After so many years as president of the ISSM, I am thrilled to see how the tradition continues, now for the 36th time. Here is the full program:
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER4.
8.30-9am
Introductions
Michael Gavin, President, Delta College
Michael Evans, Coordinator, Humanities Learning Center, Delta College
Land acknowledgment
9-10.30 am –Two concurrent sessions
Session 1a-Medievalism in Fiction and Film
Moderator: M Jane Toswell
Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, University of Białystok
“Cultural Memory and the Middle Ages in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Lions of Al-Rassan”
Karen A. Winstead, Ohio State University
“NarratingSilences: Heldris of Cornwall and Alex Meyers”
Ann Howey, Brock University
“‘Real Life?’ or ‘Just Fantasy?’: Neomedievalism in Once & Future”
Ioanna-Maria Stamati, University of the Aegean
Dracula’s Memory on the Screen
Session 1b -Medieval Rituals and the Modern World
Organizer: Nils Holger Petersen
Moderator: Stavroula Constantinou
Stavroula Constantinou, University of Cyprus
“Byzantine Rituals in Modern Greek Narratives”
Ingrid Bennewitz, University of Bamberg
“‘Take your hands off the harp!’: Rituals, music and meals in medieval literature and films of Quentin Tarantino”
Christos Hadjiyiannis, University of Cyprus
“Modern Martyrs: Byzantine Female Martyrdom in Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation (2008)”
Nils Holger Petersen, University of Southern Denmark / University of Copenhagen
“Crux fidelis(Venantius Fortunatus, 6th century): from part of the Adoration of the Cross since c. 800 to settings by Krzysztof Penderecki (1999) and Wolfgang Rihm (2000)”
10.45am-12pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session 2a –Global Medievalisms
Moderator: Tom Boudreau, Delta College
Julio César Cárdenas Arenas, Universidad Complutense of Madrid / Islamic University of Medinah
“Ibn Taymiyah's Modern Figure. Towards an Islamic Medievalist Definition”
Pavel Bychkov, Russian Academy of Sciences
“Medievalism in Soviet Unofficial Culture of the Stagnation Period (1964-1984)”
Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall University & Robert Squillace, New York University
“Global Medievalism’s “Medieval”: Demarcating Medievalized Spaces in the Modern World”
Session 2b -The Recreated Medieval: A Writers & Artists Exhibition (1)
Organizer: Carol Robinson
Moderator: Pam Clements, Siena College
Pamela Clements, Siena College
“New Poems with Old Twists”
Kathy Davis Patterson, Kent State University -Tuscawaras
“Medieval Echoes: Dragons, Witches, Unicorns, and a Contemporary Artist’s PostMedieval Aesthetic (Drawings)”
Carol Robinson, Kent State University –Trumbull
“Medievalism in Deaf Theatre: Video Clips from Four Productions”
12.15-1.30 pm –Two Concurrent Sessions
Session 3a -Spenser's Medievalism
Organizer: Nickolas Haydock
Moderator: Mickey Sweeney, Dominican University
Edward Risden, St Norbert College (emeritus)
“If Magic be the Food of Love, Play on: Boundaries of Love in The Faerie Queeneand Le Morte Darthur”
William F. Hodapp, College of St Scholastica
“Among Longaevi: Spenser Reading Faerie”
Nickolas Haydock, University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez
“Squiring Chaucer: Canterbury (Faery) Tales in Books 3-4 ofThe Faerie Queen”
Session 3b -The Recreated Medieval: A Writers & Artists Exhibition (2)
Organizerand moderator: Carol Robinson
Kavita Mudan Finn, Independent Scholar
“Sirocco”
Shiloh Carroll, Independent Scholar
“Selected Readings from Over the Vestr Sea”
Sharon Emmerichs, University of Alaska
“Modernizing Medievalism: Subverting the Narrative in Beowulf”
1.45-3pm –1stKeynote Plenary
Moderator: Desmond Harding, Central Michigan University
Anne Marie D’Arcy
Trinity College Dublin
“Island of Saints and Sages Revisited: Joyce, the Irish Middle Ages and the Post-Brexit Era.”
