Please join us for a virtual panel featuring five exciting scholars and former Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Lecturers!
Register for the panel here
On Friday, December 11, at 12:30 CENTRAL time, our panelists will convene via zoom for a discussion of their current work and the ways that they have been challenged in continuing with their work during the pandemic. Our panelists have unique perspectives based on where they have been located, throughout the US and the world, during this challenging time. They will discuss what they've been working on, how they've been working, and what insights they have for working through the restrictions on travel, movement, and even collaboration that have made academic life challenging in 2020.
All of our panelists are experts in their fields and espcially work on medieval and early modern women (and gender) studies. With different focuses--queenship, religion, societies of women, nobility, sexuality--our panelists can over a variety of expert knowledge and we'll have many topics to discuss. Please join us for a free-flowing conversation, with question and answer opportunity as well.
Panelists:
Dr. Tracy Adams (Professor of European Languages and Liteature, University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Professor Adams specializes in medieval and early modern French literature and culture and has published extensively on medieval and early modern queenship. She has published three moongraphs, including 2014's Christine de Pizan and the fight for France, and she has co-edited two collections, including 2015's Female beauty systems: Beauty as social capital in Western Europe and the United States, Middle Ages to the present. Dr. Adams has also received a Herzog August Bibliothek fellowship and an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions Distinguished International Visiting Fellowship, as well as several other awards and fellowships.
Dr. Kavita VM Finn (Lecturer in Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Dr. Finn has published widely, including a monograph, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography 1440-1627, and more than a dozen articles in journals and chapters in edited collections. She has edited four collections, inlcuding the Royal Studies Journal Book Award-winning The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, with Valerie Schutte. She also writes extensively on the connections of pop-culture and medieval and early modern culture, especially on Game of Thrones, The White Queen, and children's literature. Her publications cross all sorts of boundaries, from televions series like Hannibal studied through the lens of queerness, to looking at Shakespearan queens, fandom, and popular history.
Dr. Beth Plummer (Susan C. Karant-Nunn Professor, Reformation and Early Modern European History Professor at the University of Arizona)
Professor Plummer is an internationally known scholar of early modern religious history. She has been a fellow at the prestigious Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, at the Institute for Reformation Studies at the University of St. Andrews (UK), and at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition, Dr. Plummer has held major grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Herzog-August Bibliothek, and the NEH. She has authored and edited five books, including most recently Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany (2019), which she co-edited with Joel Harrington. Her monograph, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012), won the Gerald Strauss Book Prize 2013.
Dr. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Professor Wiesner-Hanks has published extensively on women, Christianity, and sexuality in the early modern era, as well as on world history and gender, her other scholarly passions. Her research has been supported by Fulbright and the Guggenheim grants, and a few of her best known books include “Gender in History: Global Perspectives, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe” (now in its 3rd edition and winner of the 1995 Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award), “Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789,” and “A Concise History of the World.” She is also editor-in-chief of the seven volume “Cambridge World History” and a senior editor at “Sixteenth Century Journal.”
Dr. Carole Levin (Willa Cather Professor of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Professor Levin has held fellowships from Fulbright, the NEH, the Royal Historical Society, the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, and many other fine institutions. She has won numerous scholarly and teaching awards and specializes in early modern English women's and cultural history. She has recently published, with Anna and Jo Eldridge Carney, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, and "We Princes I tell you are Set of Stages": Elizabeth I in her own words, with Tamara
moderated by Dr. Kelly Stage (Associate Professor of English, Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
A word about Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Events:
Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Lecture Series events are named for the scholar Mary Martin McLaughlin, a pioneering scholar of pre-modern women. A native of Grand Island, Nebraska and a graduate (BA and MA) of the UNL History Department, she was a scholar of women, children, and families in medieval Europe. She earned her PhD at Columbia University and taught at Wellesley, Vassar, and the University of Nebraska. Two books (with co-editor James Bruce Ross) published during her lifetime, “The Portable Medieval Reader” and “The Portable Renaissance Reader,” made her work a staple of college courses for decades. Her masterwork, “Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century Quest” (with Bonnie Wheeler) was published in 2002, and her edition of “The Letters of Heloise and Abelard” (also with Wheeler) was published posthumously in 2009.
A generous private donor and assistance from the University of Nebraska Foundation has enabled the UNL MRST program to establish the Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Lecture Series Fund. With this fund, we continue to offer lectures and events to commmorate Dr. McLaughlin's work and the work of current, top scholars in the field of pre-modern women's studies. We are honored to welcome our scholars for this virtual event in Dr. McLaughlin's name, and we are grateful for the generosity of our donor community and the assistance of the University of Nebraska Foundation.
