Visiting Academics

Current Visitors:

Past Visitors:

• Dr Marlene Hennessy (2011-12)
  Dr Marlene Villalobos Hennessy has taught English at Hunter College, the City University of New York, since 2004, where she is currently Associate Professor. She has edited a collection of essays, Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott. English Medieval Manuscripts:  Readers, Makers and Illuminators (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2009), and has published on late medieval English religious culture, Carthusian monasticism, and manuscript art.  At St Andrews she will be completing research on a reference work entitled An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII, c.1380 - c.1509: The Scottish Libraries and Collections, to be published by Harvey Miller/Brepols.  The volume is part of an ongoing series that aims to list and identify all illustrations contained in  manuscripts produced in the British Isles during the period, including informal images on catchwords, ascenders, descenders, and titles, as well as miniatures of all kinds. Every illustration is noted, from full-page miniatures and historiated initials to king’s heads, marginalia, and nota bene signs, as well as author portraits, theological diagrams, drawings of medical procedures and alchemical apparatus.  The project aims to help scholars and researchers navigate the Scottish libraries and collections, locate where images may be found, and facilitate further research, while providing information-sharing, convenience, and utility.  When not working on the Index, she will be finishing up a short monograph on devotion to the blood of Christ in late medieval England.

• Dr Ross Balzaretti (2010)
  Dr Ross Balzaretti has taught History at the University of Nottingham since 1990, where he is currently Associate Professor. His most recent book is Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, edited with Elizabeth Tyler (York). He has published widely in the fields of early medieval gender and sexuality, and was editor of Gender & History between 2004 and 2010. At St Andrews, he will be writing a short book, Liguria in the Early Middle Ages, to be published by Duckworth in a new series edited by Prof. Ian Wood. This will draw together written, archaeological and ecological sources. The current chapter titles are: 1. Ligurian Landscapes; 2. Archaeological approaches; 3. Written Sources and political change; 4. Case Study I: Genoa; 5. Case Study II: Vara Valley; 6. Liguria and Europe. He has been working on the history of Liguria since 1994, and a book of interdisciplinary essays Ligurian Landscapes (edited with Mark Pearce and Charles Watkins) was published by Accordia in 2004, in which he has an essay ‘The History of the Countryside in sixteenth-century Varese Ligure’. He will also be putting the final touches to his book on The Lands of St Ambrose: Monks and Society in Early Medieval Milan (Brepols).

• Professor Steve White (2007-8 & 2009-10)

• Dr Cynthia Neville (2009)
  Dr Cynthia Neville, George Munro Professor of History at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, was a visiting fellow in the Department of Mediaeval History from September to December 2009. She has published extensively on various aspects of the legal and social history of the Anglo-Scottish border lands in the later Middle Ages and, more recently, on the social and cultural encounter between Gaels and Europeans in Scotland in the period between 1100 and 1400. She is the author of two books: Violence,Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) and Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140-1365 (Four Courts Press, 2005). A third, entitled Land, Law and People in Medieval Scotland will be published by Edinburgh University Press in the fall of 2009. While in St Andrews she completed work on Volume Four of the Regesta Regum Scottorum: The Acts of Alexander III, the Guardians and John, 1249-1306 (forthcoming from EUP in 2010, with Alan Young) and on a comprehensive study of pardon in Scotland between 1100 and 1603.
• Dr Louise d' Arcens (2009)
  Louise is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures Program. She specialized in medieval literature at the University of Sydney in 1990, completing a PhD in 1997 on the concepts of political and literary authority in the writings of medieval women. Her two main research areas are medievalism and medieval women’s writing. Louise’s work on Australian medievalism examines the cultural and ideological role played by medievalism in colonial and former-colonial societies. Her work on Christine de Pizan focuses on Christine’s political writings, examining how Christine deploys notions of gender and ethnicity to formulate models of political action and to authorize her own intervention into the late medieval political sphere. Louise is currently finishing her book 'Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Australian Medievalism in the Nineteenth Century'.
  Louise was a Visiting Fellow at SAIMS for two weeks in October 2009, after she and Chris Jones won a grant from the British Academy and Australian Academy of the Humanities Joint Project Scheme to do collaborative work together on 'Fossil and Root: A Comparative Study of Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century British and Australian Poetry'. While she was at SAIMS, Louise also took part in 'The Middle Ages in the Modern World' Symposium. Chris will visit Louise and several of her medievalist colleagues in Australia in January 2010.
• Professor Stephen Kolsky (2009)
  Professor Stephen Kolsly is the visiting Mundus scholar in the School of Modern Languages for semester 1 2009-10. Since 2008 he has been a Principal Fellow in the School of Languages, in the University of Melbourne, having previously been Associate Professor and Reader in the Italian Department, where he has been working since 1982.
  His teaching has covered a wide area of Italian literature, from its origins to the 21st century, and he has supervised M.A.s and PhDs, and published research across this range of interests.
  His main publications are Mario Equicola. The Real Courtier, (1991); The Genealogy of Women. Studies in Boccaccio's “De mulieribus claris”, (2003); Courts and Courtiers in Renaissance Northern Italy, (2003); The Ghost of Boccaccio. Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy, (2005), as well as chapters and articles on a wide range of Italian literature, including recent work on the detective fiction writer Andrea Camilleri.
  He is currently working on the reception of sceptical philosophy in Italian Renaissance literature.
• Dr Christina Pössel (2008)
  Dr Christina Pössel is an early medieval historian, specialising in the Carolingian period. Whilst in St Andrews from September to December 2008, she was working on chapters of a book on 'Ritual, Text and Power in the Early Middle Ages', trying to figure out how changes in textual descriptions of rituals might have related to changing practices.
• Dr Siobhain Bly Calkin (2008)
  Dr Siobhain Bly Calkin, an Associate Professor in the English department at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, was a visiting fellow at St Andrews School of English from April to July 2008. Dr Calkin's research focuses on medieval romances, crusading texts and medieval western depictions of Muslims. She is the author of Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York: Routledge, 2005). Her visit was arranged as a staff research-leave exchange with Dr Rhiannon Purdie of St Andrews' School of English.
• Dr Maurizio Campanelli (2007-8)
  Dr Maurizio Campanelli of the Classics department of La Sapienza University Rome and the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo was a visiting fellow at the St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies from January to July 2008. Dr Campanelli has published extensively on medieval and renaissance texts, including books on the history of classical scholarship in the fifteenth century, the Florentine Libro del Chiodo, and the writings of Andrea Brenta, Domizio Calderini, and Marsilio Ficino. While in St Andrews he worked on fourteenth-century descriptions of Rome and also the Anonimo Romano.  His visit was funded by the Caledonian Research Foundation's European Visiting Research Fellowship, administered by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
  
  
• Professor Bill Miller (2007 & 2010)
  William Ian (Bill) Miller is Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.  In 2007 he was based at St Andrews as Carnegie Centenary Professor.  He is a leading scholar of Icelandic saga, his works including Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (1990) and Audun and the Polar Bear: Luck, Law, and Largesse in a Medieval Tale of Risky Business (2008).  He has also written a series of books on historical, social, and cultural aspects of the emotions, the Times Literary Supplement praising the 'interesting, innovative, and extremely original mind at work' in his 2003 volume Faking It.
  
• Dr Mia Munster Swendsen (2007)
  Mia Munster Swendsen is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen.  Her work focuses on the intellectual history of medieval Europe, with particular interest in Latin writers of the twelfth century and in legal thought.  She is one of the founders of the Carlsberg Academy series of conferences on European legal history.