To earn a master’s degree in medieval studies, Grissom, who uses they/them pronouns, devoted their master’s thesis to exploring the lives of anchorites, members of a Christian Monastic tradition primarily practiced by women from the 11th to the 16th century.

Anchorites voluntarily confined themselves to a tiny, windowless room attached to a church for the rest of their lives. The community supplied them with sustenance through one or two small windows, but their only source of interaction was daily Mass that they observed through a window looking into the church. Before they entered the room, they were declared “dead to the world.”

For their thesis, “‘Mi bodi henge wið þi bodi’: Dying with Christ in the Anchorhold,” Grissom’s analyzed two medival anchorite texts, Ancrene Wisse, and Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd that served as sort of instructional texts.

Senses and Sin

“I was wondering, ‘What in that restrictive process makes it so useful for their spiritual work, and how are their instructional texts helping them imagine their bodies differently in order to do that work?” said Grissom, who will graduate with a Master of Arts from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in May.

“In my research, I ended up thinking a lot about the senses because some medieval theologians and philosophers thought that women’s bodies were more connected with the senses, and through the senses, with sin.”

What stood out most in their analysis of the documents was that for an Anchorite, declaring themselves dead and embracing sensory deprivation was not the end of the story. By cutting off their traditional senses, the Anchorite was in fact awakening their “spiritual senses,” and growing closer to God.

“I was really surprised to see that there is this recuperation of the senses in spiritual work. Rather than just this straightforward narrative that medieval men are always suspicious of medieval women’s bodies and their senses, it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced,” they said.

Grissom was drawn to medieval studies because it offers the same sort of interdisciplinary scholarship that they enjoyed as an undergraduate majoring in English and history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There, they found themselves studying humanities at a science-heavy institution; and the experience gave them a greater appreciation for the interplay and blend of different disciplines.

Linguistics and Medieval Literature

Another draw for Grissom was the opportunity to delve deep into linguistics.

“A really big turning point for me was taking a history of the English language course. It was one of the coolest things I had ever done, getting to see how language changed over time,” they said. “It provided so many insights into the ways that we as people and societies change as well.”

In March, Grissom tied for second place in the GSAS three-minute thesis competition, an annual gathering where graduate students boil down their research projects for the general public.

Last year, they were the recipient of a GSAS Student Support Grant, a Mary Magdalen Impact Fellowship, which supported a research trip they took to Prague last summer, and a Fordham Jewish Studies Fellowship. In 2021, Grissom was also awarded a Loyola Fellowship, an award established by the Jesuits of Fordham that allowed them to develop digital humanities projects, run and attend language reading groups, co-organize a symposium, and develop and submit abstracts for conferences.

New Medievalists: Establishing the Diversity of the Past

In the fall, Grissom will be pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Rutgers University and plans to combat the misappropriation of medieval history by groups such as white supremacists who use Nordic runes to symbolize white supremacy.

“By showing that these are inaccurate uses of the past and that the past was a lot more diverse, a lot of us newer medievalists are trying to establish a historic precedent for the diversity of the present,” they said.

Andrew Albin, Ph.D., an associate professor of English who directed Grissom’s Fordham thesis, said their work illustrates a creative use of the few surviving materials to tell the story of the lived lives of people in the past.

“It humanizes people from the past who might feel really alien to us. The idea of choosing to wall yourself up inside a six-by-six cell for the rest of your life just so that you can pray feels kind of outlandish,” he said.

“It is a kind of practice that we don’t really have an imaginative space for anymore inside our culture. Rather than exoticize it and play up the kind of strangeness of it, [Grissom] tries to get inside the experience.”

Album said Grissom has also shown a knack for building community, reaching out to graduate students in the English Program and moderating panels at a conference for a New York area consortium of Medievalist scholars this month. He called them a natural-born teacher.

Equally important, he said, is Grissom’s commitment to addressing issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and disability.

“They have a really remarkable way of finding connections between those political commitments and the work that they do, and of making sure that there’s always a conversation between the kinds of questions that we care about today and how that impacts the kind of work that they take on,” he said.

At “Singing Truth to Power,” a medieval concert and roundtable discussion held on Oct. 5 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, performers and scholars used medieval songs to connect the music of the middle ages to present day issues. They also reflected on how music can inspire people to take action.

