MRDS Business Fall 2006

MRDS Business

NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

As many of you may know, Pam Sheingorn has had to step down from the presidency of MRDS for health reasons. Since I would, in the normal course of events, be stepping into her shoes next May, I have agreed to do so a bit early in order to preserve our administrative continuity. In consultation with the MRDS Executive, we have decided to proceed with the election of a new vice-president at the normal time, and to invite an interim vice-president to stand in for the rest of my normal term; I’m very happy to say that Max Harris has graciously agreed to fill that position until next May, so he will take charge of the prize committees (the vice-president’s major job). I know we all understand Pam’s decision to concentrate on her health, and wish her the very best.

Sincerely,
David Klausner

ELECTION OF OFFICERS

Nominations have been made for the following positions. Please return your ballot with your dues by March 1, 2007. (Ballots will be sent by postal mail)

Vice President

Richard K. Emmerson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at Florida State University. He has taught at Georgetown, Harvard, Tufts, Walla Walla, and Western Washington; has served as Deputy Director of Fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities and Executive Director of the Medieval Academy; and has edited or co-edited Speculum, Studies in Iconography, and Traditio. He has published six books, including Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama (Modern Language Association, 1990) and Antichrist and Judgment Day: The Middle French Jour du Jugement, Early European Drama in Translation (Pegasus Press, 1998), ed. with David Hult. His articles on medieval drama include "Antichrist on Page and Stage in the Later Middle Ages," in Spectacle and Public Performance in the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brill, 2006), 1-29; "Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama," JMEMS 35 (2005): 39-66; "Visualizing Performance: The Miniatures of Besançon MS 579," Exemplaria 11 (1999): 245-72; "Contextualizing Performance: The Reception of the Chester 'Antichrist,'" JMEMS 29 (1999): 89-119; "'Englysch Laten' and 'Franch': Demonic Language in Medieval Drama," in The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Brill, 1998), 305-26; "Eliding the 'Medieval': New Historicism and Sixteenth-Century Drama," in The Performance of Middle English Culture (Boydell and Brewer, 1998), 25-41; "Divine Judgment and Local Ideology in the Beauvais Ludus Danielis," in The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays (MIP, 1996), 33-61; and "The Morality Character as Sign: A Semiotic Approach to The Castle of Perseverance," Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 191-220.

Garrett PJ Epp is Professor and Chair of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His chief area of scholarly interest is late medieval and early modern English drama, especially in relation to queer theory and gender studies. He has been known to stage the plays that he studies, merrily offending theatre, classroom, and conference audiences alike. A former member of MRDS Council, the Executive Board of SITM, the Editorial Board of Ludus and the Medieval and Early Modern Institute, he has also served as treasurer of torquere (Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association) and as a member of the Production and Programming Committees for the Poculi Ludique Societas, Toronto. His articles and book chapters include, among others,"'Corected & not playd': an Unproductive History of the Towneley Plays," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 43 (2004), 38-53; "Chastity in the Stocks: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis," Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Dunnigan, Harker, and Newlyn (Palgrave, 2004), 61-73; "Noah's Wife: The Shaming of the 'Trew'," Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Salisbury, Donavin, and Price (U of Florida P, 2002), 223-241; "Ecce Homo," Queering the Middle Ages / Historicizing Postmodernity, ed. Kruger and Burger (U of Minnesota P, 2001), 346-366; "Back to the Garden: Directing the York Temptation," Early Theatre 3 (2000), 205-209; "The York Plays, Toronto 1998: Playing in all directions," Early Theatre 1 (1998) 149-52; "'Cloathes worth all the rest': Costumes and properties in English theatre to 1642," The New History of Early English Drama (Columbia UP, 1997), 269-285; "John Foxe and the Circumcised Stage," Exemplaria 9.2 (1997), 281-313; and "The Towneley Plays, or, The Hazards of Cycling," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 32 (1993), 121-150. He is currently working on a new edition of the Towneley Plays for TEAMS, and even teaches an occasional course, but is otherwise just an administrator these days.

Secretary/Treasurer

Carolyn Coulson-Grigsby is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Humanities at Centenary College in New Jersey, where her teaching responsibilities include courses in Medieval Drama, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Medieval Literature, and Theatre History. She holds a B.A. in Theatre from Santa Clara University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, where she wrote her dissertation on Herod the Great in medieval drama. She also studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Active in the production of early drama, she has directed productions of Mankind and the Towneley Herodes Magnus, and is currently directing A Midsummer Night's Dream at Centenary. Her publications include "Enacting Herod the Great’s Diseased Spirit," EDAM Review 23 (2001); "Meditation, Mysticism, and Identification in The Book of Margery Kempe," Essays in Medieval Studies 12 (1996); and "Medieval Drama: Myths of Evolution, Pageant Wagons, and (lack of) Entertainment Value" in Misconceptions of the Middle Ages, Eds. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon Grigsby (forthcoming from Routledge Press). She has been a member of MRDS since 1997 and has presented many conference papers on medieval drama at Kalamazoo and Leeds.

