Faculty Highlights

Charles Brittain (Classics) has recently published his new translation of Cicero's Academica, Cicero: On Academic Scepticism (Hackett 2006).

Wayles Browne (Linguistics) has completed a scholarly translation (with Theresa Alt) of a Croatian book: Milan Šufflay, The Serbs and the Albanians (Their symbiosis in the Middle Ages), Alerion Ltd., forthcoming. Their English translation of A. Durman, ed., 100 Archeological Sites in Croatia, will be published about September 2007 by Leksikografski Zavod, Zagreb, Croatia.

Alice Colby-Hall (Romance Studies, emerita) has an article and CD with readings from the Song of Roland, entitled "Teaching the Song of Roland as Oral Poetry: Phonetics and Metrics," scheduled to appear in Approaches to Teaching the Song of Roland, published by the Modern Language Association of America. Her current research project is a book on William of Orange and the epic legends of the Lower Rhone Valley.

Oren Falk (History) was awarded a Faculty Fellowship on "Culture and Conflict" at the Society for Humanities for 2005/06. His article "Beowulf's Longest Day: The Amphibious Hero in his Element (Beowulf, ll. 1495b-96)," will be published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. An ongoing research project, "Duelling by the Numbers: A Fresh Look at Saga Statistics," has produced a lecture and is anticipated to produce a publishable paper and a publicly usable database. Current grad student Nicole Marafioti has been working as a research assistant on this project.

Andrew Galloway (English) was Director of Medieval Studies in Paul Hyams' absence this year. He contributed a chapter on “Middle English Prologues” to a book co-edited by Cornell alumnus, David Johnson (PhD English, 1992), and Elaine Treharne, Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 288-305. He also published The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume One: C Prologue-Passus 4; B Prologue-Passus 4; A Prologue-Passus 4 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Andy also received the Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Award for Excellence in Advising for 2005.

Arthur Groos (German Studies) was elected Fowler Hamilton Senior Research Fellow, Christ Church, Oxford for 2007. His book, Topographies of the Early Modern City, which he co-edited with Markus Stock, will be published by Göttingen in 2006/07.

Wayne Harbert (Linguistics) received the Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award this year. He also organized a Cornell Conference on Language and Poverty (October 14-16, 2005), for which he received an NSF grant; he is now editing a volume on the topic. His book, The Germanic Languages, has been accepted by Cambridge University Press.

Tom Hill (English) contributed a chapter, “Wise Words: Old English Sapiential Poetry,” to Readings in Medieval Texts Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, edited by David Johnson (PhD English, 1992) and Elaine Treharne (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 166-82. He also co-wrote an article with Susan E. Deskis (BA, Cornell) entitled "The longe man ys seld wys": Proverbial Characterization and Langland's Long Will," Yearbook of Langland Studies, 18(2004), 73-79.

TJ Hinrichs (History) received a Faculty Fellowship in the Cornell Society for the Humanities (2009-2010).  Her article “Governance through Medical Texts and the Role of Print,” was accepted for publication in the volume, Transmission and Transformation of Knowledge in China, Tenth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill, forthcoming).  Current projects include a monograph, Shamans, Contagion, and Witchcraft: Medicine and the Transforming of Governance and Southern Customs in Song China (960-1279 c.e.), and a volume co-edited with Linda Barnes, Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press).

Cary Howie (Romance Studies) has contributed an essay entitled "Rude Theory: The Rough Trade of the Fabliaux," to Comic Provocations edited by Holly A. Crocker (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). His article "As the Saint Turns: Hagiography at the Threshold of the Visible" appeared in Exemplaria (Fall 2005).

Paul Hyams, Director (History) was on leave in 2005/06. He had a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in Fall 2005 and a Visiting Professorship at the École des chartes, Paris, in Winter 2006. See Reflections for details.

Jim John (History, emeritus) will spend fall 2006 at Yale University, where he has been asked to be the first Visiting Professor of Medieval Latin Paleography. He will also be studying some manuscripts that are located in Yale's Beinecke Library.

Carol Kaske (English, emerita) has published a glossed student edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Book One with an Introduction and notes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006). She has recently published two essays: “The Curse-Psalms in Their Patristic, Renaissance, and Modern Reception,” in a special issue -- entitled Literary Approaches to the Bible, Old and New, ed. R. Clifton Spargo and Alan Velie -- of Genre 40.3-4 (2007) 129-142; and  a chapter, “Edmund Spenser,” in The Blackwell Companion to The Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 197-210. Her current long-term project is co-editing Of Apothecarie Drugs -- a book by the Elizabethan and Jacobean astrologer and physician Simon Forman.

