Steering Committee
The GMS steering committee exists to help ensure the continuation of the conference from year to year. For specific queries about this year’s conference, please contact the relevant organizers of the Annual Conference.
Dr Daisy Black, English Literature, University of Wolverhampton
Dr. Daisy Black is a Lecturer in English Literature, and is writing a book on time and gender in late medieval religious drama. Daisy’s other research interests include the performance of food on the medieval stage; medieval depictions of Jews; spectatorship; medieval lay theology; women in performance and medievalism in modern board game cultures. As a theatre practitioner, storyteller and playwright, Daisy has produced creative work for bodies as diverse as the Royal College of Physicians, Manchester Cathedral and the National Waterfront Museum. She is one of the BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinkers.
Dr Diane Heath, Medieval Cultural History, Independent Scholar
Dr Diane Heath was recently a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Kent History & Heritage in the Faculty for Arts, Humanities and Education at CCCU. She specializes in the study of medieval history and literature connected to gender and to animal studies and animality. An expert in medieval Latin bestiaries, Diane works at the nexus of medieval history, heritage, special needs education and wellbeing. Her recent NLHF Medieval Animals Heritage grant has allowed her to pursue this research. In addition, Diane is, with Dr Victoria Blud of York University, the general editor for the University of Wales Press Medieval Animals strand. She also in 2017 hosted the GMS Conference in Canterbury that produced the volume Medieval Gender: Places, Spaces and Thresholds (London; IHR, 2019).
Dr Gareth Lloyd Evans, English Literature, St Hilda’s College, Oxford
Gareth Lloyd Evans is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. His primary field of research is Old Norse-Icelandic literature, and he has particular research interests in masculinities, affect and emotion, skaldic poetry, and female homosociality. He has secondary research interests in Old and Middle English literature, and contemporary medievalism. He has published on skaldic poetry, the correspondences between medieval and postmodern textualities, and contemporary medievalism. He is currently completing a book on masculinities in the sagas of Icelanders and is co-editing a collection of essays on masculinities in Old Norse-Icelandic literature more broadly.
Dr Laura Kalas, English Literature, Swansea University
Laura Kalas is a Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. Her research interests lie at the intersection between literature, gender and medicine in the Middle Ages. She works primarily on the visionary writings of medieval women, as well as medieval literature more widely. The deep relationship between spiritual and bodily health is an important aspect of Laura’s research, along with questions of emotion, the senses, and medieval religious cultures. She was the 2015 winner of the GMS graduate student essay prize and is currently working on a monograph about the medicalization of Margery Kempe’s spirituality.
Dr Amy Louise Morgan, Medieval Literature, University of Surrey
Amy Louise Morgan is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on queer readings of medieval literary texts with a particular focus on the intersections between gender, time and space. Amy also holds research interests in medieval women’s writing, ecology, affect and emotion, and mobilities. She is currently working on her first monograph on queer time and space in medieval romance alongside developing a new project examining female space as queer space in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.
Professor Elizabeth Kinne, Comparative Literature and English, American University of Paris
Elizabeth Kinne has been living, studying, and teaching in France for over twelve years, her undergraduate and graduate work including many transatlantic journeys. She specialized in French and English medieval literature in graduate school and received a dual PhD in French and Women’s Studies from The Pennsylvania State University in Spring 2013. Her dissertation, “Persuading the Polity: Authority, Marriage, and Politics in Late-Medieval France” studies the interrelatedness of gender and politics in conduct literature for women during the Hundred Years’ War. She has been at AUP since 2010 where her writing and literature courses often discuss gender, sexuality, and the construction of knowledge. Her medieval research interests include the Old French fabliaux, Arthurian literature, conduct literature and women’s writing.
Dr Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Literature and Modern Theory, Queen Mary, University of London
Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Language, School of Language, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. She specializes in comparative analyses of medieval literature and modern critical theory. She is an expert in medieval hagiography, with her work foregrounding interrogations inflected by contemporary visual, media, and cultural studies. Alongside this research strand, Alicia works in the field of medieval disability studies, exploring representations of chronic pain in the Middle Ages in terms of contemporary crip theory. Her first book, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, came out in December 2017 with Amsterdam University Press. At present, she is finishing up work on her second book, Medieval Twitter, forthcoming with Medieval Institute Press and ARC Humanities.