By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however,…[Read more]

While the evolution of spoken languages is well understood and has been studied using traditional historical comparative methods as well as newer computational phylogenetic methods, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages are poorly understood, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping sign…[Read more]

Although the ultimate theme of “The Seven Sleepers” can be located in its medieval Christian doctrine—the bodily resurrection is real, and therefore it is in the afterworld where one finally, really “lives,” with shining body and soul together—I would like to argue that, in the Old English version’s emphasis on the highly individualized emotion…[Read more]

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play “Homebody/Kabul” and the Old English “Ruin” poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just o…[Read more]

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

“Who were the Romans? Shifting Scripts of Romanness in Early Medieval Italy,” in Post-Roman Transitions. Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, eds. Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 14

“Foreign Saints at Home in Eighth- and Ninth-century Rome. The Patrocinia of Diaconiae, Xenodochia and Greek Monasteries,” in Cuius patrocinio tota gaudet regio. Saints’ Cults and the Dynamics of Regional Cohesion, eds. S. Kuzmová, A. Marinković and T. Vedriš

“Saints for All Christendom: Naturalizing the Alexandrian Saints Cyrus and John in Seventh- to Thirteenth-Century Rome.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 71 (2017): 337–366

This paper investigates the multiple impulses that contributed to the early medieval interest in Pope Damasus’s inscriptions. In part, Damasus’s verses were read as guides to Rome’s martyrial topography; in part, they served as models of a classicizing Christian style. Above all, the appeal of these verses derived from their association with…[Read more]

The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the world’s largest
and most prominent families, spoken by nearly 1.4 billion people.
Despite the importance of the Sino-Tibetan languages, their pre-history remains controversial, with ongoing debate about when
and where they originated. To shed light on this debate we
develop a database of c…[Read more]

“Why Remember Ratchis? Medieval Monastic Memory and the Lombard Past,” Archivio Storico Italiano 177.1 (2019): 3–57

The aim of this research, focusing on representations of light and the symbolism of early Christian lamp decorations, has been to examine and summarise the existing knowledge of the symbolism of light in the Mediterranean region and the models by which this symbolism was manifested in the early Christian visual culture. Lamps with Early Christian…[Read more]

Review of Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual Interpretation, by Nathan J. Ristuccia. The Medieval Review (TMR 18.11.01), 2018

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

On applying the language learning method “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) to the teaching of Western Armenian at a community weekend school.

On applying the language learning method “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) to the teaching of Western Armenian at a community weekend school.

Ambrósíus saga og Rósamunda is a post-medieval Icelandic romance which belongs to a group of Scandinavian narratives utilizing the pound of flesh motif. It survives in 19 paper manuscripts from the 18th and 19th centuries, and it has never before been edited. The aim of the present edition is of an introductory nature, primarily to make the sa…[Read more]