Saturday, November 10, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Departments of English and Foreign Languages
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Theresa Coletti is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory; Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theatre, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval England; and essays on medieval drama, Chaucer, Christine De Pizan, and contemporary representations of the Middle Ages.
Alexandra Cuffel teaches Medieval Islam, Pre-Modern Medicine, and Gender and the Divinity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam at Macalester College. Her research interests center on medieval interfaith relations and cultural exchanges, particularly in the realms of religious polemic, the history of medieval medicine and gender. Her latest work focuses on shared saints, festivals and pilgrimage to Palestine and Egypt among medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Patricia Dailey (Columbia University) specializes in medieval literature and culture (English, Dutch, French, and Italian) and critical theory, focusing on women's mystical texts, dream visions, Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, and medieval rhetoric. She has written on Hadewijch, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Hildegard von Bingen, Old English riddles, The Letter from Alexander to Aristotle, The Ruin, Beowulf, among others. Her articles appeared in New Medieval Literatures (vol 8, 2006) and Le Secret: Motif et Moteur de la Litterature; she is also a contributor to Routledge's Encyclopedia of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, and Cambridge's forthcoming Companion to Christian Mysticism, and the PMLA's special issue on Derrida. She is currently working on her manuscript Promised Bodies which focuses on temporality, embodiment, and inscription in medieval women's visionary texts and Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Dyan Elliott, John Evans Professor of History at Northwestern University, is a historian of western Europe in the Middle Ages. Her interests center on gender, spirituality, and sexuality and the way these three variables interact. She is especially intrigued by how the margins help to define the center of a given society. Elliott's publications include Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (1993); Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (1999); and Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (2004). Current projects include a study of the tangible consequences of medieval nuptial imagery and an examination of the crisis of authenticity resulting from Latin Christendom's encounter with the dualist Cathars.
Amy Hollywood (Harvard Divinity School) is a historian of Christian thought specializing in mysticism, with strong interests in feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her first book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), is a study of the body and gender in late medieval Christian mysticism. Her second book, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2001), deals with Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, and their fascination with excessive bodily and affective forms of Christian mysticism. Professor Hollywood is also the editor of the Gender, Theory, and Religions Series for Columbia University Press. She is currently writing about memory, mourning, and Christian mysticism.
Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England, as well as essays on gender, genre, cultural difference, and civic performance. She is currently at work on a new book about native saints and forms of community in late medieval and early modern England.