Gerard NeCastro, Associate Professor of English at University of Maine at Machias, has served as organizer and presenter in many sessions for MRDS over the past fifteen years, as an MRDS council member, and acting MRDS newsletter editor. He is editor of The Renaissance Griselda and co-editor of Mankind, both forthcoming from TEAMS.

Council Representative

Glenn Ehrstine received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and has been teaching since 1994 at the University of Iowa, where he currently serves as Associate Professor of German and academic coordinator of the Medieval Studies program. His research engages literature in the public sphere between 1200 and 1600, with a strong focus on early theater. His first book, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523-1555 (Brill, 2002), was the recipient of the 2003 David Bevington Award and examined the role of carnival and biblical plays in creating cultural community among Swiss Protestants. Currently, he is engaged in a study of medieval staging practices in the context of contemporary visual piety, tentatively titled "Staging Salvation: Devotional Spectatorship and Spatial Practices in Early German Theater." He has served as an officer or board member for several professional organizations, including most recently the MLA Division on German Literature to 1700 (2002-06) and the advisory board of H-German (2005-07), an online forum for German Studies.

Jill Stevenson received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center this past May and is currently an assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College in New York . Jill's interdisciplinary research examines how performance influenced the visual and material cultures of medieval England. Her work also considers the relationships between medieval and modern religious performances. Her dissertation is entitled "Sensual Bodies and Devotional Encounters: The Influence of Performance on Lay Visual Piety in Late Medieval York," which she is currently revising for publication consideration. An article related to her dissertation was published this summer in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. She has also published performance reviews in Theatre Journal, The Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance, and is currently writing a review of the 2006 York Mystery Cycle that will appear in ROMARD. Jill has organized MRDS-sponsored sessions for the medieval congresses in Leeds and Kalamazoo , and for the MLA convention. She is also an active member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She teaches theatre history and interdisciplinary writing seminars, and this spring will teach both an Advanced Studies course on Medieval Performance and a freshman writing seminar structured around the theme "Medievalisms": Past and Present.

Jon Terry Wade is an independent scholar and researcher living in Toronto. She received her MA in 1986 in English literature from McMaster University, Hamilton, where her thesis dealt with rhetorical figures from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. In 1988 she enroled in the Department of English, University of Toronto, where her focus became Tudor drama and literature. From 1988 to 1996 she designed, directed, and produced too many projects for Poculi Ludique Societas (PLS)­of which Green and Lodge’s A Looking Glass for London, and the N-Town Assumption of the Virgin stand out. She also sat on the PLS board from 1989 to 1995. Since 1990, Terry has organized conference sessions on some of her interests---on performance, on suicide and despair in early Modern England/ Europe­ and more recently, on iconoclasm and iconography. The impetus for her one published paper, "The Economics/ Economies of the Medieval Palette: Paint, Painters, and the Dramatic Records," [EDAMR 23 (2001)] was an EDAM session at Kalamazoo. She continues to work on an edition of Thomas Garter's The Virtuous and Godly Susanna, (c 1560) a Tudor retelling of the story of Susanna and the Elders, which she hopes to finish soon, providing her time is unfettered. To make ends meet, she works in the film industry in Toronto: to keep her mind sharp, however, Terry plays party politics in her riding of Parkdale-HighPark where she sits on the riding's executive board.

Jonathan Walker is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Portland State University, where he teaches courses in medieval and Renaissance English drama, performance theory, textual studies and the history of the book, and early modern theater history. He is an active member of the board for Shakespeare at Kalamazoo, having served as its president in 2004-2005, and he has organized multiple conference sessions on early drama for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Renaissance Society of America Annual Meetings, and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies. In addition to having published articles on medieval transvestite saints and on lesbianism in Ovid, Jonathan has an article forthcoming in Theatre Survey that examines the problem of offstage dramatic action in Aristotle and Horace. His current research interests include a co-edited collection of essays titled Early Modern Academic Drama and a book project on offstage action in English Renaissance drama.

 
 
 
PROPOSED CONSTITUTIONAL AMMENDMENT

Since the MRDS awards now include a graduate research award, the Council suggests the following amendment to the Society's constitution. The proposed change to the MRDS Constitution appears below underlined, italicized, and in bold. A vote on this amendment will take place at the annual business meeting in May 2007.

11. The President or a duly elected representative shall preside at all meetings of the Council and of the Society. The President shall appoint the Nominating Committee and other pertinent committees, and shall supervise the affairs of the Society during the year.

The Vice-President shall serve as presiding officer in the absence of the President, shall manage the Society’s annual Research and Publication Awards, and shall assist in the affairs of the Society.

The Secretary-Treasurer shall keep records of actions taken by the Council and by the Society, including all voting matters, and shall present minutes for approval at the next annual meeting of the Council. The Secretary-Treasurer shall also serve as Treasurer, receiving and depositing in appropriate bank accounts all monies of the Society, keeping proper books of account, and presenting annually to the Council an annual statement of income and expenditures. The Secretary-Treasurer shall keep an up-to-date membership list of the Society, with addresses, and shall conduct mail ballots when necessary, and shall give notice when dues are payable and overdue.