The Cohort @ Marco

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  “Outing” Plan B

  You know you’ve thought about it. You don’t want to, but you do. But each day as you tenderly polish the prose and craft the structure of your beloved dissertation into a finely honed rhetorical machine, you ask yourself that pesky question. And you probably hate yourself for asking it. You talk to your colleagues [...]

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  Marco Graduate Student Spotlight: Meghan Holmes Worth

  Our Marco Graduate Student Spotlight this week is Meghan Holmes-Worth, a Ph.D. Candidate and specialist in Premodern Europe who works with Dr. Jay Rubenstein. Meghan is the 2012 recipient of the Claude Robertson Award for Outstanding Student in European History, and the 2011-2012 recipient of the Jimmy and Dee Haslam Dissertation Fellowship. I recently had [...]

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  Puritan astronomy? Increase Mather’s Kometographia (1683)

  In my last blog post for The Cohort, I talked about a peculiar example of historical chronology—a domestic manuscript from the late 17th century written by a teenaged boy—and I’m still interested in recovering more documents that can help us broaden and complicate the received narratives of early modern scholarly disciplinarity. ‘Weird histories,’ so to [...]

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  Marco Graduate Student Spotlight: Leah Giamalva

  Our mission statement here at The Cohort relates our desire to give graduate students a voice in the academic community. This month begins a series of interviews with Marco graduate students. We believe it is immensely productive to be aware of what types of projects our colleagues are working on, both for the purposes of [...]

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  Mediterranean History as a Medieval Panacea, or, the Difficulties of European-based Medieval World History

  This is perhaps something that should be prefaced by saying that I aspire to be a medieval Mediterranean historian, so this critique is more from the inside than the outside.  I was recently reading Olivia Remie Constable’s excellent Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle [...]

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  In Defense of the Edition

  Including my MA and PhD programs, I’ve been an English lit graduate student—an early modernist—for going on five years, and I’ve never met a peer who is working on a scholarly edition as a dissertation project. I’m not saying that it never happens, especially among medievalists, but just that edition-dissertations seem to be unusually and [...]

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  “HEY now hear:” Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf

  Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf, like the eponymous hero (and the monstrous villain too, I suppose), is an unrelenting force of nature. The deceptively casual choice of “HEY now hear” in place of the ever-puzzling Hwæt grabbed my attention and didn’t ease up until “song / sung / sing/er’s/ saga / ended” nearly eighty pages later. By then, [...]

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  Seeking Intercession: Books of Hours and A Prayer to St Margaret of Antioch

  Books of Hours, or Horae, couple image and text and provide a window into the devotional life of the laity, which is something that is frequently difficult to grasp. Prayers to the saints are especially telling of the devotional desires of the laity, as such prayers illustrate that medieval Christians both requested from saints intercession [...]

News and Notes

Graduate Fellows: Leah Giamalva and Meghan Holmes-Worth

Here is a video of two talented Marco graduate students speaking about their work. These presentations were given by Meghan Holmes-Worth, the 2011 Haslam Dissertation Prize recipient, and Leah Giamalva, the 2011 Anne Marie Van Hook Memorial Travel Fellowship recipient at the Graduate Fellows evening last Spring. They are introduced by our Marco Director Dr. [...]

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Medieval Latin Reading Group

From Dr. Maura Lafferty: The medieval Latin sight reading group will be meeting this semester onThursdays at 3:30 in Greve 604.  We began last week with materials related to the legend of St. Peter in Chains.  We have a little more to finish, and then we are looking for further readings, so bring your suggestions.  [...]

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Renaissance reading group

A number of graduate students in the English department recently expressed the desire to bring faculty and graduate students together to discuss Renaissance texts and culture in a group setting as a way to encourage a sense of community and ongoing conversation, as well as to benefit collaboratively from each person’s specific expertise. Our hope [...]

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