Brenda Deen Schildgen, 2008 recipient of the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, specializes in the European Middle Ages, Bible as Literature, Dante, and Jewish, Christian, and Moslem relations in the European Middle Ages. She has a strong secondary interest in colonial and post-colonial literature, especially of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. She is a recipient of numerous fellowships including National Endowment for the Humanities, PEW, Bogliasco Foundation, and the National Humanities Center in 2005-06. Her books include, most recently Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008), the co-edited volume (with Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman) Other Renaissances; Dante and the Orient; Pagans, Tartars, Moslems and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark, which won a Choice Best Book award in 1999, and Crisis and Continuity: Time in the Gospel of Mark. She takes students to Florence, Italy, every summer.

David Biale was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and educated at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, the Hebrew University and UCLA, where he received his PhD in History. From 1986 to 1999, he served as Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. During the same period he also served as adjunct professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History at UC Berkeley. In 1999, he was appointed Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History in the Department of History of University of California Davis. He has also been visiting professor at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, Haifa University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lady Davis Foundation ,the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Resesarch council. Recent Publications: “Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians” (Univ. of California Press) Editor. “Cultures of the Jews: A New History” (Schocken Books) In progress: “Not in the Heavens: The Lagacy of Secular Jewish Thoughts”

Mark Halperin is an Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Davis specializing in Medieval Chinese literature and cultural history, especially anecdotal and religious literature of the Tang and Song dynasties. His publications include Out of the Cloister: Literati Attitudes Toward Buddhism in Sung China, 960-1279 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006).

Kevin Batton is a graduate student in the Classics department at UC Irvine.

Adam Siegel is a bibliographer and subject specialist at the UC Davis Shields library. His areas of expertise include Classics, Linguistics, Middle Eastern/South Asian Studies, Native American Studies, Russian and Eastern European Studies with research interests in Central and Eastern European intellectual history. He has forthcoming publications that will appear in Libraries Unlimited and Oxford Bibliographies: Atlantic History.

Zina Giannopoulou’s research interests revolve around Plato, the reception of classical literature, and Greek epic and tragic poetry. She is currently editing and contributing to a volume on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for Routledge (2013). She is also writing a monograph on the reception of the Odyssey in the literature and film of the 20th and 21st century. Smaller works in progress include papers on the reception of Plato in the literature and film of the 20th century, essays on Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and a paper on Plato’s Alcibiades.

Born in Taipei, Michelle Yeh received her BA in English from the National Taiwan University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Currently she is Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Davis, as well as Chair of the UC Pacific Rim Research Program. Her major publications include: Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice since 1917, Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (edited and translated into English), No Trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu (translation into English), Essays on Modern Chinese Poetry (in Chinese), From the Margin: An Alternative Tradition of Modern Chinese Poetry (in Chinese), Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (edited; English and Chinese editions), Iconography of the Sea: Poems of Derek Walcott (translation into Chinese).

Arturo Arias is the Tomás Rivera Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a well-known expert on Central American literature, with a special emphasis on indigenous literature, as well as critical theory, race, gender and sexuality in postolonial studies. Prior to coming to Texas he was Greenleaf Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Tulane University. He has published Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word(1998), and Ceremonial Gestures (1998), as well as a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mulata (2000). 2001-2003 President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), professor Arias co-wrote the film El Norte (1984), and has published six novels in Spanish. Twice winner of the Casa de las Americas Award for his fiction, and winner of the Ana Seghers Award for fiction in Germany, he was given the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2008 in his native Guatemala.

Emilio Bejel, poet, critic, and narrator, was born in Manzanillo, Cuba, and has lived in the United States since the 1960s. He received his B.A. from the University of Miami, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish and Spanish American literature from Florida State University (Tallahassee). In 1997 he was a member of the jury for the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize. He has published several books of literary and cultural criticism, among them Literatura de Nuestra América,La subversión de la semiótica, José Lezama Lima, Poet of the Image, Gay Cuban Nation, and José Martí: Images of Memory and Mourning; as well as several poetry collections, the latest two of them are Casas deshabitadas and El libro regalado. He has also published three versions of an autobiographical narrative: The Write Way Home. A Cuban-American Story (translated into English by Professor Stephen Clark), El horizonte de mi piel (in Spanish), and O Horizonte da Minha Pele (in Portuguese). At the present time he is distinguished professor of Latin American Studies of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Davis, where he chaired that department from 2003 to 2008.

