Graduate Student, Celtic Languages and Literatures
Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
University of Cambridge, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic
Thesis Title: Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest in Late-Eleventh-Century Wales
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Prof. Catherine McKenna
Dr. Paul Russell Prof. Jan Ziolkowski Dr. Michelle Brown (IHR Mellon Mentor) |
About
I am a final-year PhD candidate at Harvard University in Celtic Languages and Literatures & Medieval Studies. I am a Graduate Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2011-12), and have been a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London as well as a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellow (2010-11).
My dissertation "Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest in Late-Eleventh-Century Wales" explores the complex interactions among language, text, and political context in Wales during the decades surrounding the Norman Conquest of England. I argue that writers in medieval Wales created in both their literary compositions and their manuscripts intricate layers of protest and subversion in direct opposition to the authority of the Norman political hegemony and the aggrandizing spread of the Canterbury-led church. These medieval literati exploited language and script as tools of definition. They privileged Welsh or Latin as their audience shifted, and they employed the change from early Welsh script to the Caroline script of the Normans as not just a natural evolution in script development, but as a selective representation of mimicked authority.
I am a native of Rhode Island, a graduate of Smith College (2006, Medieval Studies), and a violinist in the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra.
Contact Information
| Address: | Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study |
