ASSC Graduate Student Biographies


CONSORTIUM UNIVERSITIES

ELIZABETH A. BONNETTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Elizabeth A. Bonnette is a Ph.D. candidate in the the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "Remembering Things: Transformative Objects and Community Conflict in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England," examines the work of memorials and memorialization in texts depicting religious identities in conflict. Her main focus is on hagiography and history writing, with special attention to the re-interpretation of Anglo-Saxon saints' cults in post-Conquest England. Her other interests include: historical and "hagiographical" English romances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the "matter of Araby" in late medieval England; and gender, pilgrimage, and healing.


BENJAMIN BREYER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Benjamin Breyer is an M. Phil. candidate in the the Department at English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His interests include Norse, Old and Middle English literature, narratology, historiography, epics and sagas, and mystical texts. He is also interested in narrative theories of film.


AUDREY WALTON, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Irina Dumitrescu is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Medieval Studies at Yale, and currently an Exchange Scholar in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.


MARY KATE HURLEY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Mary Kate Hurley is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University's department of English and Comparative Literature. Her dissertation, called "Writing and Rewriting Collectivities in the Ninth through Twelfth Centuries" engages with questions of time, translation and the formation of proto-national identity in the medieval period. Other interests include monstrosity, literary translation, and the Old English poem "The Wanderer." She is a member of the BABEL and MEARCSTAPA workgroups.


MATT KOHL, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Matt Kohl is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at New York University. His interests are primarily in Anglo-Saxon poetry, Old and Middle English language, translation, and English lexicography. He's currently working as an Editorial Researcher at the Oxford English Dictionary.


BRIGIT MCGUIRE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Brigit McGuire is Ph.D student in Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is currently working on an oral exam field entitled "Technologies of Knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England," about how Anglo-Saxon texts claim to produce, transmit, and conceal knowledge. She is writing a dissertation on gendered knowledge in Anglo-Saxon and later texts, focusing on gendered bodies of knowledge and / or scenes of women as teachers and knowledge producers. She's also extremely interested in the intersection of late classical "encyclopedisms" with Anglo-Saxon catalogues such as the riddles or so-called catalogue poems, and hopes one day to write and think more about how these genres both inform and diverge from one another.



AFFILIATED INSTITUTIONS

JORDAN ZWECK, YALE UNIVERSITY

Jordan Zweck is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Yale University. Her dissertation, "Letters from Heaven in the British Isles, 800-1500," examines the circulation of the Sunday Letter in medieval England, Ireland, and Iceland, exploring the ways in which medieval documentary culture created and shaped communities. Her other interests include the history of the English language, history of the book, and medieval medicine.