“Reading Old French”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
17-20 July 2023 • Remote

Welcome to the 2023 Summer Skills “Reading Old French” Seminar.
Below you will find a directory of participants and the program schedule.
This course is meant to be very much a collective, collaborative effort, and we hope that not only will you gain some proficiency with reading Old French, but that you will also meet fellow scholars who share similar interests and may be future collaborators.
Therefore, we would encourage you to visit the participant pages and reach out to anyone whose work piques your interest.
In the interests of confidentiality and privacy, these pages are accessible only by password; please do not share your password or distribute or share the contents of these pages.

Participant Impressions

“It was a great course. An excellent combination of grammar and varied texts. It was quite intensive, but I am amazed at how much we were able to do and learn in such a short period of time. Charlie was excellent. Well prepared; clear in presentation; gracious; patient, and very knowledgeable.”

“The course was incredibly interesting and educational. I enjoyed the verity of the academic level of the participants, it enriched the course and the learning process. In addition, the encounter with the different kinds of sources was helpful and renewed my interest with each meeting (even as late as 11:00 PM). Prof. Samuelson was a great and attending teacher. His instructions were clear and incredibly helpful, and he managed to create a supportive and encouraging learning environment in the little time we had.”

“Charlie was an outstanding instructor. It must be hard to start from ground zero, even with motivated students. He approached our various skill levels with patience and understanding. I'd take a second course from him in a heartbeat.”

“This course was fantastic. I’m not sure how Charlie managed to pack so much into four days and have it be so well organized. This was a really excellent introduction that got me started reading Old French texts.”

Program

The course will be was via ZOOM.

Monday, 17 July 2023
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.     Introduction. Old French grammar, dialects, and literature.
2.     Marie de France’s Anglo-Normand

Tuesday, 18 July 2023
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.     Trouvère lyrics
2.     Chansons de geste 

Wednesday, 19 July 2023
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.     The Old French of Chrétien de Troyes
2.     Prose romance 

Thursday, 20 July 2023
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.     Vernacular hagiography and religious texts
2.     Didactic texts from (in particular) the Latin Orient

Faculty

Prof. Charlie Samuelson (Dept. of French and Italian, University of Colorado Boulder) is a specialist of medieval French literature. His research uses close textual analysis and looks to both medieval learned culture and modern theory to take to task entrenched notions about the gender and sexual politics of medieval texts. His monograph, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature appeared in 2022 with the Ohio State University Press. He is currently working on a new project about representations of sexual consent in medieval French literature and culture.

Participants

Richard Barton
(History, University of North Carolina Greensboro)

I’m an Associate Professor of History at UNC Greensboro, where I’ve taught since 1998. My early publications focused on lordship and aristocratic society in 11th-century western France (Maine, Anjou and the Touraine), and mostly depended on my reading of Latin monastic charters and chronicles. In the last five years, my research interests have shifted into the 13th century, where, increasingly, Old French was used in legal and administrative contexts. Some of my publications include: Lordship in the County of Maine, c.890-1160 (Boydell and Brewer, 2004); "'Zealous Anger' and the Renegotiation of Aristocratic Relationships in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France," in Anger’s Past: the Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 153-170; “Emotions and Power in Orderic Vitalis,” Anglo-Norman Studies 33 (2011 for 2010), 41-59; “Enquête, Exaction and Excommunication: Experiencing Power in Western France, c.1190-1245,” Anglo-Norman Studies 43 (2021 for 2020), 177-196; and “The Politics of Witnessing: Enquêtes as a Technique of Power in Thirteenth-Century France,” Haskins Society Journal, forthcoming.

Tracey L. Billado-Lotson
(History, Queens College, CUNY) 

Tracey L. Billado-Lotson is Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. She completed her PhD dissertation, “The Politics of ‘Evil Custom’ in Eleventh-Century Anjou” at Emory University. She is author of “Rhetorical Strategies and Legal Arguments: ‘Evil Customs’ and Saint-Florent de Saumur, 979-1011” (in Jaritz and Richter, eds., Oral History of the Middle Ages) and co-editor of Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White. Her current research interests include lordship, customs, dispute-processing, and unfreedom in eleventh-century western France. She is currently researching inter-monastic disputes in eleventh-century western France.