Marilyn Migiel (Romance Studies) is currently serving a three-year term as President of the American Boccaccio Association. Her most recent publication, "Wanted: Translators of the Decameron's Moral and Ethical Complexities," appeared in Heliotropia 6 (2009) and can be accessed at < http://www.heliotropia.org/>.

Simone Pinet (Romance Studies) received two research grants this year -- one from the Institute for European Studies (2006) and another from the Humanities Council (2005/06) -- which will enable her to pursue research on the 13th-century Libro de Alexandre on three main subjects: cartography, translation as mester, and political economy. In September 2005 she delivered a lecture entitled "El valor de las palabras: economía política del Libro de Alexandre" at the Asociación Hispánica de Literatura medieval in León, Spain. Simone also won the John K. Walsh Award for the best article published in La Corónica in 2005: "Para leer el espacio en el Poema de Mio Cid: breviario teórico," Vol. 33.2 (Spring 2005): 195-208.

David Powers (Near Eastern Studies) has co-edited, with M. Khalid Masud and Ruud Peters, Dispensing Justice in Muslim Courts: Qadis, Procedures, and Judgments (E.J. Brill, 2006). He also contributed the following entries for the Encyclopedia of Medieval Islamic Civilization: Inheritance, Judges, Wakf. His most recent publication is Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (2009).

Masha Raskolnikov (English) has recently been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, and is currently on sabbatical, having been honored with an Appel Fellowship (which grants a year's leave). Her new book, Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, has just come out, as the first volume in the series Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture edited by Ethan Knapp (Ohio State University Press, July 2009). In addition, she has an article, "Transgendering Pride" forthcoming in the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and has given several talks around the country. When she returns from sabbatical, she will serve as the Interim Director of the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Program at Cornell.

Cynthia Robinson (Art History). Cynthia's third monograph, Imag(in)ing Passions: Christ, the Virgin, Images and Devotion in a Multi-Confessional Castile, 14th-15th centuries A.D., is under contract with the Pennsylvania State University Press, and will appear in late 2011. She has published numerous articles in peer-review journals, including Gesta, Medieval Encounters, Muqarnas and Reales Sitios, as well as essays in several edited collections. She delivered the prestigious 3rd Annual Harvey Stahl Memorial Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis on 20 September 2009 and at the University of Illinois at Chicago on 1 October 2009. The lecture was titled, "Opening Up the Alhambra: Comparative Considerations of a 'Unique' Nasrid Monument in the Context of Court Life," and contains the seeds of a fourth book project, for which she will be engaged in research over the next several years.

William Sayers (Comparative Literature; Olin Library) continued his guerilla campaign against the OED with several notes on English etymologies (bastard, dog, gun, mackerel, penguin).  Also appearing were articles on Welsh Cei and the Unferth of Beowulf, on avian attributes of Merlin and Tristan, on the trebuchet in Villard de Honnecourt and in French and English lexis, and on Snorri Sturluson's list of troll-wives.  Caló/Romani origins were proposed for Spanish flamenco and gringo, and several studies were devoted to the treatise on the French vocabulary (with Middle English glosses) for estate management by the Essex knight Walter of Bibbesworth.

Savely Senderovich (Russian Literature). Recently publications include “Toward the History of the East Slavic Name Vladimir” (in Russ.: “K istorii vostochnoslavianskogo imeni Vladimir”) // Slavianovedenie (Moscow), 2007, no. 2, pp. 9-16; and “Historical Speculation in the Russian Primary Chronicle: A Possibility of Reconstruction” (in Russ.: “Istoricheskoe umozrenie…” // Drevniaia Rus’ 3 [2008], 63-65). (Abstracts of this conference were dedicated to the 100th anniversary of A. A. Shakhmatov's studies of the Russian Primary Chronicle.) His current project is The Origin of Russian Historiography, a series of essays dedicated to the first reconstruction of the frame of mind of the founders of Russian chronicle writing and of their surroundings in the 11th century.

Shawkat Toorawa (Near Eastern Studies) received Cornell's James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony (2006), and has received a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2006-09). His essay "Defining Adab by (re)defining the Adib: Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and storytelling" recently appeared in On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, edited by Philip Kennedy (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 285-306.

Samantha Zacher (English) published her monograph Preaching the Converted: the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies, Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 1 (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She also organized and hosted a conference at Cornell in October of 2008 on the subject of "New Views on Jews in Anglo-Saxon England." Her research on the representation of Jews in Anglo-Saxon texts is likewise the subject of a recent article entitled "The Chosen Peoples: Religious Identities," forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Medieval English Literature, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford University Press, 2010). Samantha also recently received the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists.