, elements, and bodies to speak against political authority norms and to interrogate the parameters of British national identity. Other interests include adaptation studies, late medieval literature, post-colonial theory, and critical race studies.

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Awards

• Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2022

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, BA English, University of Virginia

Bio

Lexi is a first-year PhD student interested in the reception and evolution of early Christian figures, texts, theologies, and tropes through the late Middle Ages into the Early Modern period in both literature and art. Her research interests also include the diverse roles of women in religious settings in these and the creation of apocryphon in these periods.

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Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is PhD candidate in the English and Comparative Literature department at UNC Chapel Hill with a focus on medieval literature. She is interested in antifeminist representations of tropes and myths in medieval literature, the authors that lived and wrote contrary to such representations, and the ways Christian and pagan theology interact with portrayals of women in medieval literature. Krista received her BA in English from a historically women’s college and credits her unique undergraduate experience with sparking her interest in early women’s writing and feminist theory.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Isabel (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina. Their research broadly focuses on the intersections between language, textual culture, and queer theory in medieval literature. Medieval theories of language and rhetoric inform their investigation, alongside structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. Ambiguous words, semiology, and narratives concerning sex change are of particular interest to their research.

Isabel’s reading of queerness in medieval literature is twofold: they seek to locate queer instances in both didactic religious texts, such as the trans saints in medieval hagiography, and in secular narratives like the 13th century Le Roman de Silence. In both secular and religious frameworks, Isabel is concerned with how language informs structures of sexuality and gender and how these structures are often unsettled and displaced through language. In their reading of queerness in medieval texts, Isabel desires to experiment with how we recognize and interpret ‘queerness’ not as a fixed identity, but as acts, events, and performances in dialogue with identity-formation.

They are currently working on two projects: one entitled ‘I kan nat glose’: Queering Illegible Signification in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale,’ which analyzes the infamous pear tree sex scene in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale as a culmination of unintelligible semiotic exchanges of letters and of sexual organs, and the other, “Needle as Queer Instrument of Authorship in Chrétien de Troyes Yvain,” which considers the implications of the textile worker as auctor.

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Awards

CARA Summer Scholarship, The Medieval Academy of America, 2022

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, MSt English 650-1550, University of Oxford

2014, BA English and Medieval/Early Modern Studies, University of California, Davis

Bio

Jillian is a first year PhD student and teaching fellow in the department of English and Comparative Literature. She is a medievalist with a focus on the post-conquest period ca.1100-1300. Her previous research projects have centered on the lais of Marie de France and other Anglo-French texts. Additionally, she is interested in exploring the transmission of medieval texts and medievalisms. Her research approaches include digital corpus linguistics and Natural Language Processing, feminist and gender theory, virginity studies, and queer theory.

Jillian is a recent transplant from rural Northern California to the Research Triangle, where she is working to rapidly fill her new living space with houseplants. In addition to research, she is passionate about teaching and providing student support.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, BA English, Samford University

Bio

Emily is a PhD candidate focusing on late-medieval Middle English literature. She is especially interested in questions of authority, counter-authority, legality, and outlawry in late fourteenth and early fifteenth century political poetry and outlaw tales, including Piers Plowman, texts in the Piers Plowman tradition, and Robin Hood traditions.

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Teaching Awards

• Doris Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2022

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Awards

• 2022 Joseph Breen Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Medieval Studies
• 2021 ARPA Graduate Degree Completion Grant
• 2020 Joseph Breen Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Medieval Studies

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, MA English Literature, University of Virginia

2015, BA English Literature, Bethany College

Bio

Khristian S. Smith studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religiopolitical and material contexts. His research interests include the histories of religion and emotion, occult knowledge, and literary representations of the Devil. His most recent publication places William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its contemporary religious and scientific contexts by exploring the toxicological roles of night, crypts, and demons in the play. He has previously delivered papers on the Devil and humor in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Paracelsianism in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and medieval theories of predestination in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Smith’s current project interrogates the relationship between the reception of Calvinist doctrine and “horror” as an affect in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tragedy, epic, and sermons.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• Forthcoming. “‘No healthsome air breathes in’: Spiritual Poison in Romeo and Juliet,” Poison on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Kibrina Davey (Manchester University Press).

Media & Impact

• “Possets, Drugs, and Milky Effects: A Look at Recipes, Shakespeare’s Plays, and Other Historical References,” Shakespeare and Beyond, February 2020.
• “How to Name Medieval Plants,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, January 2020.
• “Displaying the Body,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, November 2019.
• “Recognizing Evil: The Devil and His Horns,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, October 2019.
• “‘The Blood is the Life’: Dracula and 19th-Century Transfusions,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, September 2019.

Curatorial Work

• Narratives of Queer Identity, The Lewis Round Library Special Collections, Chapel Hill, NC, Cocurator, Online.

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Awards

• ARPA Graduate Degree Completion Grant, UNC Graduate School, Fall 2021
• Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways Travel Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library, December 2019
• Sara Malone Conference Grant, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, May 2019
• Florence Hoagland Memorial Award for Outstanding Senior English Major, Bethany College Department of Humanities, Spring 2015
• W. F. Kennedy Prize for Outstanding Junior Man, Bethany College, Spring 2014
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Junior English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2014
• Bettie Blanck Travel Award, BC Department of Humanities, Fall 2013
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Sophomore English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2013

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Tulsa

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, BA English and History, Grinnell College

Bio

Eleanor Griggs is a doctoral student studying Medieval Literature. Her work focuses on ecology, historiography, and time in Middle English poetry, romance, and encyclopedic writing.

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Publications:

“The Orchard and the ‘Ympe Tre’: Gardening, Mastery, and Ecology in Sir Orfeo” Comitatus 50:1 (2019): 97-118.

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Awards

2018 Joseph Breen Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Medieval Studies

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