3.15-4.30pm –Two Concurrent Sessions
4a –Medievalism and Video Games, 1
Moderator: Kevin Moberly, Old Dominion University
John Plavcan, University of Arkansas
“Medieval Women in Videogames and the Reinforcement of Sexual Power Fantasies”
Marisa Mills, University of Southern Mississippi
“‘Erased from the Records of Time:’ Bayonettaand the Sexualized Middle Ages
Alicia McKenzie, Wilfrid Laurier University
“How (not) to design a progressive Viking: “desynchronized” morality in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla”
4b –Graphic Novels
Moderator: Karl Fugelso
Karl Fugelso, Towson State University
“‘Messer Papero e il Ghibbelin Fuggiasco’: Cultural Constraints on (Neo)medievalism's Adaptability.”
Elizabeth Herbst Buzay, University of Connecticut
“Feminist Knights, Questions of Power, and Utopian Societies: Medievalism Today in Cyril Pedrosa and Roxanne
Moreil’s L'âge d’or”
Alisa Schreibman, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Front Range Community College, and Harrisburg
University of Science and Technology
“Bats Don’t Do That: Knights, Superheroes, Heroes, and Purity in Gothic Gotham”
4.45-5.45 pm -ISSM Assembly
6-7.15pm -Entertainment
Daisy Black (storyteller)
Unruly Woman, an “indecorous assortment of medieval tales from around Europe about women who gain the upper hand –or, occasionally, the upper arse.”
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5
9 am-10.30 pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session 5a –Disease, Death and Rebellion
Moderator: Luiz Guerra, Independent scholar
M Jane Toswell, University of Western Ontario
“Pandemic Politics: Deploying the Plague”
Galit Noga-Banai, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“From the Holy Lance to Covid-19 Syringe: the cult of relics according to Benjamin Netanyahu”
Matthias D Berger, University of Bern
“Revolt: ‘Peasants’ and Protest in the Twenty-First Century”
Session 5b -Reshaping the Middle Ages in and through Asian Popular Culture, 1
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
and the Mutual Images Research Association
Organizerand moderator: Michael Torregrossa
Priyanka Das (student), Presidency University Kolkata
“Snakes and Ladders: The Serpent Allegory in Medieval Religious Art”
Priyanka Das (faculty), Presidency University, Kolkata
“There are no innocents, not anymore”:Holocaust and Medievalism in the Japanese anime Castlevania”
William Schrage, University of Groningen
“The Female King Arthur; The Moefication of Historical Characters in the Media Mix Called Fate”
10.45 am-12.15 pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session 6a –(MIs)using the Medieval Past
Moderator: Christina De Clerck-Szilagyi, Delta College
Adam Oberlin, Princeton University
“Storyworld Epistemologies and the Stratification of the Medieval(ish)”
Miriam Muller, Independent Scholar
“Blood and Soil, expressions of medievalism in contemporary far right movements”
Luiz Guerra, Federal University of Minas Gerais
“When the Abyss stares back: Methodological aspects, security and ethical considerations for studying medievalism and other -isms in the underweb of fringe groups and forums”
Ray Lacina, Delta College
“Democracy, Race and Language: Thomas Jefferson's Old English Grammar”
Session 6b -Medievalism in BroadcastMedia
Moderator: Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall University
Dena Arguelles, Drew University
“Will they ever get this body right? Tomoe Gozen and Jessica Jones after the fight.”
Meaghan Allen, University of Manchester
“Sacred Slayers: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Storyteller” and the Hagiographic Genre”
Rebecca Brackmann, Lincoln Memorial University
Failed Medievalism: My Favorite MurderEpisode 22 and the Limits of Medievalized “True Crime” Narratives
Valerie B. Johnson, University of Montevallo
“Broken Hearts and Unbroken Arrows: Historical and Fictional Women Archers”
12.30-1.45 -2ndKeynote Plenary
Moderator: Michael Evans, Delta College
Andrew Elliott
University of Lincoln
“Medievalism Today: The Limits of Interpretation.”
