About

I am a medievalist scholar whose academic expertise in medieval Arthurian Romance provides the context in which I explore contemporary fantasy, romance, and other genres that use and adapt medieval Arthurian characters, tropes, motifs, and more.

I describe myself as first and foremost a queer transgender scholar seeking to read and engage inside and through a variety of communities. Carolyn Dinshaw described queer history as "the touch across time," and it is that very ideal that I aim to expand and explore with this creative project.

Queerly

To read texts queerly is to be aware of the social and political contexts of the time in which a text was produced, so that we may then read it against the grain, seeking places where texts can be read with different lenses, a different understanding using contextual background.

It is not an examination of characters to determine which contemporary label may or may not fit them. To be queer is to be nuanced, and that is no less true for characters of the past than in the present. Instead, I seek disruptions and kinships across disparate texts, genres, and times. Often this does mean characters and readings carry a connotation of the queer in a more colloquial sense; I find that overlap particularly productive and exciting.

Beloved

Romance, the genre of the contemporary era featuring love stories and happy endings, began in the medieval period with French author Chrétien de Troyes, whose text Lancelot, le Chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart) introduces the love triangle of King Arthur, his wife Guinevere, and Arthur's best knight Lancelot.

Courtly love developed from the burgeoning romance genre. A system of behavior for knights and ladies, the birth of the chivalric order and knights in shining armor. But, in aggrandizing these ladies as the object of affection, they become increasingly objectified in a negative sense.

The reclamation of the romance genre in contemporary literature is consistently evolving and a site of great cultural importance. Additionally, the role of love and the identity of the beloved exists beyond binary reproductions of heteronormativity; I seek to explore these intersections academically and in recreation.

Medievalisms

Both an examination of the past and an examination of how contemporary people understand the past, medievalisms are those things that appear today that have been inspired by, adapted from, or based on elements of medieval history.

So, both the study of Guy Ritchie's 2017 film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, a loose adaptation of King Arthur's sword-in-the-stone narrative, and Star Wars, a space-opera multimedia franchise, are examples of medievalism. While it may be simpler to view Ritchie's film and recognize Charlie Hunnam's Arthur as the King Arthur, analyzing elements of the Star Wars franchise require the search for patterns and motif, rather than exact adaptation.

What can engagement with this past, anachronistic or otherwise, tell us about the ways in which we build community and identity through literature and storytelling?

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