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I was incredibly grateful to KP Pilley at the Thouron Award and LaRahia Smith at UH for writing pieces about my work.

You can read them here and here.

Michelle Warren’s Holy Digital Grail is a fascinating book about the long history of a medieval manuscript, from its creation to its place as a digitized object on the internet. I frequently use digitized manuscripts in my research and teaching, but it was only when reading Warren’s book that I stopped to think more about the infrastructures that sustain them. Often, freely accessible internet content is represented as unambiguously positive, but as Warren shows, it comes with great costs attached, particularly in terms of capital and environmental impact. The book changed the way I think about my research and my teaching, and I’m grateful I got the opportunity to review it for Modern Language Quarterly:

Like manuscripts themselves, digitization is the product of political and social history. Warren shows that when we encounter MS 80, our meeting is conditioned by infrastructures that enable our engagement—technologies supporting the website, the history of those technologies, and the funding that enabled their development, for instance—but also by the longer history of text technologies that have led to the manuscript’s survival and virtual reproduction. Thus the story of MS 80 encompasses the social and political conditions that created the tech boom in Silicon Valley, the ecological cost of the servers that host the Parker Library on the Web, the Reformation history that created Cor- pus Christi College’s Parker Library, and the mercantilism and nascent cultures of European colonialism and imperialism encoded in the manuscript from its origin. One manuscript may seem a small target for a monograph, but as the list above makes clear, Holy Digital Grail’s true focus is the deep history mediating our engagement with material objects. The study is a transformative account of contemporary manuscript research that illuminates the long-obscured institutional and infrastructural histories that drive medievalist scholarship.

You can read the review here.

In April 2024, Manchester University Press published Literatures of the Hundred Years War, a volume of twelve essays I co-edited with my friend and colleague R.D. Perry (University of Tennessee-Knoxville). Editing the book during the course of the pandemic certainly had its challenges, but we’re immensely grateful to Manchester University Press and to our contributors for their support.

Here is the table of contents:

Preface – Ardis Butterfield

Introduction: Literatures of the Hundred Years War – Daniel Davies and R.D. Perry

1. Infinite Tragedy and the Hundred Years War – Andrew Galloway
2. Forms Against War: the pastourelle and the Hundred Years War – Elizaveta Strakhov
3. Prophecies of Alliance and Enmity: England, Scotland and France in the late Middle Ages – Daniel Davies
4. Italy, poetry and the Hundred Years War – David Wallace
5. Merchandising Peace – Lynn Staley
6. Mobility and Migration: Calais and the Welsh Imagination in the late Middle Ages – Helen Fulton
7. The shared wound: Crusade and the origins of the Hundred Years War in the writings of Philippe de Mézières – Stefan Vander Elst
8. Mirrors of war: chronicle narratives, class conflict and regiminal ideology between France and England, c. 1330-1415 – Matthew Giancarlo
9. Dreaming the (un)divided nation: Alain Chartier’s allegorical oneiropolitics – Lucas Wood
10. War, tears and corporeal response in Christine de Pizan – Alani Hicks-Bartlett
11. Visionary women, the Papal Schism and the Hundred Years War: Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena in medieval England – Jennifer N. Brown
12. Between men: French books and male readers in fifteenth-century England – J.R. Mattison

Instead of an extract, here is the acknowledgements, the most important part of the book:

“Emily Steiner first suggested we put together a volume on the Hundred Years War at ‘Method and the Middle English Text’ held in Charlottesville, Virginia on 8–9 April 2016. We are grateful for her inspiration: this book would not exist without her. We would like to thank Marina Bilbija, Taylor Cowdery, H. M. Cushman, Sonja Drimmer, Ruth Evans, Walt Hunter, Sierra Lomuto, Jonathan Morton, Vince Sherry, Zachary E. Stone, Spencer Strub, Lindsay Turner, Sunny C. Yang and all those who supported this project through advice, feedback and encouragement. Audiences at the Medieval Academy of America (2018) and International Congress on Medieval Studies (2019) helped hone several of the chapters. The volume is available free of charge through Open Access thanks to the support of the Colgate University Research Council, Andrew Galloway, the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol, the University of Denver’s Open Access Publication Equity Fund and the University of Houston’s CLASS Book Completion Fund and Small Grants Program. The University of Houston provided further support through the Martha Gano Houstoun Research Grant in Literary Criticism. At Manchester University Press we are grateful to Meredith Carroll for advocacy, patience and support, especially through the ­ COVID-19 pandemic, and to Laura Swift, Juanita Bullough, Ideas on Fire, Karen Nash, and everyone involved in the production process for their expertise and assistance. Likewise, we are grateful to Anke Bernau, David Matthews and the volume’s anonymous readers, at the proposal and manuscript stage, who helped clarify the volume’s focus. Above all, we want to thank our contributors for their ­ generosity and commitment.”

You can access the book free of charge here.

