Alumni Highlights

(Please send notice of pertinent information to medievalst@cornell.edu)

The Spring 2007 issue of the Medieval Academy News listed several Cornellians who have recently received national fellowships to work on medieval projects:  Elizabeth Rowe, History, Independent Scholar, received an ACLS fellowship (2005/06) for "Annals and Sagas: The Historiography of Late Medieval Iceland."  Fiona Somerset, English Literature, Duke University, received a National Humanities Center fellowship (2006/07) for "Feeling like Saints: Lollard Affect and the Contestation of Holiness, 1370-1550."  And David S. Peterson, History, Washington & Lee University, received an NEH Fellowship (2007/08) for "Power and the Sacred in Renaissance Florence, 1375-1460." In addition, Karl F. Morrison has honored his teacher Theodor E. Mommsen with a remembrance in the newsletter.

A recent mailing to our alumni has elicited news from several of our former students (see also the Appointments of Graduates page). In the process of updating our alumni database, I have also found some interesting facts, which are shared below:

Niall Brady has edited (and contributed to) a book due out in 2007: On and Under Water: the Archaeology of Irish Lakes and Inland Waterways. He reports that Jimmy Schryver has been in Ireland this summer, excavating in Tulsk, Co. Roscommon, with six of his students from the University of Minnesota-Morris.

Asa Simon Mittman is currently Senior Lecturer at Arizona State University. He focuses on monstrosity and marginality in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, and Routledge published his Maps and Monsters in Medieval England in 2006. Asa is currently completing Inconceivable Beasts: The ‘Wonders of the East’ In the Beowulf Manuscript (ACMRS, 2007), in collaboration with Susan Kim. He is also working on Digital Mappaemundi: A Resource for the Study of Medieval Maps and Geographic Texts, in collaboration with Martin K. Foys of Hood College.

Several of our graduates have not gone directly into academic positions or have changed careers later on. Elisa Mangina is Assistant Organist at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Anglican Church in Toronto and gave a solo recital in spring 2007; she has two children. Mary-Louise Zanoni went to law school and now practices in St. Lawrence County, New York; she is also Executive Director of Farm for Life(TM), a nonprofit group supporting small-scale and sustainable farmers, and citizens who raise livestock and crops for their own food. Alice Sheppard, who left academia after getting tenure at Pennsylvania State University, is now a professional dancer (http://www.axisdance.org/index.php); and Janet Harris is a technical writer in New York City and coaches swimming.

Linda Tatelbaum has retired from the English Department at Colby College, and she and her husband built a solar-powered house on a back road in Maine. Their garden produces the family food supply. Linda’s first book, Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader’s History (About Time Press, 1997), describes how and why she lives this way. Her second book, Writer on the Rocks–Moving the Impossible (About Time, 2000), explores how physical labor can help us move metaphysical obstacles like writer’s block. Her third book is a novel, Yes & No: recipe for a young woman's coming of age (About Time Press, 2004). You can visit her home page at http://www.colby.edu/~ltatelb/ .

Nancy Spatz Lucid left academia and obtained a degree in horticulture; one of her most elaborate projects, a medieval garden, can be viewed at http://www.scu.edu/stclaregarden. Having changed careers again, Nancy is now a full-time analyst in marketing at Symmetricom, a leading supplier of timing and synchronization hardware for communications networks, in San Jose, California. Her husband Tom Lucid, a Cornell Economics graduate, is the senior technical trainer at an enterprise software company in Palo Alto. Nancy plans to see classmate Disa Gambera and husband Tom Stillinger this summer in Salt Lake City, where both teach in the English Department at the University of Utah.

Lizzie Macaulay Lewis (B.A. 2002) reports that she is now doing a DPhil in Classical Archaeology at Oxford (UK); her first edited book, Crossing Frontiers, will be coming out this year.

I'm delighted to report that several of our graduates are now chairs of their departments and programs. Wendy Chapman Peek is chair of the English Department of Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts (and she wonders if anyone else has seen Kelly Wickham-Crowley on the History Channel talking about Alfred the Great?); María Bullón-Fernández is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at Seattle University (she has also edited a collection of essays, England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary and Political Exchanges [New York: Palgrave, 2007], and recently published "Private Practices in Chaucer's Miller's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 [2006]: 141-74); Suzanne Hagedorn is an Associate Professor at The College of William & Mary and served as the Director of Medieval & Renaissance Studies in 2006/07; Bob Pasnau spent two years as chair of the Philosophy Department at Colorado University at Boulder (and when he returns from a year's sabbatical will be a full Professor); Patricia Black is chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at California State University at Chico; Penn Szitta continues as the Chair of English at Georgetown University; and Regina Psaki is Associate Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. Mary Wack, formerly chair of the English Department at Washington State University and Dean of the Honors College there, has recently been named to a newly created position, the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education.

Eleonore Stump currently holds a guest professorship at Wuhan University, China (2005-2008). Sachi Shimomura's book, Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature, was published in November 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan; in the fall, she will become the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Susanne Hafner has accepted a position in Medieval German Literature and Culture at Fordham University; she has also been awarded the Virginia Brown Fellowship in Palaeographical Studies at the Center for Palaeographical and Epigraphical Studies at Ohio State University (2008).

