Alumni News and Updates

I've passed my fields exams and am happy to be working on my dissertation on Old Norse reception and contemporary queer youth literature in the Global North. I'm the editorial assistant at "The Medieval Globe," and have just taken on a new job at UIUC's Center for Children's Books "The Bulletin" (where the very first book I reviewed was called "Viking Strong"!). It's rewarding to be a medievalist working interdisciplinarily with gender and women's studies and alongside the library schools, and thinking collaboratively about youth spaces, queerness, and the Middle Ages.

I recently moved from teaching at the K-12 level to a corporate training position in the financial services industry. I teach my company's clients how to use the software they've purchased.

I did my M.A. in 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Berkhofer, and wrote an M.A. thesis: "The Diario of Polissena Pioppi: Nuns and Faction in Sixteenth-Century Modena" on women's networks, vendetta, and faction in early modern Italy. I expanded this research into looking at vendetta violence and family networks in Early Modern Italy more broadly and graduated from Emory University with a Ph.D. in Early Modern History in 2011. I was a Marion L. Brittain postdoctoral fellow in Writing and Communication at Georgia Tech from 2011-2014, a Research Scientist at the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech 2015-2018, and a lecturer at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Tech, from 2019-21. I am currently an Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and Director of Geospatial History at the Roy Rosenzwieg Center for History and New Media. Relevent to the work I began at the MI, I have published several articles on and have presented extensively on vendetta violence and recently completed my monograph, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (under consideration). I am the Co-PI of the collaborative digital spatial Humanities project, Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy. Some of my research has been funded by research grants from the American Historical Association and the Glady Krieble Delmas Foundation for Venetian Studies. I was the keynote speaker at the 2024 Violence and its Control in Early Modern Europe conference at York University. I have also written several articles on Assassin's Creed II. I miss Bilbo's breadsticks.

I defended my dissertation, "Give Her Some Space: Quest Maidens, Spatiality, and Mobility in Medieval Arthurian Literature" in April 2023 and received my PhD in English Literature, Theory, and Cultural Studies in May 2023 from Purdue University. In August 2023, I began working as a teaching professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH, where I will be teaching core and lower-level English courses in both literature and composition. This fall I'm not doing much medieval (apart from my own research), but I'm hoping to teach the Headley translation of Beowulf this spring!

I work with the medieval collections at the University of Pennsylvania! I've been here for ten years, after spending my first ten years working in digital humanities. Next year I'll be curating an exhibit on Moveable Manuscripts (the twist: all manuscripts are moveable) and I'm so excited to share that. In the meantime I have a weekly program called Coffee With A Codex, where I hop on Zoom and share 30 minute show-and tell about manuscripts from the Penn collections (https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/), and I have a weekly personal podcast, Inside My Favorite Manuscript, where I talk to people about the manuscripts they love the most (https://insidemyfavoritemanuscript.tumblr.com/). Curator, Digital Research Services, Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania

I completed an M.A. in Medieval Studies at the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in 2007 and am now the editor-in-chief of Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University. . I am a true interdisciplinarian and am interested in many things medieval, including but definitely not limited to: social history, particularly in post-Conquest England, manuscript studies, material culture and literature.

This is fellow alum Maggie Myers and I on the night we received our WMU M.A. degrees!

Camping trip! Including me, Eric Gobel-Lynch, Erin Gobel Lynch, Julie Polcrack, Matthew Hilferding, and Becky Straple-Sovers.