Jordan Amspacher (History)
Jordan Amspacher presented three papers during the 2017-18 academic year: “‘It’s all just a little bit of history repeating’: The Legacy of Troy in Gunther of Paris’ Hystoria Constantinopolitana,” at the Southeastern Medieval Association in Charleston, South Carolina (November 2017); “Sacro sacrilegio: Form, Function, and Phenomenological Funk in the Hystoria Constantinopolitana” at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium in Sewanee, Tennessee (April 2018); and “Peacocks in the Cloister: Anti-Hagiography in Gunther of Paris’ Hystoria Constantinopolitana” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 2018).
Caitlin Branum (English)
Caitlin Branum presented a paper, “The Marian Reflection: The Virgin as Contemplative Inspiration in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and the Speculum Devotorum” at the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in Atlanta, Georgia (March 2018).
Kyrie (Kiki) Miranda (MFLL-Spanish)
Kyrie Miranda accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor of French and Spanish at Francis Marion University, which she began in fall 2018. Since then, she has participated in the Southeastern Medieval Association’s annual conference where she presented her paper “Voyage and Community in ‘Le conte du graal’ and ‘Inferno.'” Her essay “Cultural Salvage at Sea: El Caleuche and Myths from Chiloé Island,” based on a paper that she presented at Oxford in 2015, was published through Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the anthology titled Underwater Worlds: Submerged Visions in Science and Culture. At Francis Marion University, she has been the creator and administer of the ‘French at FMU’ Facebook page, and she has planned and co-led two successful French Conversation Tables with her colleague in French, Professor Elizabeth Zahnd. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Medieval Animals in New World Texts” at UT, advised by Professor Millie Gimmel.
Kendra Slayton (English)
Kendra Slayton published an article, “Tied in ‘lusty leese’: Gender and Determinism in Troilus and Criseyde” in The Chaucer Review 54.1 (Jan. 2019). She is spending the 2018–2019 academic year as a UT Humanities Center Graduate Fellow, completing her dissertation on the intersection of gender, circumscription, and the common good in Chaucer’s works.
Jason Stubblefield (History)
Jason Stubblefield travelled to the Newberry Library in Chicago for archival research in June. He looked at psalter manuscripts as part of an ongoing project on the role of the Psalms and their glosses in the production of medieval monastic identity at Christ Church, Canterbury. Much of this research will culminate in a paper he will present at Kalamazoo’s International Congress on Medieval Studies in May 2019.
Klayton Tietjen (MFLL-French)
Klayton Tietjen presented a paper titled “Encounter with the Alien in Nithard’s Histories” at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo in May 2018. In June 2018, he received the Paul Barrette Fellowship and was accepted to the Semaines d’études médiévales, an international conference where PhD candidates and scholars from around the world participate in a two-week series of lectures, historic site visits, and medievalist trainings at the Université de Poitiers in France.