Animating the Medieval Update (September 2016)

I am pleased to announce the slate for our upcoming session at next year's International Congress on Medieval Studies:

Animating the Medieval: Research on Animated Representations of the Middle Ages in Memory of Michael N. Salda

Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Organizer: Michael A. Torregrossa (Independent Scholar)

Presider: Jennie Friedrich (University of California, Riverside)

Paper #1: Reading, Writing, and Sorcery: Education in the Animated Middle Ages

Valentina S. Grub (University of St Andrews)

Valentina S. Grub is in the final year of her PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She graduated with a degree in Medieval & Renaissance Literature and Classical Civilization from Wellesley College, and earned her master's degree in Medieval Studies from St. Andrews. Her dissertation looks at the ritualization of medieval English embroidery between 1250-1350. Her research has been published in Allegorica, The Manuscript Hub, and Sequitur.

Paper #2: History and Stories: The Middle Ages in European Animated Cartoons

Marie-Anne Smith (Independent Scholar)

Marie-Anne Smith is now an independent scholar but worked for more than ten years as assistant curator in French and British museums and as lecturer at the Ecole du Louvre. She obtained a BA in History from the Sorbonne, Paris, an MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD in Art History from the Ecole du Louvre, Paris in 2004. Although her first works focused on the development of armament in the 15th and 16th century with the publication of Glossaire des termes militaires français du XVIème siècle and Swords and Saucepans: Arms and Armor in Parisian domestic interiors she also reached a wider audience by collaborating on productions such as Les Mots-Clés de la Renaissance and the children book Au Temps des Chevaliers. Convinced that entertainment media such as comic-books or video games can be an ideal link between scholars and the general public, she will show in her paper how animated cartoons, often dismissed as “childish,” have been regularly used in the transmission of historic knowledge.

Paper #3: Teaching the History of the English Language with Comics

Patrick J. Murphy (Miami University)

Patrick J. Murphy is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has taught medieval literature and the history of the English language since receiving his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. His research has appeared in the journals English Studies, Philological Quarterly, Modern Philology, English Literature in Transition, Review of English Studies, and Studies in Medievalism. His book Unriddling the Exeter Riddles was published in 2011 by Penn State University Press and a new monograph, Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.R. James, is forthcoming from the same press in May 2017. He has long had an interest in teaching with comics, and his latest project (just now underway) is to develop the "ink talks" he has been illustrating for a course on historical linguistics into a full-length work of graphic nonfiction: A Comics History of the English Language. The current proposed paper is a first attempt to share these materials with, and gain feedback from, an audience outside the classroom.