Jim Blythe, Dunavant Professor of History at the University of Memphis, is also a photographer. For samples, visit his webpage: http://www.artistlink.com/artists/Blythe/ArtistsLinkBlythe.htm.

Michael Twomey has been named the Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities at Ithaca College, and in April Brepols Publishers in Belgium published volume I of the Latin edition of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum, on which he's been working with a team based in Muenster, Germany. The citation is: Baudouin van den Abeele, Heinz Meyer, Michael W. Twomey, Bernd Roling, and R. James Long, eds., Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 1, De Diversis Artibus 78 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

Ross Leasure will have an essay in a forthcoming volume from Peter Lang Publishing (2008), Milton in France, entitled "Spenser's Diabolical Orator and Milton's Man of Hell" on the rhetorical affinities between the allegorical figure of Despayre (Faerie Queene I.9) and Belial (Paradise Lost II).

Robert Figueira, Professor of History at Lander University in Greenwood, SC, has edited Plenitude of Power: The Doctrines and Exercise of Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Robert Louis Benson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), which includes his essay “The Medieval Papal Legate and His Province: Geographical Limits of Jurisdiction”; and has co-edited the annual issue of The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association 2007, the fifth time he has done so.

Paul Schaffner, a librarian at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), is responsible for the production of full-text electronic versions of early English and American books (pre-1800). Daughter Rebecca has finished her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke, is working as a summer intern for Farrar Strauss & Giroux (New York), and will attend Queen's University, Belfast, in the fall for a term or two.

John Sebastian is back in New Orleans, after being displaced for a year and spending a semester each at Amherst and Georgetown, where he has been named the Deputy Director of the University Honors Program at Loyola. He is planning a trip to see friends Johanna Kramer, Marc Johnson, and baby Linus in Columbia, Missouri, where Johanna teaches in the English Department, and Marc is a researcher in the Department of Microbiology at the Medical School. Johanna has contributed to a festschrift honoring long-time Cornell Professor Tom Hill: "'Thu eart se weallstan': Architectural Metaphor and Christological Imagery in the Old English Christ I and the Book of Kells" in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honor of Thomas D. Hill, ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (University of Toronto Press, 2007).

Thomas Izbicki, who has been Research Services Librarian at Johns Hopkins, will assume a new position as the Humanities Librarian for Classics, Philosophy and Religion at Rutgers University on August 1. He also reports publication of a new book: Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), introduced & translated by Thomas M. Izbicki, Gerald Christianson, and Philip Krey (Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America Press, 2006).

William Hyland reports that he has been made the first Director of the new Center for Norbertine Studies at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. The Center's website is http://www.snc.edu/cns.

Bill Cook, currently holds the rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at SUNY Geneseo. He was the first to be awarded the CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching, given by the Medieval Academy of America (2003), and has recently been named the runner up for the 2006 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching; being runner up carried a prize of $15,000 plus $10,000 to SUNY Geneseo's History Department.

Andy Cain reports that he is an Assistant Professor, and director of undergraduate studies, in the Classics Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has authored eight articles and four book reviews, and his book, The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Exegesis, and the Making of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity, is under consideration at Oxford University Press. He is also co-editing two volumes of collected essays, one on Jerome and the other on religion in Late Antiquity, that are forthcoming with Ashgate Publishing. In the past two years he has co-organized two major international conferences, one on Jerome which took place last summer in Wales, and the other, the Seventh Biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity conference, which took place on the CU-Boulder campus this past spring. (He is also the father of two young children.)

Walter Stephens will be teaching a seminar at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, in Spring of 2008, “Writing and Wonder: Books, Memory, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe,” a topic that he says has been gestating (or fermenting!) since 1974 at Cornell and will ultimately produce a book, which "got its latest jolt when I was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, during Michaelmas and Hilary terms 2004-5, and should get another when I'm at Christ Church College, Oxford, in Trinity term 2009 as the Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow. For more about the seminar see http://www.folger.edu/institute.

Other publications by Cornell graduates include:

Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford University Press, 2007) by Jeremy Cohen.

“Thisbe Out of Context: Female Readers and the Findern Manuscript," in Chaucer Review, 2006, by Kara Doyle.

The Literal Sense and the Gospel of John in Late-Medieval Commentary and Literature, Volume 12 in Studies in Medieval History and Culture, by Mark Hazard (Routledge, 2002).

Illuminating Luke: The Infancy Narrative in Italian Renaissance Painting, by Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003).

Dutch Romances III: Five Interpolated Romances from the Lancelot Compilation, edited by David F. Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens (Boydell & Brewer, 2003). Dave and Claassens have also collaborated on Dutch Romances II: Ferguut (2000), and Dutch Romances I: Roman Van Walewein (2000).

Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature, by James H. Morey (University of Illinois Press, 2000).

The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). Fiona has also edited, with Andy Galloway and Kalpen Trivedi, The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Vol. 17 (Medieval Institute Publications, 2004); and Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, with Jill Havens and Derrick Pitard (Boydell & Brewer, 2003).

Liber Contra Wolfelmum, by Manegold of Lautenbach, translation with introduction and notes by Robert Ziomkowski (Peeters Publishers & Booksellers, 2002).