Laurie Brand
(International Relations and Middle East Studies, University of Southern California)

Laurie A. Brand is Professor Emerita of Political Science & International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California (USC), where she was a member of the faculty from 1989 until her retirement in May 2021.  From 2009 until 2021 she held the Robert Grandford Wright Professorship of International Relations and Middle East Studies at USC, where she also served as Director of the Center for International Studies (1997-2000), Director of the School of International Relations (2006-2009), and Chair of the Middle East Studies program (2007-2009, 2014-2017).  Brand is a four-time Fulbright grantee, and the recipient of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and numerous other fellowships.  She is author of Palestinians in the Arab World (Columbia, 1988), Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations (Columbia, 1994), Women, the State and Political Transitions (Columbia, 1998), Citizens Abroad (Cambridge, 2006), and Official Stories (Stanford, 2014).  A former president of the Middle East Studies Association (2004), she has chaired its Committee on Academic Freedom since 2007, and she has served as a member of the board of trustees of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Doha, Qatar since 2015.    

Katie Despeaux
(History, University of New Mexico)

Katie Despeaux is entering her first year of the History PhD program at the University of New Mexico. Katie earned her Master of Science degree in Clinical Psychology in 2018 from Loyola University Maryland and her Masters of Art in both French and History from the University of New Mexico in 2023. Her thesis, “A Randomized Controlled Trial Assessing the Efficacy of Group Psychological First Aid” was published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 2019. Katie now studies the medieval French Mediterranean, her research concentrating on gender and power in this region during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Omer Rose Elmakais
(History, Tel Aviv University)

My name is Omer Elmakais and I’m a Medieval History graduate student in Tel Aviv University. In addition, I have a bachelor’s degree in history and art History from the same institution. Currently, I’m exploring Caroline Walker Bynum's theory about sacred objects (as presented in her book Dissimilar Similitudes), and the ways it can further the understanding of the relationship between materiality and women mystics and accused witches.

Matthew Gorey
(Religious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder)

I am currently an Assistant Professor in Classics at Wabash College, a small liberal arts college in Crawfordsville, IN. I received my Ph.D. in Classics in 2017 from the University of Washington (Seattle) and I taught as a visiting professor at Bucknell University and Puget Sound before landing at Wabash, where I teach a mix of courses in Latin, Ancient Greek, and ancient Mediterranean literature and history. In my research I am broadly interested in uses of figurative language and metaphor in Greco-Roman literature. Beyond antiquity, I also work on receptions of classical literature in early modern Portuguese and Spanish.

Eliezer Grunwzeig
(History, University of Tel-Aviv)

I’m an MA student in the History Department at Tel-Aviv University. My current research interest focus on what can be learned, from various medieval texts about the pilgrimage to Compostela on the French way between the 11th and 14th centuries, about the medical aspect of the pilgrimage phenomenon. The medieval texts as used in the research are based on formal, hagiographical and literary (chanson de gestes) corpuses. In my previous career I worked as an industrial engineer.

Jesse Izzo
(Islamic Studies, Stanford University)

Jesse Izzo is a medievalist whose research and teaching explore the connected histories of Western Europe, the Near East, and Inner Asia from late antiquity to the age of the Crusades. He has published articles in The Haskins Society Journal and Crusades, while his work has been supported by the Fulbright program, the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program, the Irving and Helen Betz Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, the Hill Manuscript Museum and Library, and the Fresno Institute for Classical Armenian Translation. His current book project, Franks and Mamluks: Diplomacy, Politics, and War in Medieval Syria, is a study of relations between the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in the thirteenth century. Izzo has been a Lecturer and Visiting Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University since Fall 2019, having taught previously in the history departments at the University of Miami (FL) and Quinnipiac University (CT). Prior to that he was a Visiting Fellow with the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (2016), an M.Phil from Cambridge University, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Peter Mahoney
(Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Stonehill College)