Jessie Ann Owens is dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the College of Letters and Science, and professor of music. She came to UC Davis in July 2006. Owens was trained as a classicist, with a major in Latin from Barnard College (B.A. 1971). Her book Composers at Work: the Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (Oxford University Press, 1997), for which she received the 1998 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, was the first systematic investigation of composers’ autograph manuscripts from before 1600; it offers a view of the conceptual foundations of musical language. She is now continuing her investigation of tonal language by examining English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before coming to UC Davis, Owens had served as Louis, Frances and Jeffrey Sachar Professor of Music and dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University, where she had taught since 1984. She had previously taught at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) and Columbia University as a Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Owens was a long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1998-1999, and a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2006. She served as president of the American Musicological Society from 2000 to 2002 and as president of the Renaissance Society of America from 2002 to 2004. In 2003, she was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2008, Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.

Ralph Hexter is the provost & executive vice chancellor of UC Davis. He also holds an appointment as distinguished professor of classics and comparative literature. Throughout his career, Hexter has continued to teach, lecture, and publish on the interpretation and meaning of classical Greek and Roman literature from antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern times. His most recent work includes a historical survey of Ovid’s exile poetry in Rezeption der antiken Literatur: Kulturhistorisches Werklexikon, Der Neue Paully, Supplemente, vol. 7, ed. Christine Walde (2010); an account of the pseudo-Ovidiana in Ovid in the Middle Ages, edited by James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (2011); and The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, co-edited with David Townsend (2012).

Joseph T. Sorensen is Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at U.C. Davis. After attending Kyushu University and the University of Tokyo, he received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2005. His research interests include text-image relationships in premodern Japan, place-names, and travel literature, as well as pre-modern aesthetics and performance theory. He is the author of Optical Allusions: Screen, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (Brill Japan Studies Library, 2012) and “The Politics of Screen Poetry: Michinaga, Sanesuke, and the Court Entrance of Shōshi” (Journal of Japanese Studies, 2012). His current projects focus on medieval poetic factionalism and the relationship between narrative fiction, such as The Tale of Genji, and the composition of court poetry in the Heian and Kamakura periods.

Christa Adams is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Akron, in Akron, Ohio. Her research focuses on the collection, display, and representation of Asian art and antiquities within and by Midwestern museums.

Menglu Gao is a graduate student in the English department at Columbia University. Her research interests include 19^th– and early-20^th-century literature–English, Chinese, Spanish and French, translation, animal studies, modern drama, and visual arts. Her recent projects include “Ibsen’s Meta-theatrical ‘Home’: Departure, Dreamland, and Compromise,” (presented at “Coming Home”, Stony Brook, 3/2013), “She Was Woman; He Was Dog”: The Possible Other-worlding in Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” (accepted by “The Posthuman: Differences, Embodiments, Performativity”, Series “Beyond Humanism”, Rome, 9/2013) and “Living with Wrong Shoes: The Alternative Roots Trip in In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee,” (accepted by the MPCA conference, “Documentary” Area, St. Louis, 10/2013).

James Housefield is an Assistant Professor of Design History, Theory, and Criticism, whose research and teaching analyze art and design since the late eighteenth century. He is completing a monograph on the interaction of modern art, design, and science, tentatively titled Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography in the Work of Marcel Duchamp. Housefield’s research focuses on the interaction of art and design with each other and with the cultures of literature and science, particularly astronomy and geography. He is especially interested in the histories of exhibition design and modern cultures of immersive experience. He has contributed to several exhibition catalogues, and his scholarly writing on Duchamp, art and geography, and related topics has appeared in The Geographical Review, Journal of North African Studies, Cultural Geographies, and multiple edited volumes. His past research has focused on trans-Atlantic modernisms and the French cultures of art and design, including the francophone cultures of the colonial and post-colonial world. His current research emphasizes the heritage of nineteenth-century ideas on modernism, especially considering the impact of the Symbolist movement on aesthetics, book design, and the creation of immersive experiences.