The event was co-presented by Fordham’s Department of Art History and Music, Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies, New York State’s Council on the Arts, and Alkemie, a medieval music ensemble group.

Some of the connections between today’s issues and medieval songs were made quite literally. As Alkemie performed medieval chants, Niccolo Seligmann, a performer with the group, inserted poems that added present-day commentary to the themes expressed in the songs.

“They tell us that their greed is good, tweeting atop the tower/They say, ‘work harder and you could join us and wield our power,” Seligmann recited between medieval songs, which were performed primarily in Old English and Old French. “They tell us their prosperity is earned through God’s just grace/They show the press their charity and warn us to pick up the pace. But those of us out on the streets engaged in mutual aid/can often barely make ends meet and expect no press parade.”

In the panel discussion that followed, Sian Ricketts, a performer with Alkemie, said the group has been trying to figure out how to best convey the messages, both past and current, in their work.

“Are we supposed to be making a political message as we engage with these materials of the past that are so overtly political? And we have to process what that means to project it into the world,” Ricketts said. “All the music on this program is all written by clerics, essentially people who are working in the system—they don’t have a lot of power; they had an education. And that’s the position we can really identify with, so I find it fascinating to grapple with that.”

Reflecting on Activism

For others, the concert made them reflect on their own activism and work in their daily lives.

“When I got the invitation to be a part of this panel, my initial reaction was to ask myself, ‘Am I an activist?’” Natalie Reynoso, a Ph.D. candidate studying the history of Christianity at Fordham said. “But I think for me, and maybe for many of us, the image of someone outside protesting is the image that often comes to mind. And it is not the way my activism looks in my work.”

Reynoso said the performance helped her reflect on how her work studying gendered violence in early Christianity can be considered activism.

“The questions that I ask are really where my activism comes in—who gets to be human in the ancient world and who doesn’t? Who gets left out? And my interest is in those who get left out and telling those stories,” she said.

Patrick DeBrosse, a Ph.D. candidate at Fordham currently studying the political culture of Latin Europe during the Middle Ages, said that the performance reminded him of one of his biggest sources for his dissertation—the music of troubadours from that time period.

“It’s full of protests essentially,” he said. “It’s one of the few places that you can really get perspectives on power, you can get critiques of power… I think this performance was a great way for me to sort of reflect back on the relationship between my sources and protest in general—who gets to protest? What’s the purpose of it?”

DeBrosse also said that the concert made him think back to how music was used in history to bring attention to an issue and “draw a crowd” around a performance.

“Sometimes I think we in the modern world forget that music does this so powerfully because we consume it through headphones,” he said. “In a pre modern society, all of the things we just heard are intended to be consumed, with a much bigger crowd of people who have chosen to … listen to and then go on to presumably comment on whatever message has been given to them by the singer.”

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Medieval Studies, said that the “lasting partnership” between the center, Fordham, and Alkemie has been very beneficial and has led to many “great events.”.

“It’s a great joy to be able to see that continuing, to be able to benefit from that partnership by being able to have events like this evening where we premiere new work,” he said.

“It’s common for historians and the general public to say that there are little to no sources about women from the past. There’s actually a ton of material, but it hasn’t been integrated into the way that we tell the history of the city,” said Gribetz, an associate professor of theology who was recently awarded a $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on her book. 

“I want to shift our focus away from the usual suspects—King David, Emperor Constantine, Sultan Salah ad-Din—and toward the many women who made contributions to the city,” she said. 

Jerusalem: A Feminist History will serve as a historical account of the city from Biblical times to the present—a period that spans more than 3,000 years. Instead of focusing on the city’s male leaders, it will highlight women from all social classes, from the queens of Jerusalem to enslaved women and servants from wealthy households, said Gribetz. 

A Heroine from the First Century

Among the featured women will be Helena of Adiabene, a first-century queen. A native of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Helena converted to Judaism and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When she arrived, the city was suffering from famine. She used her wealth to import figs and other agricultural products from nearby countries. Thanks to her philanthropic efforts, she became a beloved figure in Jerusalem, said Gribetz.

“Helena is a woman from outside of the city who becomes a hero within Jerusalem. In the many centuries after her death, Jews and Christians continue to tell stories about her,” Gribetz said. “She’s actually a relatively minor character in the first century, but she helps us see new things about the city’s history.”

