MRDS Business Fall 2004

MRDS Business

Election of Officers

Nominations have been made for the following positions. Please return your ballot with your dues by January 25, 2005. (Ballots will be sent by postal mail)

Nominees for Vice-President

David Klausner is a Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has just completed a five-year term as Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies. He has been involved in the performance of early theatre since the day after his arrival in Toronto in 1967, and with the REED project since 1976. He has taught undergraduate classes on early English drama, and teaches a regular graduate class on the moral interludes. His volume on Herefordshire and Worcestershire for the REED project appeared in 1990, and the volume for Wales will appear in 2005. He is editing Wisdom for the TEAMS series of early English playtexts.

Claire Sponsler is a professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drama and Resistance (Minnesota, 1997); East of West: Crosscultural Performance and the Staging of Difference, co-edited with Xiaomei Chen (Palgrave St. Martin's, 2000); and Ritual Imports: Medieval Drama in America (Cornell, 2004); and is doing an edition of Lydgate's mummings and entertainments for the Middle English Texts Series. Her research on medieval drama has appeared in collections and in journals such as New Literary History, Essays in Theatre, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Theatre Annual.

Nominees for Council

Robert Clark is an Associate Professor of Modern Languages at Kansas State University. He specializes in French medieval drama and has written articles on Miracles de Nostre Dame par Personnages and Le Jeu d'Adam, as well as collaborative articles with Claire Sponsler on Le Mystère de la Sainte Hostie and cross-dressing, and with Pamela Sheingorn on the illuminated manuscripts of Gréban's Mystère de la Passion. His ongoing projects include a critical edition of the Mystère de la Sainte Hostie; collected papers of C. Clifford Flanigan and others; and another collaborative project with Pamela Sheingorn on illuminated medieval drama manuscripts.

Jody Enders is a Professor of French and Dramatic Art, at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Her main research interests lie in the history of rhetoric, performance theory, and the interrelations of law and literature. She is the author of numerous articles on early drama, rhetoric, epic, romance, and lyric poetry, among them "Dramatic Memories and Tortured Spaces in the Mistère de la Sainte Hostie," "Medieval Snuff Drama," "The Spectacle of the Scaffolding: Rape and the Violent Foundations of Medieval Drama Studies," and "Performing Miracles: The Mysterious Mimesis of Valenciennes (1547)", which have appeared in such journals as PMLA, Rhetorica, Olifant, Modern Language Quarterly, Exemplaria and Comparative Drama. In Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Cornell, 1998), she explored the interplay among torture, rhetoric, and aesthetics. Her most recent book, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, 2002), won the 2003 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History and Cognate Studies, and her 1992 book, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in French and Francophone Studies from the Modern Language Association.

Eve Salisbury is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University. Her research interests include violence, domesticity, and late-medieval marriage, especially in medieval drama, Chaucer, and Gower. She is a past Assistant Editor for the Middle English Text Series sponsored by TEAMS and is currently the editor of Comparative Drama. In that capacity she has organized a number of sessions at the International Medieval Congress, including "East Meets West in Early Drama, Parts I and II" (2004) and "Staging Justice: Theater and Law in Early Drama," "Performing the Other in Early Drama," and "Marlowe vs. Medieval" (2005). She is currently at work editing a special issue of Comparative Drama on Asian drama, which will include some of the presentations from the 2004 East Meets West sessions.

Martin Walsh is Head of the Drama Concentration, Residential College, University of Michigan, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Drama. He is both a scholar and practitioner of Medieval Drama. Since founding the Harlotry Players in 1983, he has mounted some two dozen productions for the Toronto Cycle projects, numerous conference and university venues, the Detroit Institute of Arts and most recently, the Internationaal Middeleeuws Theaterfestival, Groningen. As a scholar, he specializes in German-language comic drama, popular culture and festivity His numerous articles have appeared in Comparative Drama; AA Early Music, Art & Drama Review; Early Theatre; Medieval English Theatre; Medieval Folklore; Fifteenth-Century Studies; Folklore; Studies in Medievalism; and others. He is co-editor and translator of Mariken van Nieumeghen/Mary of Nijmegen (ca. 1516): A Bilingual Edition (Camden House, 1994), is co-editor with Clifford Davidson on a TEAMS edition of Everyman/Elckerlijk, and is working on a monograph on the popular culture (including drama) surrounding the feast and the figure of St. Martin of Tours.

Proposed constitutional amendment:

Current text

Article 6. Annual business meetings of the Society shall normally be held during the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo). Notice of meetings shall be mailed to members by the Secretary-Treasurer at least 30 days prior to the time of meeting, unless members are duly notified by an announcement in the official program of the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Sponsored sessions will ordinarily be organized by the Society for the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, the International Medieval Congress (Leeds), and any other venues approved by the Society.

Proposed text

Article 6. Annual business meetings of the Society shall normally be held during the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo). Notice of meetings shall be published in the newsletter of the Society at least 30 days prior to the time of meeting, unless members are duly notified by an announcement in the official program of the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Sponsored sessions will ordinarily be organized by the Society for the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, the International Medieval Congress (Leeds), and any other venues approved by the Society.