Media
This page offers a record of some of my media appearances and public engagement work, and also includes links to some of my public-facing scholarship or recordings of my talks. A complete list of these activities can be found on my CV.
Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages - Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast
I was honoured by to participate in this special edition of The Multicultural Middle Ages podcast, which offered a dialogue between the contributors and editors of the special issue of Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages, published by the mostly widely-circulated journal of medieval studies, Speculum (99.2), in April 2024. This conversation examined how the framework of race and race-thinking informs medieval studies today - but also what medieval studies offers to ongoing dialogues about modern day race and racism. I explained my contribution to this special issue — an article entitled "Queer, Indigenous Relationality in Finnboga saga ramma" — and considered how a close-reading of this text, deeply engaged with Indigenous and queer theory (and Indigenous queer theory) helps us understand how Old Norse-Icelandic narratives instrumentalise or even appropriate Indigenous subjectivities to serve queer - but settler - desires.
Finding Transgender Worlds in Late Medieval Iceland - Essay for History on the Web
I was invited by the Historical Association in the UK to contribute a short essay for ‘History’ on the Web’, the online, public-facing component for the journal History. My brief essay responded to the the rise of modern gender critical feminism (or trans exclusionary radical feminism) in the UK, by looking to how Old Norse-Icelandic sources glimpsed alternatives to hegemonic cisheteropatriarchy and masculinity, even as they attempt to uphold it. Drawing upon the work of José Esteban Muñoz in my reading of the late medieval Króka-Refs Saga and Flóamanna Saga , I argue Old Norse-Icelandic literature provides political resources for grappling with a transphobic present, but also for imagining queerer alternatives.
History in a Time of Polarization Workshop, Columbia University — Invited Speaker
I was honoured to be invited to take part in a virtual workshop hosted by The Medievalist Toolkit, a public history group founded by graduate students at Columbia University. This workshop brought together professionals from fields that deal with the violent far-right, with a focus on how hate groups have consistently drawn from memories of the medieval past in their recruitment efforts, and in recent years this retrospective look to the Middle Ages has only increased, particularly online. This workshop offered a setting for scholars, social workers, and journalists to share their unique viewpoints on how best to combat the use of the Middle Ages in right-wing radicalization, providing a forum for discussion and problem solving.
“I Don’t Want Realism, I Want Magic!” Keynote Address - Performing Magic in the Premodern North
I was invited by the Performing Magic in the Premodern North working group to deliver a keynote address for their inaugural conference. My talk moved from A Streetcar Named Desire to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas to theorise the intersection between queerness and magic, as well the desire for alternative relationalities inherent to both. The twelfth and thirteenth-century Íslendingasögur (family sagas) are often lauded for their ‘realism’ Yet scholarship has perceived a supposed ‘decline of realism’; in the so-called ‘postclassical sagas’: the Íslendingasögur presumably composed after the collapse of the independent Icelandic commonwealth in 1262-1264 .Despite recent interrogations of whether the ‘postclassical’ sagas are measurably more fantastic than earlier Íslendingasögur, this essay asks whether the postclassical Íslendingasögur might, like Blanche DuBois, embrace magic as a particularly queer form of critique.
York LGBTQ+ History Month, Portal Bookstore, York — Invited Speaker
I am honoured to be regularly invited to The Portal Bookshop in York, England, to deliver public-facing lectures on LGBTQ+ and specifically trans* history. The Portal Bookshop is the only dedicated LGBTQ+ community space and mutual aid group in York, and thus has a special responsibility to provide educational programming that meets the needs and interests of North Yorkshire’s LGBTQ+ community. In 2023 and in 2024, I delivered two talks for York’s LGBTQ+ History Month: “Queer Feelings and Feeling Queer in Medieval Scandinavia“ and “Cruising the Sagas: Queer Sex and Death in the Viking Age”. These talks introduced the community to sources for LGBTQ+ lives in Old Norse-Icelandic sources, and the challenges and possibilities of queer and trans* medieval history.
““There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. […] So in the end it is the intellectual as a representative figure that matters – someone who visibly represents a standpoint of some kind, and someone who makes articulate representations to his or her public despite all sorts of barriers… that vocation is important to the extent that it is publicly recognizable and involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability.””