Medieval Academy of America Webinar: Medieval Crip Theory

On April 12, I will join Richard H. Godden and Tory V. Pearman for a panel discussion on “Medieval Crip Theory: New Approaches and Provocations,” hosted by the Medieval Academy of America’s Inclusivity and Diversity Committee.

Details on the webinar are available here: Link to MAA webinar details.

For accessibility purposes, copies of my talk and slides are available here through April 13:

MAA Webinar Talk

MAA Webinar Slides

Mississippi Humanities Council Teacher of the Year Lecture

On Thursday, March 9, 2023, I will present a talk titled “Disability and the Medieval Apocalypse: Body and Soul” at USM.

For more background on this talk and the teaching award that occasions it, please see: https://www.usm.edu/news/2023/release/mhc-teacher-year.php

You can find access copies of my talk’s text and slides (available through 3/9) here:

MHC Lecture

MHC Slides

MLA 2023

I am presenting two papers at the Modern Languages Association in January 2023. Access copies of the text and my slides are available here (through January 10):

“Decay and Doomsday: The Disabled Corpse in Soul and Body” (Thursday, 5 January, 5:15-6:30 pm in Moscone West 3003)

Paper

Slides

“Disability and Distant Lands in the Beowulf Manuscript” (Saturday, 7 January, 12-1:15 pm, Virtual)

Paper

Slides

MAA 2022: Cynewulf's Wounds

At the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) Annual Convention 2022 I am giving a talk titled “Cynewulf’s Wounds: Disability and Eschatological Anxiety.” This paper is based on a chapter from my book project.

Session: “Medieval Medicine and Marvel,” Friday, March 11 at 8:30 am Eastern time. (I will be presenting remotely.)

Access copy of my paper is available here through March 15.

And my slides are available here.

ICMS Kalamazoo 2021

Access copies of my papers for the International Congress on Medieval Studies 2021 are available here through May 20, as well as the PowerPoint slide deck that covers both presentations.

Friday, May 14 at 3 pm Eastern time: “St Margaret and Natal Disability” Paper

Friday, May 14 at 7 pm Eastern time: “Sight and Salvation: Disability Metaphors in Early Medieval Eschatology” Paper

ICMS 2021 Slides (both papers)

Joining the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi!

The title pretty much says it all. In fall 2019, I will take up the position of Assistant Professor of English—specializing in early British literature, pre-1600—at the University of Southern Mississippi. My new colleagues are absolutely amazing and I could not be more excited to take this next step in my academic career!

The fancy/formal entrance to the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg campus.

The fancy/formal entrance to the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg campus.

CFP: 'More Fuss about the Body' Volume - deadline February 1!

Call for Proposals for an Edited Volume:

More Fuss about the Body:
New Medievalists’ Perspectives

Editors: Leah Pope Parker and Stephanie Grace-Petinos

In her 1995 essay “Why All the Fuss about the Body?: A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Caroline Walker Bynum presented a nuanced picture of embodiment in the past in order “to suggest that we in the present would do well to focus on a wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies.”* The same year saw the release of Bynum’s magisterial exploration of the body, identity, and medieval Christian eschatology in The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. Almost 25 years later, Bynum’s call for diversity with respect to histories of the body still inspires increasingly nuanced approaches to medieval embodiment.

London, British Library, “Harley Psalter” Harley MS 603, fol. 6v

London, British Library, “Harley Psalter” Harley MS 603, fol. 6v

We invite proposals for short essays of approximately 5,000 words for a volume of original research that seeks to revisit, expand, and update the ideas presented in Bynum’s seminal essay, while using it as a springboard for future investigations concerning the body, both medieval and modern. We seek essays that deal with personhood, identity, and the material body, updating histories of the body through areas of study that have grown in popularity since the mid-1990s, including disability studies, trans studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, animal studies, and the global Middle Ages, along with new developments in feminist and critical race theory. Possible essay topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Bodily integrity and the limits of the body, healing damage to the body, or bodies and borders (i.e. the treatment of bodies in immigration/incarceration);

  • Theologies of death and resurrection and rituals of burial and remembrance;

  • Bodies centered and marginalized—including discussion of recent movements such as #metoo and Black Lives Matter;

  • Gender expression and/through the body;

  • Normativity (cisheteronormativity, compulsory ablebodiedness, etc);

  • Flora and fauna, cyborgs and prosthesis;

  • Present-day concepts of embodiment and their medieval predecessors as presented in popular culture;

  • Comparative and cross-cultural concepts of the body; and/or

  • The body in queer/crip time.

The organizers of this panel are committed to including perspectives representative of the diversity of the field, and especially welcome proposals from “new” medievalists, that is in broad terms, those who have joined the field since 1995. In the spirit of Bynum’s invitation to consider “a wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies,” we welcome papers that offer critical reflections upon the field of medieval studies, and which represent diverse and innovative perspectives on medieval histories of the body and contemporary medievalisms.

Please send abstracts, accompanied by an author bio of no more than 200 words, to leahpopeparker@gmail.com by February 1, 2019.

NB: In order to achieve an accelerated production timeline, essay drafts will be due to the editors in August 2019.


*Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1–33, p. 8.

SSDMA CFP for ICMS Kalamazoo 2019

The Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages
Invites Proposals for the International Congress on Medieval Studies
May 9-12 2019, Kalamazoo, MI

[An individual with a bandaged leg with amputated foot on a small crutch, using a larger crutch with the opposing arm, and holding a sword in preparation to attack.]

[An individual with a bandaged leg with amputated foot on a small crutch, using a larger crutch with the opposing arm, and holding a sword in preparation to attack.]

Medieval Disability and Pedagogy (a roundtable)

Contributors will discuss the ways in which disability has informed approaches to instruction, how to unite disability pedagogy and scholarship, possible texts for inclusion in the classroom, and selected assignments and activities that involve the medieval disability perspective. Participants will share practical ideas for effective activities, assignments, and readings.

Intersections of Race and Disability in the Global Middle Ages (a session of papers)

In this session, contributors will offer papers that explore the intersections between race and disability in the Middle Ages. We particularly seek approaches that consider non-Western, inter-disciplinary perspectives.

Disability and Public Scholarship (a session of papers)

In this session, participants will discuss the responsibilities of medieval disability studies to engage in public scholarship, how we can share our own public scholarship, and the ways that we as medieval disability studies scholars can be more active in public scholarship in order to support the value of our research.

Please send 250-word abstracts along with completed Participant Information Form to Tory Pearman at pearmatv@miamioh.edu by September 15.

Because medieval disability studies should pursue inclusive and intersectional scholarship, the SSDMA is committed to including perspectives representative of the diversity of the field and to amplifying voices that are too often marginalized by systemic discrimination in academic employment, publishing, funding, and conference programming.

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UW-Madison English Department Teaching Awards

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I'm honored to be one of several TAs in the English Department to receive teaching awards this year! Along with Neil Simpkins, I was chosen as one of a dozen College of Letters & Science Teaching Fellows. In this role, Teaching Fellows design and lead the training for L&S TAs at UW-Madison each August. The English Department web site has the full list of English TAs who received awards here.

 
From left to right, some of the English Department TA Awardees: Thatcher Spero, Neil Simpkins (kneeling), Tori Thompson Peters, Scott Harman, Leah Parker, Annika Konrad, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, Addie Hopes, Jennie Seidewand, Lindsey Wells.

From left to right, some of the English Department TA Awardees: Thatcher Spero, Neil Simpkins (kneeling), Tori Thompson Peters, Scott Harman, Leah Parker, Annika Konrad, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, Addie Hopes, Jennie Seidewand, Lindsey Wells.