IMA Participants
Dr. S. Dorsey Armstrong is a Professor of English at Purdue University. Her research interests include medieval women writers, late-medieval print culture, and the Arthurian legend, on which she has published extensively in journals, essay collections, her own monographs as well as work with co-authors. She sits on the executive and advisory boards for numerous scholarly and academic entities, including TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship, and the International Arthurian Society, and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Arthuriana. She has won numerous awards for undergraduate teaching, and has written and taped several lecture series for The Teaching Company/The Great Courses.
Dr. Jessalynn Lea Bird is an Assistant Professor in the Humanistic Studies Department at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame and a Regional Fellow of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. She has written many articles on the reforming activities of Paris-educated masters and is currently writing a monograph on them for Oxford University Press. She has co-edited multiple volumes, including a sourcebook for the crusades and collections of essays on the crusades' impact in Europe, the Fourth Lateran Council, and Christian-Muslim relations. She is currently co-editing three volumes on the Marie of Oignies relics, the crusades and nature, and medieval futures (the proceedings of the last Illinois Medieval Association meeting). In her spare time, she serves on the Medieval Academy's K-12 Committee and develops sources in translation and teaching materials for LibreTexts.org. You can find samples of her work on academia.edu
Josephine Bottoms is a graduate student studying English Literature at Northeastern State University ambitious of obtaining an English M.A. degree. She currently works as a graduate teaching assistant and a writing center tutor, developing her fourth semester of experience with each in hopes to increase her ethos as a writer, instructor, and scholar. Her primary fields of research include medieval, gothic, southern and grotesque literatures, as well as mythology, folklore and various genres of theory.
Roxanne Dunn, Special Collections Archives Librarian at Kent Library, joined Southeast Missouri State University in 2013 after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master's degree in library and information science. She also earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Illinois in 2005. In her seventh year as a professional archivist in an academic library setting, Dunn has presented original research on hoarding and its effect on acquisitions and appraisal in archives at multiple professional conferences. She greatly enjoys teaching and engaging undergraduate students with primary sources and working with faculty to develop classroom activities that provide students with unconventional learning opportunities.
Zac Engledow is a PhD Candidate in English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. His primary research focuses on medieval romance and its intersections with queer and trans materialities, identities, and bodies.
Dr. Libby Karlinger Escobedo is an art historian specializing in late medieval English and French manuscripts. She studied art history at UCLA and Bryn Mawr College before spending four and half years cataloging manuscripts from the Pierpont Morgan Library for the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She joined the faculty at Aurora University in 2007 and her most recent essay, on midwives at the nativity, part of a collection on medieval sanctity and disability, will be published by Brill in 2021.
Dr. Vicky McAlister is Associate Professor of History and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of History and Anthropology at Southeast Missouri State University. She has been at Southeast since 2013 when she also received her Ph.D. from Trinity College, Dublin. Her scholarly and teaching interests include medieval material culture, environment, economics, digital humanities, and archaeology. Her first monograph,, The Irish Tower House: Society, Economy, and Environment 1300-1650 (Manchester University Press) was published in 2019. In addition, she has written and edited numerous articles, book chapters, and edited collections and is Associate Editor of Eolas: The Journal of the American Society for Irish Medieval Studies. She has a research and teaching interest in the digital humanities and teaches digital history as well as medieval history classes. She is PI on the American Philosophical Society funded What Lies Beneath: Defining a Best Practice Model for Multidisciplinary Study of ‘Lost’ Medieval Landscapes and a contributor to the NEH supported Castles to Classrooms: Developing an Irish Castle in Virtual Reality.
Dr. Joey McMullen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research employs ecological criticism and the study of place to highlight the role of the landscape in the literature of the medieval North Atlantic, especially that of England, Ireland, and Wales. He is also broadly interested in multilingualism and networks of literary exchange within the British Isles.
Dr. Ian Alexander Moore is a faculty member at St. John’s College (Santa Fe) and, starting in August, an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (SUNY, 2019), editor of Reiner Schürmann's Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance (Diaphanes, 2020), co-editor of Jean Wahl’s Transcendence and the Concrete (Fordham, 2017), and translator or co-translator of books by Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, and Peter Sloterdijk. He works on medieval speculative mysticism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and German poetics, and is currently writing two books, one titled Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl, the other on Paul Celan’s critical appropriation of Meister Eckhart’s Middle High German writings. He also serves as Associate Editor of the journal Philosophy Today.
Dr. Jill (Jilana) Ordman teaches pre-modern history as an adjunct at universities and community colleges in the Chicago area, including Dominican University. Her research and publications, in medieval cultural history, focus on Western Christian medieval authors attributions of affect as evidence for historical actors' motives. She volunteered to organize the 2021 IMS conference in order to play a greater role in a local academic organization, and it became an engaging way to revive her pre-academia skills in digital design.
Mikaela Renshaw is currently pursuing her PhD in English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is particularly interested in the romance and epic genres within Old English and Middle English literature.
Dr. E. L. Risden is Professor of English at St. Norbert College. He has published thirty-one books including, recently: Spiritual Shakespeare: Religious Subtext in the Plays; Seeking the Beautiful: A Study in Literary Aesthetics; and the print version of Alfgar's Stories from Beowul (published as an e-book in 2012). The current paper comes from an ongoing study in how authors have used expandable/contractible space.
Giovanni de Simone graduated in economics at Bocconi University in Milan and in philosophy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. Her studies focus particularly on the reflexivity of the intellect in Aquinas and contemporary authors, and on the foundation of economics. Some of her essays have been published in Divus Thomas, a journal of philosophy and theology. She also works as an entrepreneur, currently at Gustorotondo.it.
Dr. Mickey Sweeney is a Professor of English at Dominican University, River Forest, IL.
Gregory J. Tolliver is a Doctoral Candidate in English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on developing alliances among ecomaterialism, queer theory, and late medieval courtly and devotional literature. He is especially interested in developing a theory for reading the relationships between time, temporality, and non/human identities and relationships in premodern genres.