MEMSA Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries Podcast

Nicole Maceira Cumming is a second year PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow. She is a member of the Glasgow Animal Studies Reading Group (British Animal Studies Network) and committee member of the Northern Early Modern Network. Her AHRC funded research examines the impact of the Reformation on human-animal relationships in early modern Scotland. In this episode, she talks to MEMSA's Kate Foy about depictions of human-animal transformations in early modern Scottish witchcraft trial records. She can be followed on Twitter at @nicole_maceria.

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Dr Anastasija Ropa is lecturer at the Latvian Academy of Sport Education, Department of Management and Communication Science. She has presented at international conferences and published articles on medieval and modern Arthurian literature, aspects of the history of medieval Livonia, on medieval animal studies, and on equestrian history. In her Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries episode she examines the representations of the borders of Livonia in early modern chronicles and maps. 

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė is a third-year PhD student in Italian at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Her thesis focuses on Dante’s unorthodox understanding of the senses in visionary and dream experience, contextualising Dante’s dream writing in relation to theologically inflected late medieval vision genre more generally. In her talk for the Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries podcast series she explores the depiction of dreaming in Dante’s Purgatorio 9 as an experience that enables the crossing of physical and conceptual boundaries.

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

In this double episode, Aisha Hussain and Sam Brown share their research on early modern Englishmen and their perspective on the Ottoman 'other'.

Aisha Hussain is a PhD candidate at the University of Salford whose research interests include of Turkish Otherness, fictional terror, Anglo-Ottoman commerce, gender studies, Orientalism, and, in particular, crusading and anti-crusading discourses in early modern English drama. Her current research investigates how the emergence of a more positive theatrical Turkish type in the works of Fulke Greville, Thomas Goffe and Roger Boyle reflects, in a shift from their contemporaries, what can be considered an anti-crusading discourse. Her paper is entitled, 'Reframing the Crusading Discourse: representations of Roxolana in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha (1609) and Roger Boyle’s Mustapha (1665)'. She can be emailed at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @AishaHussain96.

Sam Brown is in the first year of her PhD studies at UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. Building on her MA dissertation on the same subject, her project explores the materiality and afterlives of the manuscripts of William Bedwell (1563 - 1632), the first Englishman since the Crusades to dedicate his life to the study of Arabic. Her paper for the MEMSA Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries podcast is entitled 'Fear and Loathing in Constantinople: fact versus fiction in the Turkish captivity of Sir Thomas Sherley the Younger'. She can be emailed at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @samuscript. 

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Paola Rea is a postgraduate student at the University of Roma La Sapienza, where she studies medieval history and Latin palaeography. Her research focuses on nuns' handwriting in medieval Italian manuscripts. In her paper for the Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries podcast series, she explores ecclesiastical and political conflict in 9th century Rome, offering a new interpretation of the nature of the city's political divisions.

She can be contacted at [email protected].

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Dr Katarzyna Burzyńska holds a PhD in English literature and is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She teaches translation, culture studies and English early modern drama. Her research interests include feminist and queer studies with a focus on history of embodiment as well as philosophical analysis of literature. In 2016 she published her doctoral dissertation entitled The early modern (re)discovery of ‘overhuman’ potential: Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s over-reachers in the light of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

This paper is part of a bigger project entitled “Sir, she came in great with child, and longing”: phenomenology of pregnancy in English early modern drama (Measure for Measure 2.1.96)” financed by The National Science Centre, Poland within the scheme OPUS (Contract no. UMO-2017/27/B/HS2/00089, Project no. 2017/27/B/HS2/00089).

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Dr Maria Volkonskaya is an associate professor in the school of foreign languages at National Research University Higher School of Economics. Her research interests lie in the field of the history of English language and literature, recently focusing on the language of medieval religious treatises and homilies. Her paper for the CBCB podcast is part of a larger research collaboration on the virtues of the Mass as represented in the British Isles (in Latin, Middle English, Irish, and Welsh texts) carried out together with Dr. Elena Parina (Philipps-Universität Marburg/Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow).

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

In this double episode, Samantha Hunter and Kirsty Haslam discuss burgh governance and the politics, society, and culture of urban centres in early modern Scotland.

Samantha Hunter is in the first year of her PhD at the University of Dundee. Her research primarily focusses on the relationships between ecclesiastical and secular authorities and the boundaries of their jurisdictions within localities. Her paper for the Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries podcast uses the burghs of 17th-century Fife to explore concepts of state building and models of governance.

Kirsty Haslam is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Aberdeen, where her work examines the social and cultural impact of conflict in medieval and early modern Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. Her research draws both on documentary sources and the material culture and architecture of the region to examine the relationship between urban and rural communities and investigate the possibility of a regional martial culture.

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Asseline Sel, Aspirante F.R.S-FNRS, is a PhD student in the department of Germanic languages and literature at Université de Namur in Belgium. Her PhD thesis focuses on the use of the French language and the representation of French culture in Shakespeare’s Henriad, critical editions, translations, and performances over time. In this CBCB podcast, she addresses French scenes and French language spoken by English characters in Jacobean city comedies, the perception of French people in early modern London, and how this perception played into the negotiation of the boundaries of English identity. She can be contacted at [email protected].

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

Hannah Weaver is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh where her research focuses on space, gender, and illicit behaviour in late eighteenth-century Edinburgh. In this episode, she presents a paper on what Ranger's Impartial List can tell us about urban boundaries and illicit space in early modern Edinburgh and discusses her research with James Taffe, MEMSA's chair.

Music: Aitua, 'Blind Fire', from the album Elements. Used with the kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.