Betsy Chunko: Betsy is a graduate student in the Art and Architectural History department.  She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in English and an MA from Ohio State where she specialized in medieval literature. Her research in art history focuses on late-medieval England and combines the study of vernacular literature with commonly depicted vignettes found on wood carvings known as misericords.

Gabriel Haley: Gabriel's interests include medieval understandings of solitude; the intersection of Middle English lyric poetry and vernacular theology; the phenomenology of literary forms; and the transmission, reception, and collaboration of Middle English texts. His dissertation explores lyric intervention in texts that champion and/or interrogate the medieval life of solitude, including the works of Richard Rolle, the Digby Mary Magdelene play, Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Charles d'Orléans's English lyrics. His dissertation is supervised by Bruce Holsinger, A.C. Spearing, and Elizabeth Fowler. Gabriel coordinates the interdisciplinary colloquium for Medieval Studies at UVa, and he provides digital imagery and design support for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive.

Elizabeth Head:Elizabeth is a PhD student in the French Department. She earned her BA in French at Furman University (Greenville, SC) in 2004 and her MA in French Literature at UVA in 2006. Her academic interests include 12th and 13th century French vernacular literature (particularly verse narratives), French and general Linguistics, and Medieval French and Norman history. She is currently preparing for her PhD exams and working toward a dissertation topic.

Ryan McDermott: Ryan specializes in late medieval English literature, the history of criticism, and philosophical theology. He is writing a dissertation about how the fate of the tropological sense of scripture changed the ethical invention and interpretation of literature in England between c. 1350 and the eve of the Reformation, focusing on William Langland's Piers Plowman, the biblical poems of the Pearl-Poet, the York Plays, and John Skelton. The dissertation is supervised by Bruce Holsinger, A. C. Spearing, and Kevin Hart. Ryan is a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellow and an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He coordinates the Duke-UVA Colloquium on Interpretation and Ethics, a semesterly interdisciplinary forum. His essay on poetry and evil is forthcoming in Modern Theology. 

Christine Schott:Christine Schott: Christine began studying at U.V.A.'s English Department in 2006. She holds her B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on tracking readership and contemporary responses to medieval works of literature through manuscript design, decoration, and especially marginalia; her secondary interest is in scholarly editing, and she works as a graduate assistant at the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive.

Monica Sokol:Monica Sokol began work on her PhD in French Literature at UVa in 2008. She completed her BA and MA at FSU in 2006 and in 2008. Monica’s research interests include late medieval French Literature, women writers, and New Historicism/Cultural Studies. She wrote her MA thesis on the figure of the Sibyl in the writings of Christine de Pizan. More recently, she has completed research on the role of the lion in the Fables of Marie de France and the function of Toute-Belle’s portrait in Le livre du voir dit by Guillame de Machaut.

Beth Sutherland: Beth Sutherland entered UVa’s English doctoral program in 2009 and graduated from William and Mary with a BA in English and history.  Her still-broad interests include apophatic theology, Middle English saints’ lives, biblical exegesis, cultural medievalism, the semantic parallels between postmodern literary theory and medieval theological thought, insular romance, medieval and Early Modern travelogues, and creative writing.  She has done archival work at the Bodleian Library for a project on the medievalism of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and has written on negative theology in “The Clerk’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale.”  Beth is currently working on a manuscript of short stories with the working title A Postmodern Hagiography.  If she could snap her fingers and become Umberto Eco, she would.     

Victoria Valdes:I'm a second-year graduate student in the History of Art and Architecture program, specializing in Ottonian art. I am currently working on my masters' thesis, which is a feminist approach to the construction and meaning of metalwork created by the convent of Essen during the late 10th- and early 11th centuries. On a broader scale I am interested in the patronage and production of Ottonian women in general and their conception of womanhood within the context of Liudolfing rule.

Daniel Wasserman:Danny's broad interests lie in the history of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, especially Spain and its New World territories. Some more specific research interests include language and communication, the rise of the vernacular, popular access to knowledge, and censorship. His dissertation examines language policy (i.e. the question of what language authors could use in publishing their works) in the early modern Spanish world. It focuses on the rise of the vernacular and problems it posed for Catholic evangelization, especially the publication of catechisms, prayer books, and other religious aids. Danny has received research grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Together with classmates from the History department, he began an interdisciplinary colloquium for Early Modern Studies, and he is also a research assistant for the World of Dante website (http://www.theworldofdante.org).

Dolly Jørgensen (History): Dolly defended her dissertation "Private Need, Public Order: Late Medieval Urban Sanitation in England and Scandinavia" in March and graduated in May 2008. She is current a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture. She has published one article based on her dissertation already: "Cooperative Sanitation: Managing Streets and Gutters in Late Medieval England and Scandinavia", Technology & Culture 49, no. 3 (2008): 547-567. Another is forthcoming in 2009: "'All good rule of the Citee': Sanitation and civic government in England, 1400-1600," Journal of Urban History.

Abram Ring (Classics) (B.A. University of the South; M.A. University of Virginia): I am currently completing my Ph.D. dissertation on Heracles/Hercules in ancient Greek and Roman historiography. My classical interests extend to Greek and Latin prose and poetry (especially epic). In addition to my classical studies, I have devoted my time to various medieval Latin projects including my annotated translation of the epic poem, Waltharius (an online version hosted by Northvegr and a revised print version in the works with Edgar Kent), a translation of Alcuin's Propositiones (yet unpublished), and an on-going translation of the Res Gestae Saxonicae by Widukind of Corvey. Furthermore, I have contributed a number of annotated translations of entries to the Suda On Line Project which is an attempt to provide the first complete English translation of the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedic work called the Suda. I have also developed a computer program (Lector Latinus) designed to aid intermediate and advanced students of Latin in building their vocabulary faster. I hope that the program will aid medievalists who wish to improve their Latin proficiency, as it does have reasonably good support for medieval and ecclesiastical Latin vocabulary.