Wonderful change is coming to The Year's Work in Medievalism, our peer-reviewed open access journal providing codisciplinary communication for scholars interested in the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times:
It is my great pleasure to hand over editorship to a new team of leaders, Dr. Valerie Johnson and Dr. Renée Ward, who will expand on the foundations laid by earlier editors.
As some of you may remember, YWiM was originally conceived by the founder of Studies in Medievalism, Leslie J. Workman (1927-2001), as an outlet for the conference proceedings originating from the annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. In recent years, while still receiving a good number of its submissions based on papers presented at the annual conference and the sessions the Society sponsors at the medieval congresses in Kalamazoo and Leeds, the YWiM has welcomed submissions from everyone interested in disseminating their scholarship in Medievalism Studies.
Please know that Valerie and Renée will of course be putting their own stamp on our publication, but please also respect their need for a little time to get things moving.
My heartfelt "Gramercy" for their willingness to serve all of us, and the steadily growing community of those who work in medievalism studies. I look forward to their editorship with great expectation and joy.
About our new editors:
Valerie B. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at the University of Montevallo, the liberal arts campus of the University of Alabama system. Her research concerns the late medieval vernacular literature of the British Isles, with a particular focus on ecopolitical imagery. Recently she has begun to investigate the medieval Americas. In addition to her editorial service with The Year’s Work in Medievalism, she is a co-founder and co-managing editor of the open-access and peer-reviewed journal The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies. Recent publications include articles on medievalism and multimodality in first year composition classrooms, romance novels and the Robin Hood canon, and a volume (co-edited) of critical essays on the Robin Hood tradition.
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 emphases on monsters/monstrosity in medieval romance and outlaw literature. She has additional interests in modern medievalism, especially within children’s and young adult literature from the 19th century to present. Her current projects include a monograph study of werewolves in romance literature from the 12th to 14th centuries, and the recovery of works by the Victorian children’s writer Eleanora Louisa Hervey, including a collection of Arthurian tales and an adaptation of Beowulf. Renée has served as Associate Editor for The Year’s Work in Medievalism. She is also an editorial board member for Brill’s series Explorations in Medieval Culture, an executive board member for MEARCSTAPA (The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application).