The city of Jerusalem itself is often personified as a woman and depicted in feminine terms, Gribetz said. 

“In our earliest written sources about Jerusalem, people imagine the city as a sister, mother, partner, or widow. That personification of Jerusalem often happens when the city is in danger of coming under foreign rule or destruction in times of war,” Gribetz said. 

New Insights From Tombstones and Old Records

Gribetz said the inspiration for her book emerged during her first years at Fordham, when the Center for Medieval Studies asked her to teach a course on medieval Jerusalem. 

“I kept noticing women in ways that I had never thought about, in terms of Jerusalem’s history,” said Gribetz, who taught the course for several years, beginning in 2016. “At a certain point, I realized that the way I constructed my syllabus was in line with this very standard narrative of Jerusalem’s history, but there were many other ways to tell that history.”

In the following years, she received research grants and support from Fordham, including the theology department’s Rita Houlihan grant, which allowed her to research topics that led to her book. She is currently living in Jerusalem, where she is interviewing scholars and locals, participating in city tours, and studying texts at libraries, museums, and archives. The texts include funerary inscriptions on tombstones from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, as well as other archaeological remains, including from synagogues, churches, and mosques. 

“Our literary sources often focus more on men than women, so we have to get creative with the kinds of sources that we use to reconstruct history,” said Gribetz. “But there are still many ways to find traces of these women.” 

‘This History Belongs to Many Different People’

Through her book, Gribetz said she aims to push back against the idea that we’re limited in the kinds of stories we can tell. 

“If we’re creative with the questions we ask and the sources that we use, then we can tell history in a way that incorporates the stories of a much broader segment of the population, whether it’s in Jerusalem or in other cities or contexts,” said Gribetz, who has also written Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020). 

Gribetz will spend the coming few years writing the book, which will be published by Princeton University Press. In addition to exploring the history of women in Jerusalem, Gribetz said she also hopes that her book weaves together the stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and shows that the city’s diversity is a strength, rather than a liability. 

“I would like to think that my book may help encourage people in all these different communities to appreciate what a beautiful thing it is to share such a deep history with the city, rather than to compete over who has exclusive claims to it,” Gribetz said. “I hope that my book conveys how complicated, interesting, and beautiful this history is, and that this history belongs to many different people.”

“Many people don’t believe the Middle Ages are interesting. They only learn about that period through books, TV shows, and popular culture. But there’s so much influence on our world today that we don’t really see,” said Campagna, a master’s student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who is studying medieval studies. “Transcribing records—even property records, as boring as that may sound—is part of understanding how our modern world came to be.” 

Campagna grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where she loved reading historical novels with her father. But she said she never considered history as a legitimate career path until college. 

“My history classes opened my eyes to a different way of seeing the world,” said Campagna, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2020. “And Fordham has one of the best centers for medieval studies in the country. I met some incredible faculty and got involved with the community, and things took off from there.”

Signs of the Medieval Period at Rose Hill 

Campagna is a project manager for Medieval New York, a Fordham-based website that identifies how the medieval period has influenced modern-day New York City. Since last summer, Fordham students have been developing itineraries that highlight parts of the city that are inspired by the European Middle Ages, including dozens of Gothic churches, as well as remnants from the pre-colonial period that are still visible today. When complete, the itineraries will feature audio guides and augmented reality recreations of New York City during what we commonly view as the “medieval period” on the website, said Campagna. 

“A good example is the Met Cloisters, a medieval art museum in Manhattan that’s partially composed of old structures from Europe. So you have this combination of the Middle Ages and medievalism sitting in an old-growth forest in the middle of present-day New York City,” said Campagna. 

The medieval period also reveals itself on Fordham’s campus, she added. 

“Keating Hall is an example of medieval-inspired architecture. Fordham, Columbia, and City College of New York all have this super Gothic style with buildings meant to remind us of castles,” Campagna said, adding that Gothic style is characteristic of the Middle Ages. “A lot of people associate the Middle Ages with the birth of the university as we know it, like Oxford and Cambridge, but also with a certain kind of scholarship and history that we see as legitimate. We still pull from that architectural style in order to call back to that time and project a certain image of authority.” 