Blake T. Wentworth is Assistant Professor of Tamil Studies at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in the History of Religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. His publications include the forthcoming translation Kampan’s Ramayana: Youth for the Murty Classical Library of India, and Tamarind History, an English translation of the Tamil novel, Oru Puliyamarattin Katai, by Cuntara Ramacami

Ajay Rao is currently an assistant professor in the Department and Center for the Study of Religion, and in the Department of Historical Studies at University of Toronto, Mississauga. He completed his Bachelor of Arts and Masters at the University of Michigan. He also received a Masters in Chicago, where he later completed his Ph.D. His interests are in the academic studies of South Asian religions; Sanskrit intellectual history; Sanskrit literature and poetics; and religion and aesthetics. He is currently working on a project about the “theologization of the Ramayana” in South India, 1250-1600.

Rumya Putcha is a dancer and ethnomusicologist whose research centers in South Asia, with work ranging across anthropology, performance studies and ethnomusicology, including issues of gender, modernity and social justice. She is currently working on a book project which examines the interstices of dance historiography and tourism while her upcoming research on female dance traditions and South Indian cinema adds an emphasis on representational strategies, film history and issues of gender and sexuality within South Asian expressive cultures. She received her Phd in 2011 from the University of Chicago and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Earlham College.

Wai Chee Dimock experiments with close readings across different widths of space, and across a range of time-scales. Her book, “Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time” (2006), received Honorable Mention for both the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. A collaborative volume, “Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature,” further elaborates on these arguments. Outside Yale, Dimock was a consultant for “Invitation to World Literature,” a 13-part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook forum, “Rethinking World Literature,” is still ongoing. She is now at work on two critical books, “Recycling” and “Many Islams,” and a print-and-web anthology, “American Literature in the world.” She posts images on its facebook page and helps organize an annual graduate conference.

Margaret Ferguson joined the UC Davis faculty in 1997. Before coming to Davis, she taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College (The Bread Loaf School of English). Her areas of interest include Renaissance literature, literacy studies, and feminist theory; she has published extensively on these topics. Currently, she is a member of the advisory boards for Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Modern Language Quarterly. She has served on many committees of the Modern Language Association, including the Executive Committee, the PMLA committee, the translation prize committee, the Elections Committee, and the Executive Committee for the Division of 17th C. British Literature. She was elected second vice president of the MLA in 2012 and will serve as President in 2014-15. Her current book project is on “Cultural Debates About Hymens in Early Modern England, with an opening chapter on ancient Greek and Hebrew concepts of “virginity” and an epilogue on the modern surgical practice of “hymenoplasty.” She is the co-director with Gina Bloom of the Mellon Research Initiative in Early Modern Studies.

Archana Venkatesan is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the UC Davis with research interests in Tamil Vaishnava (Alvar) poetry, South Indian performance, and women and Goddess traditions in India. Her publications include The Secret Garland: Translations of Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli in the American Academy Texts and Translations Series from Oxford University Press and A Hundred Measures of Time: Nammalvar’s Tiruviruttam which will be coming out from Penguin Classics in 2014. Her other ongoing projects consist of a collaborative translation project of Nammalvar’s 1100 verse magnum opus, Tiruvaymoli undertaken with Prof. Francis X.Clooney (Harvard University) and a study of the 19th century poet-saint, Natana Gopala Nayaki Svamikal (1843-1914).

Alf Hiltebeitel’s publications as well as his current research take him back and forth between the Mahābhārata and fieldwork on Tamil Mahābhārata “folk” traditions. From this tandem project, his work branches out into related texts, most notably the Rāṃāyaṇa; into other cults and oral epic traditions; and recently into an attempt to understand theIndian concept of dharma. Recently out or forthcoming are the following titles: Dharma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010); Reading the Fifth Veda: Studies in the Mahābhārata, Essays by Alf Hitebeitel, vol. 1, and When the Goddess Was a Woman: Mahābhārata Ethnographies, Essays by Alf Hiltebeitel, vol. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011); and Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hiltebeitel is Columbian Professor of Religion, History, and Human Sciences at the George Washington University.

Prof. James W. Earl is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon. He has published many studies of medieval religion and literature, including Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford UP, 1994). He is also the author of “How to Read an Indian Novel,” Literary Imagination (2007) and Beginning the Mahabharata (SASA Books, 2011).

