A description of how I employ video games and RPGs, especially open-world online games, to harness student curiosity and foster an interest in research-based assignments in literature and humanities courses. Talk was presented to a K-16 audience with emphasis on K-12 teaching, but assignments work well at 9-12 and undergraduate university levels.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

Exemplaria review essay by Sarah Elliott Novacich of recent books by Simon Gaunt, Jonathan Hsy, and Shirin Khanmohamadi on medieval contact zones.

This chapter details a credit-based orientation & information literacy course taught with local archival and special collections materials.

Digital scholarship, particularly with digital monographs, requires a great deal of work that traditional scholarship does not. The presenter has authored a digital monograph (published 2017) and written and co-written web texts on the methodologies of digital scholarship and critical making (both currently under review). While digital tools can…[Read more]

Digital scholarship, particularly with digital monographs, requires a great deal of work that traditional scholarship does not. The presenter has authored a digital monograph (published 2017) and written and co-written web texts on the methodologies of digital scholarship and critical making (both currently under review). While digital tools can…[Read more]

One of the most salient aspects of DH projects is that they are fun to create. DH scholars love to make amazing new tools that solve tangible problems. This makes teaching DH a joy: students work harder on DH assignments because the assignments demand and reward their attention. When work is fun, it doesn’t feel like work. Rather than being a…[Read more]

One of the most salient aspects of DH projects is that they are fun to create. DH scholars love to make amazing new tools that solve tangible problems. This makes teaching DH a joy: students work harder on DH assignments because the assignments demand and reward their attention. When work is fun, it doesn’t feel like work. Rather than being a…[Read more]

A course (MA level) I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, the research for which culminated in my book Freedom Readers (Notre Dame 2011).

This paper links the medieval and early modern production of parchment and paper with modern electronics manufacturing, in order to examine some of the occluded ecological and political dimensions of archival study.

This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simul…[Read more]

This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simul…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of
many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be
elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic
set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of
Roland fam…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

This paper deals with the complicated sociopolitical space defined by the use and transformation of what we call Occitan language. Literary and cultural production in Occitan language during the late 12th and early 13th centuries light up the boundary conditions, the boundary values of what we call courtly culture making them visible in all their…[Read more]