Surprising Findings on Women in Medieval London

Campagna is also involved with Medieval Londoners, an online catalog of all identifiable people who lived in London during the Middle Ages. She collects and organizes data and then uploads it to the main website, which is accessible to the general public. 

“It’s a collective biography. This is pretty popular in medieval studies because you often don’t have a lot of information about one individual. But if you have a little bit of information about a lot of people within a certain social group, you can learn about what their lives might have been like by looking at all of them in aggregate,” Campagna said.    

The Medieval Londoners project inspired her undergraduate thesis, for which she studied the lives of elite women who lived in medieval London. 

“Through archival records, I saw that when a wealthy husband died, his wife often took over their business. If she married again, her new husband could take over that business. But he needed her input because of her experience and skills,” Campagna said. “It was exciting to me that women were so involved in the economic system during this time.” 

Her current master’s thesis also draws from life in medieval London. For part of her thesis, she is creating a crowdsourcing project called Get to Know Medieval Londoners, where she will train volunteers to transcribe medieval property records and collect data that will be used to better understand life in the medieval period. The data will then be uploaded to the Medieval Londoners website, which is open to the public. 

“The goal is less about the actual research, and more about collaboration and accessibility. In this country and across the world, there’s all this incredible research that only other scholars will read. I think it’s valuable to make sure that this research has a wider purpose, instead of being hoarded inside the academic system,” said Campagna, who will defend her master’s thesis this summer. 

Dismantling Academic Stereotypes

Campagna’s research is intertwined with the digital humanities, an academic field that uses the latest technology to answer traditional scholarly questions. She is among a growing group of students who are merging medieval studies with the digital humanities, said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., associate professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval Studies. 

“Grace is one of the first students in our program to have a formal minor field in digital humanities and to be writing a thesis squarely on a digital topic,” Paul said. “Her work is very exciting and cutting edge and points the way not only to the future of projects like these, but also the humanities.” 

Campagna said she appreciates how the digital humanities make research more accessible to a 21st-century audience. 

“I was really drawn to that format of researching history. It’s very collaborative and accessible, not just one person sitting alone in a library with a lamp, poring over old manuscripts,” she said, chuckling. “I want to keep working with medieval documents, possibly for a digital humanities center, and present them in a way that is interesting and accessible—where people can actually learn something from them.” 

“With the pandemic, the possibility of a physical conference collapsed, and so we decided that we would look for something more timely, something that would be useful, both intellectually but also pedagogically,” said W. David Myers, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham and a member of the Board of Directors of the  Renaissance Society, which relocated to the Rose Hill campus last year.

As historians, they did what they are trained to do: They brought the past into the present.

The new symposium, titled “Plagues, Pandemics, and Outbreaks of Disease in History” will take place virtually on Friday, Nov. 13, beginning at 10 a.m. The symposium is free but participants need to register in advance.

Myers said the goal of the symposium is to show how history helps us see the current moment, as well as how the current moment can help us understand the past.

“What can we bring to the study of the modern pandemic, from our historical experience, but just as much, what can we bring to the study of past plagues?” he said. “ How will this experience–as human beings in this sad world at the moment–alter or affect the way we study?”

The morning session will feature a round table on the intellectual and scholarly significance of the present moment in historical terms. The participants–Hannah Marcus, Ph.D. (Harvard), Colin Rose, Ph.D. (Brock University, Ontario), and Lisa Sousa, Ph.D. (Occidental College)–are experts in the global consequences of plagues from the Black Death in Europe to smallpox in the conquest of the Americas.

Central to the planning of the symposium, Myers said, has been Christina Bruno, associate director of the Center for Medieval Studies and a Fordham Ph.D. in medieval history who has also published in Renaissance Quarterly.

Myers said the event, which is co-sponsored by the society as well as Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies and the Departments of Art History and Music, Classics, and History, will also allow graduate students at Fordham to present and discuss their work in front of an international audience.

Rachel Podd, a Ph.D. student in history; Camila Marcone, an M.A. student in medieval studies; Mark Host, an M.A. student in medieval studies; and Katherina Fostana, the visual resources curator in art history will participate in the session called “Developing Pedagogy: Roundtable and Discussion.”

Some of these students will talk about how they’ve taught materials on the plague and other historic pandemics to their classrooms in the New York City area. A few of their examples will be presented at the symposium, including how Podd gave a lecture for high school students in the spring on the Black Death plague and Marcone put together a project on the plague for a high school in New Jersey.