Associate Professor of Spanish and Medieval Iberian Studies Peter Mahoney's research chiefly focuses on legendary-epic texts and their intersection with medieval law and politics, their relationship with Spanish and Portuguese chronicles, and their characters’ reprisals in 15th-century ballads. He is in the early stages of a book project tentatively titled The Age of Heroes: The Formation and Formulation of Spain’s Glorious Past wherein he explores how several texts and their heroes were used throughout the Middle Ages to forge a unified “national” past, and how these texts—and their retellings—have led modern scholars to understand the epic genre. Mahoney served as a collaborating editor of A Companion to “Poema de mio Cid” (Brill, 2018) and has completed The Seven Knights of Lara: Text, Context, and Translation (Juan de la Cuesta, 2019), a study and annotated translation of the Siete infantes de Lara. His studies have been published in journals including Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques Médiévales, La Corónica, Romance Quarterly, and Bulletin of Spanish Studies as well as in edited volumes.

Marie Sarnacki
(History, Eastern Michigan University)

I am currently a master’s student in history at Eastern Michigan University, where I am completing a thesis that explores the origins of government-administered child welfare policy in the 19th-century United States. My historical interests are wide and varied, however, and the cultural history of medieval France is near and dear to my heart. I have been recognized for several different pieces of academic writing, winning Phi Alpha Theta’s George P. Hammond Prize for Best Graduate Student Essay and receiving honorable mention from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the 2021 Graduate Student Essay Prize competition. In addition to my work at EMU, I have a master’s degree in secondary education from the University of Arizona and teach high school English and history at South Lyon East High School in South Lyon, Michigan.

Yasmine Segol
(History: Tel Aviv University)

My name is Yasmine Segol, I acquired my B.A in General History from Tel Aviv University, and am currently working on my Master's degree in Early Modern European History, under the supervision of Prof. Tamar Herzig. My fields of interest include Queer history, history of sexuality, religious history and in general the history of the irregular, anomalous individual and phenomenons. I work as a Reserch Assistant at the Daniel S. Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies at the TAU Faculty of Humanities, directed by Prof. Nadine Kuperty-Tsur. I also had the opportunity to work as a research assistant at the ISF (Israel Science Foundation) Project "Queer Israel: 1970-2000", supervised by Prof. Moshe Sluhovsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Prof. Yuval Yonay (Haifa University) and Dr. Michal Shapira (Tel Aviv University), focusing on Lesbian history in Israel/Palestine. Later this year [2023] , an article I wrote is expected to be published in the Leshem Shinui Journal, the TAU Department of History Journal. The proposed title is "Women as Historical Writers in Sixteenth Century France: The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre" (Tel Aviv: Leshem Shinui Journal, Vol 3). [Hebrew]

Dan Selden
(Literature: University of California Santa Cruz)

Born in New York, but raised in Cleveland, Ohio, a community that was both racially and ethnically extremely mixed, I began traveling the world at an early age--factors that no doubt underlie my professional interest in intercultural poetics.  I did took both my undergraduate degrees (Italian Literature, History of Art) and did my graduate work (Comparative Literature) at Yale in the heyday of deconstruction.  The advisors  that I have listed below all left an indelible mark on my thinking.  My first job brought me back to New York and then, after a year in Los Angeles at the J. Paul Getty Center, I accepted a post at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose leftist orientation and open encouragement to cross borderlines has proved a indispensable to my work.  Except for intermittent stints of guest teaching elsewhere (Stanford, Emory, Padova), I chose to stay at UCSC for the remainder of my career.  A two-year visiting professorship at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago allowed me to perfect my command of Egyptian, as well as West and South Semitic languages.  As a Comparatist, I have worked and published on all periods of Levantine, Mediterranean, and European literary history from antiquity through the present.  Since my days as a graduate student when I studied with Donald Crafton, I have retained a commitment to teaching film history and theory at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  The bulk of my published work constitutes interventions in various fields and sub-fields of literary study which attempt to take stock of what sorts of questions are being asked and why, primarily in the hopes setting research in these areas on a better track.

Kaeli Waggener
(University of Colorado Boulder)

Kaeli is an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Medieval studies is of particular interest to them within the departments of Art History and French, and has been the motivation for starting the Medievalists of Boulder (MOB) student organization on campus. They are currently an employee of Rare and Distinctive Collections in Norlin Library, focusing on making the university’s vast collection of fairy tales accessible online through a detailed database.