Dr. Veena Rani Howard teaches in the Religious Studies Department and Asian Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her publications include “Gandhi, The Mahatma: Evolving Narratives and Native Discourse in Gandhi Studies,” Religion Compass 1.3 (May 2007), “Non-violence and Justice as Inseparable Principles: A Gandhian Perspective,” in Justice and Mercy Will Kiss: The Vocation of Peacemaking in a World of Many Faiths, eds. Michael K. Duffey and Deborah S. Nash (Wisconsin: Marquette University, 2008), “Gandhi’s Reconstruction of the Feminine: Toward an Indigenous Hermeneutics,” in Woman and Goddess in Hinduism: Reinterpretation and Re-envisionings, eds. Tracy Pintchman and Rita Sherma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), the monograph Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming), and “Rethinking Gandhi’s Celibacy: Ascetic Power and the Empowerment of Women,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming in 2013).

Vishwa Adluri received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School Social Research in 2002. His research focuses mainly on Plato, the Greek and Indian epics, and the tradition of rational soteriology in ancient philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the Neo-Platonists. He is the author of Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy: Return from Transcendence (London: Continuum Publishing, 2011) and has also written on Plato, Plotinus, and interpretations of ancient philosophy in 20th century Continental thought. He also recently published a translation of Arbogast Schmitt’s Die Moderne und Platon: Zwei Grundformen Europäischer Rationalität (Modernity and Plato: Two Paradigms of Rationality [Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012]) and an edited volume with contributions from Luc Brisson, John Bussanich, and Walter Burkert, titled Philosophy and Salvation in Greek Religion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). Vishwa’s current projects include studying the reception of Indian thought in Western Orientalism and how to read the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, philosophically. A two-volume edition of Alf Hiltebeitel’s collected essays has already appeared as part of this project (Reading the Fifth Veda: Studies in the Mahābhārata, Essays by Alf Hiltebeitel, vol. 1, and When the Goddess Was a Woman: Mahābhārata Ethnographies, Essays by Alf Hiltebeitel, vol. 2 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011]) and Vishwa is now working on a third book, an edited volume titled Argument and Design: The Mahābhārata as Literature (also from Brill) with contributions by international Mahābhārata scholars. Meanwhile, he is most excited about the release of his book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology from Oxford University Press this summer.

David Gundry is an Assistant Professor in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at UC Davis. His research interests include Medieval and early-modern Japanese literature, the comparative history of the novel, and Edo-period popular culture. He is currently working on a book examining the fiction of Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693).

Monte Johnson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego. He teaches classical and hellenistic philosophy. His research focuses on Aristotle and Democritus, and their immense subsequent influence on philosophy and science. He is currently working on a reconstruction of Aristotle’s lost work the Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy)

Michael Griffin is an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies and the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He also works with the Ancient Commentators project at King’s College London under the directorship of Prof. Richard Sorabji as incoming co-editor for the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series of translations, which celebrates its 100th volume this year. He studies the philosophers of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, especially the vibrant intellectual and literary traditions that emerged around the works of Plato and Aristotle following their own lives and during the rise of the Roman Empire. Griffin’s special focus has been the legacy of ancient logic and dialectical practice, leading to his doctoral work reconstructing the earliest commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories – a seminal treatise whose influence has crept into our everyday speech. He is currently interested in the development of semantics at the intersection of metaphysics and grammar in the first surviving commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, culminating in the philosophy of Plotinus (c. 204/5-270 CE) and the later Neoplatonists, and in the legacy of the Platonic Socrates in later antiquity.

Jan Szaif is a Professor of Philosophy at UC Davis. His long-term research interests relate to the history of the philosophical concepts of truth and being, the history of virtue ethics and its underlying conception of rationality, and the place of friendship in ethical theory. His publications include a book on Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, Platons Begriff der Wahrheit [Plato’s Concept of Truth] from Freiburg / München (Alber), and a forthcoming book on the Aristotelian and Peripatetic theories of human goods, human well-being, and its natural foundations.

Rex Stem is an Associate Professor in the Classics department at UC Davis. His research interests include Roman historiography, oratory and political thought and the late Roman Republic. His recent publications include “Shared Values and the Limits of Relativism in Nepos’ Epaminondas and Atticus” in Classical Journal and “The Exemplary Lessons of Livy’s Romulus” in Transactions of the American Philological Association. The University of Michigan Press published his recent book, The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos, in Fall 2012.