2-3.30 pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session 7a -Medievalism and Spaces
Moderator:Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
Elizabeth Allyn Woock, Palacký University
“Medievalist Built Spaces in Sequential Art”
Keith Russo, Independent Scholar
“Mythical Histories: Medieval Total War: Thrones of Britannia”
Tommaso Zerbi, British School at Rome
“Neo-Medievalism (Studies): A Manifesto. Architectural/Art History and the Study of Medievalism”
Session 7b -Performing and (Re)imaging Medieval England
Moderator: Amy French, Delta College
Laura Dull, Delta College
“The Woodvilles, the White Queen, & What’s Missing”
Rowan Wilson, University of Oxford, St Hilda's College
“Corporeal Medievalisms: The Reburial of Richard III”
Lorraine Stock, University of Houston
“Robin Hood, Women in Tights:Burlesque Medievalism on the Gilded Age American Stage”
3.45pm -5.15pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session 8a -Henry II and Thomas Becket: Identity, Popular Representation, and Political Medievalism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Organizer: Esther Cuenca
Moderator: Jason Thames, Harvard University
Lucy C Barnhouse, Arkansas State University
“Sex, politics, religion: Teaching challenging medievalisms with Becketand The Lion in Winter”
Christine Caccipuoti, Footnoting History
“From The Lion in Winterto Empire: Medieval history and pop culture interpretations of the family of Henry II of England”
Esther Liberman Cuenca, University of Houston-Victoria
“‘Normans’ vs. ‘Saxons’: The Angevins, Becket, and Imagining Race in Medieval Cinema”
Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge, Woodward Academy/ Footnoting History
“Convocation and religious freedom in late medieval England”
Session 8b -Disability, Ablism and Medievalism
Organizer: Carol Robinson
Moderator: Lesley Coote, Independent Scholar
Lauryn S. Mayer, Washington & Jefferson College
“Other Worlds: Medievalist Novels and the use of Disability”
Pamela Clements, Siena College
“Falconry as Remedy: Helen Macdonald, T. H. White, Depression, Obsession, and Goshawks”
Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall University
& Carol Robinson, Kent State University -Trumbull
“Ragnarok & Mental Health: The Legend Continues in a Norway High School”
5.30-7 pm –Two concurrent sessions: Australian-friendlytime
Session 9a -Racism,Nationalism, and Medievalism
Moderator: Jesse Swan, Northern Iowa University
Helen Young, Deakin University
“Far-right Medievalist Fictions”
Louise d'Arcens, Macquarie University
“Medievalism and Transnational Mobility in Matthias Enard’s Street of Thieves”
VanessaIacocca, Purdue University
“James Macpherson’s Ossianand a Tradition of Invention: Modelling a New Means of Nationalist-Political Dialogue”
Sarah Ifft Decker, Rhodes College
“Invisible Jews and Jewish Monsters: Jews and Jewishness in Medieval-Inspired Films”
Session 9b -Alternative Medievalisms: Beyond Conservatism and Progress, I
Organizer: Luiz Guerra
Luiz Guerra, Federal University of Minas Gerais
“Beyond Bolsonaro: the 'other' Middle Ages of Brazilian politics”
Carol Robinson, Kent State University-Trumbull
“Chivalry and Cinematic Propaganda”
Sabina Rahman, Macquarie University
“Robbie Hood: Indigeneity, Medievalism, and Australian Identity”
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6
9-10.30am –Two concurrent sessions
Session 10a -Alternative Medievalisms: Beyond Conservatism and Progress, 2
Organizer: Luiz Guerra
PriyankaDas (student), Presidency University, Kolkata
“The God-like Politician: Narendra Modi and the Central Vista Redevelopment Project”
Karl Christian Alvestad, University of South-Eastern Norway
“Is the Queer really Queer?”