I am organizing a series of panels for the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium centered on ‘Archives/Archival Lives’. Here is the call for proposals:

Archival research has always been a cornerstone of medieval studies, but recent work has  reinvigorated the field by transforming our understanding of the lives of late-medieval authors  and people alike. The discovery of new evidence in the case of Cecily Chaumpaigne and  Geoffrey Chaucer, contentious debates around identifying “Chaucer’s Scribe” Adam Pinkhurst  and recovery of figures such as Eleanor Rykener and the rebels of 1381 all demonstrate how  archival research enriches our understanding of the medieval past. This thread invites  contributions that foster new understandings of lives in the archives and bring a theoretical eye to  the practice of archival research itself. Proposals might address new microhistories of medieval  figures; the need for what Saidiya Hartman names “critical fabulation” to address archival  silences and erasures; the colonial and imperialist history of institutions such as the National Archives; the archival lives of poets such as Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate; medieval  manuscripts as technologies of the archive; the limits of empirical history as an analytic for  literary history; and theorizations of archival “discovery” as a colonial epistemology.

This thread will consist of a series of panels. You can choose to submit a paper or a pre-organized panel. Each panel will have a faculty respondent. 

SUBMIT A PAPER ABSTRACT (DUE NOV 1): 

Proposals for papers can touch upon any aspect of the general theme, and we encourage proposals from medievalists of any discipline and any geographic area. Scholars can apply to the general call, or to specific sub-themes. We accept proposals from anyone with a Ph.D. or who is in the process of gaining a doctorate. Abstracts should be submitted by November 1, 2023.

PROPOSE A PANEL (DUE NOV 1): 

We also invite participants to submit whole panels of papers, that is, a pre-organized panel. Professional organizations often submit panels from among their membership, but individual are also invited to do the same. To submit a full panel, you need to send a description of the panel, a CV and abstract for the papers you would like to include, and suggestions for possible respondents. Panel proposals are due November 1, 2023.

More information here: https://new.sewanee.edu/academics/medieval-colloquium/2024-conference-info/conference-sub-themes/archival-lives-lives-in-the-archives/

In Fall 2022 I taught my first graduate seminar at UH on medieval poetics. I’m grateful to Kimberley Philley for writing up a short piece about the class and our end of semester colloquium for Forward, our department’s newsletter.

I was apprehensive about teaching my first graduate class, especially knowing that most of the students wouldn’t be medievalists (or have much interest in medieval literature at all) but it was an incredible experience. During the semester, I sought to combine deep scholarly engagement with demystifying the profession.

All too often we’re expected to simply know how things work in academia. Often we talk about ‘professional development’ to address this imbalance, but demystification is a more useful way of thinking about how we move beyond the hidden curriculum to enable students to find their way through the academy. 

Through the seminar, students put together syllabi for class sessions, wrote book reviews (and some got published!) and produced new critical and creative work. 

The culmination of the class was our colloquium, where students presented new poetry, prose, and critical work. I was blown away by the level of the work they presented, and I am so excited to see how it develops.

Read more here.

For Full Stop I reviewed Violaine Schwartz’s fascinating portrait of the French asylum system Papers (trans. Christine Gutman):

Displacement is a global phenomenon that demands to be understood in an expansive framework: Transnational crises do not have national solutions. The translation of Papers contributes to this project by shedding light on the human experience of the French asylum system. But perhaps thinking in such macro terms simply reproduces the logics of bureaucracy that Papers reveals. What the book offers instead is testimony to the importance of fostering hospitality, cultivating welcome, and creating spaces of refuge. Yet this, too, is insufficient. “It’s a drop in the ocean,” the speaker hosting Issa in their spare room says. “And there’s something unfair and arbitrary about it too.”

You can read more here.

For The Millions, I reviewed Danish writer Dorthe Nors’ fascinating ‘A Line the World’:

What begins with Nors’s desire to escape the city becomes a meditative portrait of identity—personal, regional, national—in its making. Growing up the child of a carpenter and hairdresser in the post-industrial town of Herning, Nors followed the path of ambitious Danes from the provinces by heading east, first to study Swedish literature at the University of Aarhus before continuing on to join the Copenhagen literati. But, as A Line in the World describes, Nors felt confined by city living and longed for the region that shaped her. Lying on her apartment floor one day, Nors realizes she must change her life: “I want a storm surge, I thought. I want a north-west wind, fierce and hard. I want trees so battered and beaten they’re crawling over the ground.” But most of all, a “horizon is what I want, and I want solitude.” And so she returns West.

Read more here.

I wrote a review of Katherine H. Terrell’s Scripting the Nation (Ohio State University Press, 2021), now published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer:

The value of this book for Chaucerians and scholars of late medieval literature lies in the way it conjoins the two major traditions of Scottish literature: monumental Latin histories and vernacular court poetry. In so doing, the book models a synthetic form of literary history that combines historiography and poetry, alive to the literary techniques, rhetoric, and style of both kinds of writing. While Terrell’s book rests on the specific connections between Scottish historic and poetic writing, it exemplifies a methodology that would benefit any scholar interested in questions of nation, literary tradition, and how late medieval writers sought to inter­ vene in the political crises of their day. While Scotland is a notable absence within Chaucer’s geographic imagination (mentioned only once by name, in The Man of Law’s Tale), it was a key site for contesting conceptions of national identity, crafting visions of national historiography, and promot­ ing the role of vernacular poetry in the life of the polity that resonate across the late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period.

You can access it here.