Emily Albu is an Associate Professor in the Classics department at UC Davis where she is also the director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program. Her research interests include Medieval historical writing, late Antique / Medieval cartography and the Peutinger map, the twelfth century, and classical receptions. Her books include Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices which was co-edited with H.A. Drake et al and The Normans in Their Histories: Propaganda, Myth, and Subversion. Her chapter titled “The Battle of the Maps in a Christian Empire,” will appear in the forthcoming book The Transformation of City and Citizenship in the Classical World: From the Fifth Century BCE to the Fifth Century CE edited by Claudia Rapp and Harold Drake from Cambridge University Press.

Marcia Kupfer, an independent art historian based in Washington DC, writes on the cultural and social functions of medieval images. She is the author of The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town (Penn State, 2003) and Romanesque Wall Painting in Central France: The Politics of Narrative (1993). In addition, she has published numerous studies on medieval world maps and is currently completing a book that will show how the famous Hereford mappa mundi of c. 1300 folds moralized optics into its cartographic representation. She also edited The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama (Penn State, 2009).

Yuming He is an Assistant Professor in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at UC Davis. Before coming to UC Davis, Professor He has held appointments at Reed College and the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous articles and of the book Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, published by the Harvard University Asia Center.

Noah Guynn is a specialist in medieval and early modern French literature, theater, and culture. His book Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages was published in The New Middle Ages Series at Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. He is currently working on a second book on ethics and politics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century farce. Guynn’s teaching interests extend from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, and he regularly offers courses on topics such as medieval romance, Molière, and the Theater of the Absurd. Guynn was also a recipient of ASUCD’s 2004 Excellence in Teaching Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s 2009 Excellence in Teaching Award.

John M. Ganim (B.A. Rutgers; M.A., Ph.D. Indiana University) is the author of three books, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (1983), Chaucerian Theatricality (1990), both published by Princeton University Press and Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (2005; paperbound edition 2008), published by Palgrave MacMillan. He served as President (2006-2008) of the New Chaucer Society. Previously, he has served as a Trustee of the New Chaucer Society and as chair of the Executive Committee of the Middle English Division of the Modern Language Association. He held a Guggenheim fellowship in 2001. At UCR, he has been department chair and graduate advisor. He is an International Associate, Network for Early European Research, sponsored by the University of Western Australia and the Australian Research Council and a PI on an Australian Research Council multi-year grant to study Australian Medievalisms. His recent seminars have covered a range of topics, including Cosmopolitanism in the Middle Ages,; Temporalities and Literature; Landscape, Urbanism and Space in Literature; as well as courses on Malory, Beowulf and Chaucer. His recent research covers how the Middle Ages is reimagined from century to century in aesthetic and political realms; how medieval literature and contemporary theory engage; and how the form of late medieval literature is shaped by its institutional contexts.

Shirin A. Khanmohamadi is an Associate Professor in the Comparative and World Literature department at San Francisco State University, where she specializes in comparative medieval European literature, premodern travel and ethnographic writing, literary and cultural contact between the medieval European and Islamic worlds, and medievalism in contemporary theory and literature. She has recently published work in New Medieval Literatures, Exemplaria, and Arthuriana. Her study of premodern ethnographic poetics, In Light of Another´s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages, is forthcoming in The University of Pennsylvania Press’ Middle Ages Series (2013).

Marisa Galvez is an Assistant Professor of French at Stanford University. She specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. Her most recent book is Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 2012). Her current research project investigates the rhetorical and ideological craft of medieval French confessional texts and its relation to crusade lyrics.

Zrinka Stahuljak is Professor of French & Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her research interests include medieval romance, historiography, and poetry, medievalism and the nineteenth century, history of sexuality, Mediterranean and translation studies. She has published two books: Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism and the Invention of the French Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) andBloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages. Translatio, Kinship and Metaphor (University Press of Florida, 2005). She also co-authored Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes (D.S. Brewer, 2011) and co-edited Violence and The Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World (D.S. Brewer, 2013) and Minima Memoria: Essays in the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard (Stanford University Press, 2007).