Brian Egede-Pedersen, Nykøbing Katedralskole
Cosmopolitan and Multicultural Templars –and Sweden. Appropriating History in Jan Guillou’s Crusades-trilogy
Usha Vishnuvajjala, Cardiff University
Embodied Experience and Women’s Communities of Resistance
Session 10b -Taiwanese roundtable -Borderlands and Berserkers: Understanding Western Culture in Taiwan
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Organizerand moderator: Carolyn F. Scott, National Cheng Kung University
Lo-Yi Zoe Wu;Wen-Chi Stella Chang; Wen-Tien Luthien Chuang;Shan-Yo Jo-Ann Fang,Students at National Cheng
Kung University
10.45 am-12 pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session 11a -Afterlives of Medieval English literature
Moderator: Jesse Swan, University of Northern Iowa
Emily M Harless, University of Manchester
“Confessing the “Desire to Exist”: The Confessional “Self” as Medievalism in Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe”
Hannah Piercy, University of Bern
“The afterlives of medieval(ist) misogyny: Tracing the Pelleas and Ettarde story from the thirteenth to the twentieth century”
Spenser Santos, Independent Scholar (PhD, University of Iowa)
“Feminist Translations of Beowulf: Headley, Purvis, and Grendel’s Mother”
Sessions11b –Medievalism in Young Adult Fiction
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Appalachian State University
& Olga Trokhimenko, University of North Carolina Wilmington
“’I Show Not Your Face, but Your Heart’s Desire’: Medievalism, Fakelore, and the Commodification of Story-Telling
in the Afterlives of Harry Potter”
Anna Czarnowus, University of Silesia
“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Maurice Gee’s The O Trilogy”
Christina Francis, Bloomsburg University
“Confronting Our Past: Black Girl Magic and Tracey Deonn’s Legendborn”
12.15-1.30 pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session12a -Mud, Blood... and Medicine?: Modern Medical Medievalisms 1. Doctors, Disease, and the Imagined Medieval
Organizers: Winston Black and Lucy Barnhouse
Moderator: Lucy Barnhouse
Winston Black, St. Francis Xavier University
“Avicenna, Prince of Physicians, and Modern Political Medievalism”
Claire Burridge, University of Sheffield
“Early Medieval Surgery: Challenging Popular Stereotypes with Archaeological Evidence”
Courtney Krolikoski, McGill University
“What am I, a Leper in This Town?’: Challenging and Correcting Representations of the Medieval Leper in Modern Media”
Session 12b –Medievalism and Video Games, 2
Moderator: Juan Manuel Rubio, Central European University
Evan Moore, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
“Physical Properties and Scientific Methodologies: Alchemy inThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrimas a Fantasy Representation of Medieval Science”
Clint Morrison, Ohio State University
“Allegory in the Periphery: Medievalism inDeath Stranding(2019)”
Nils Lommerde, Radboud University
“’Holding out for a Hero’: Empathy and Knightly Expectations in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild(2017)’s
Narrative”
1.45-3pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session13a -Mud, Blood... and Medicine?: Modern Medical Medievalisms 2. Women’s Medicine Medieval and Modern
Organizers: Winston Black and Lucy Barnhouse
Moderator: Winston Black
Minji Lee, Montclair State University
“How to Treat the Woman’s Cold and Porous Body: Mugwort Fumigation for Fertility in Medieval and Modern Folk
Medicine of the Western and Asian Cultures”
Margaret Ng, College of Wooster
“The Art of Giving Birth in China”
Candace Robb, Independent Scholar and author of the Owen Archer mysteries
“Wise Woman,Bonne Femme,Midwife: the Skilled Healer in the Middle Ages”
Session 13b -Reshaping the Middle Ages in and through Asian Popular Culture, 2
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture and the Mutual Images Research Association
Organizer and moderator: Michael Torregrossa
Matthew S. Dentice, University of Nevada
“Reading Malory by Moonlight: The Arthurian Theme in Sailor Moon”
Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent scholar
“A Review of Scholarship on Asian Medievalisms”
Maxime Danesin, Independent scholar
“Monster Girls in the Neomedieval Mangaesque Imagination: Between Melusinian Tales and Interspecies Eroticism”
3.15-4.30pm –Two concurrent sessions
Session14a -Arthuriana
Moderator: Michael Evans, Delta College
Samantha Lehman, Memorial University of Newfoundland
“Mama told me she loved me, I'm thinking this isn't real: The Ramifications of Intergenerational Trauma and Grief
in Arthurian Adaptations”
Rachael Warmington, Seton Hall University
“Monsters, Superheroes and Knights: Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations of Arthurian Legend”
Carl B. Sell, Lock Haven University
“The Once and Playable King: The Arthur of Contemporary Roleplaying Games”
Session14b -A Video Game Workshop: The UNICORN Museum
Organizer: Carol Robinson
Moderators: Carol Robinson and Lauryn Mayer
Carol Robinson, Kent State University –Trumbull
Lauryn Mayer, Washington and Jefferson College
4.40-6 pm –ISSM Business Meeting
6.30-7.45pm –3rdKeynote Plenary
Moderator: Richard Utz, Georgia Tech
Minsoo Kang
University of Missouri –St. Louis
“East Asian Medievalism?: The Case of Hong Gildong, the Korean Robin Hood.”