A New Hope

Hello. Remember me? It's been a while...

For various reasons, mostly delineated here, things have been quite silent here. The blog has therefore fallen into a sort of disrepair, tumbleweeds flying about, sand people getting more courageous, the empire ascendant, etc.

Anyway, it's time to strike back from our desert hideout.

This blog is back.


 On the model of the wonderful In the Middle, Modern Medieval is becoming a group blog. But a group blog on a theme. As you'll see in a minute, when I introduce the rest of our contributors, we're all at different stages of our careers and so our posts will deal with that fact. Our posts will reflect our particular, varied interests but offer thoughts on what it means to study this, that, or the other thing from where we each are. So, let's get to it. We'll be talking to you soon.

In alphabetical order, here are our contributors:

Matthew Gabriele is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He researches and teaches on crusading, memory, apocalypticism, Jews and Christians, and medievalism. See more at his homepage. He's also an elected Democratic Supervisor (District G) for Montgomery County, VA.

Richard Godden is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Tulane University.  His dissertation, “Fame’s Untimeliness,” explores the intersection of judgment and fame in fourteenth-century English literature, specifically how medieval writers use the concept of fame in order to mediate and represent the past.  His current work explores how the confrontation with the monstrous in medieval romance reveals troubling yet productive temporalities.

Brandon Hawk is currently a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut. I am writing my dissertation on the uses of apocrypha in Old English sermon collections, and am interested in a range of subjects including medieval literature, religious history, and intellectual receptions.

Scott Jenkins is a PhD student at the Swansea University (UK) with broad interests. His thesis relates to medieval student crime and is tied to themes of group identity, masculinity, law and order and societal norms.

Jennifer Lynn Jordan is a doctoral student of medieval history at SUNY Stony Brook.  Her research interests include  Medieval Italy, women and the family, women as cultural transmitters in medieval Europe, medieval apocalypticism, gender and eschatology, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and nineteenth-century medievalism, contemporary popular medievalism. She is also the co-author of the webcomic Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell (www.dcisgoingtohell.com).

Larry Swain is currently Chair of the English department at Bemidji State University, teaches Medieval and Renaissance Language and Literature, researches and publishes in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon studies, and is the editor of The Heroic Age.  In addition to Modern Medieval, Larry blogs at The Ruminate and operates The Heroic Age blog.