“We’re showing that our students really are reaching out to the community and recognizing that education at the university and college level is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

“[Our scholars] are trying to incorporate a whole world of study, from archeology to medical study to our history, in order to help students today understand the historical experience and place themselves in history somehow,” Myers said. The partnership between Fordham and the Renaissance Society of America helps bring together scholars from across the world and helps to elevate the work of Fordham graduate students, he said.

“[Renaissance Society of America] gets to tap a population of scholars and the population of students and workers who are vibrant and energetic and interesting,” Myers said. “It brings an internationally important and significant organization in the humanities into the world of Fordham and allows us to tap that experience.”

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic upended instruction for both classes, but on May 6, the two were able to come together for a one-time collaboration that dramatically expanded the high school students’ understanding of the similarities between the Black Plague and the current pandemic.

Clark e-mailed Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies in April, which connected him to Podd, a Ph.D. candidate in history who had since moved back home to Dallas and was teaching remotely at the time.

Podd, whose dissertation focuses on how medieval people understood disease and how it affected the practice of medicine, recorded a 20-minute lecture for the high school students to watch on their own. She also assigned them reading such as a selection from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron recounting the author’s experience of plague in Florence, and several current news articles on COVID in New York that focused on areas of commonality, such a rise in xenophobia and a breakdown in the rituals of death and dying.

She’d also taught a class at Fordham in the fall titled Plagues and Peoples: The History of Disease in Medieval Europe and was able to repurpose material for a high school audience. On May 6, she, Clark, and 50 students logged on to Google Meet for a 90-minute Q&A session.

“The major thing I wanted to highlight was that even though the Black Death seems so remote and has nothing to say to us today, with our smartphones and internet, and everything that’s so advanced, in reality communities and societies almost always respond the same way to moments of intense stress,” she said, noting that attacks and wars elicit similar responses.

“The way that societies respond is they harden boundaries that can be geographic, as with quarantines, or social. So the boundaries between who is in and who is out, and who is acceptable and who is not also become harsher. That was true for the Black Death, and it’s true for communities experiencing COVID-19.”

There other parallels as well. Doctors wore masks during the 14th century just as they do today, except theirs had a distinct bird head-like appearance.

“The point was that the beak acted like a reservoir for spices or sponges filled with vinegar, and it was supposed to keep the doctor from having to smell the bodies sick with the plague, because it was thought that that smell was one of the ways that it was transferred,” she said.

“The mask allowed him to keep his hands free while treating people. So, it’s not all that different from today.”

Clark said the idea of inviting a scholar from a local university to address his class came about as he was trying to think of ways to make remote learning more interesting for his students.

“It really was a fortuitous coupling of her expertise with where I was in the curriculum at that time, because she brings a comprehensive knowledge of medicine in the Medieval world in England, and the Black Death,” he said.

“I thought it was awesome that she was able to draw together the past and the current predicament that we’re in.”

The question and answer session on May 6 was the best attended live meeting of the semester, he said.

“It was really valuable for the students to see what a studied person can bring to a dynamic context like a Q&A session, where anything can be thrown at the expert,” he said.

Another major lesson from the plague that Podd emphasized turned out to be especially relevant. Just 19 days after the meetup, George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer ignited worldwide protests against racism. Although the Black Death was immeasurably painful, she noted that it allowed for considerable social reform, including increased female entry into the workforce and rising social mobility.

“I am in no way trying to minimize the intense suffering,” she said, “but if we look for a silver lining, there really is one. And that is that these moments of extreme stress are an opportunities for a reevaluation of what our values are.”

The Black Lives Matter protests are so intense she noted, because of the justifiably intense feelings that the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Floyd, and others engendered. But it’s also worth noting that some protestors lost jobs due to the pandemic, and that gave them the opportunity to join protests they might have otherwise not attended.

“It’s kind of hard to see the good in this, but this gives us a chance to lobby for a more just, more equitable world,” she said.

The grants, which are for $60,000 and will last for 12 months, will allow both of them to undertake ambitious new research projects.

Translated Texts of the Church Fathers

Bruce, a professor of history, will use his grant to launch The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition, a massive cataloging project that could take as long as a decade to complete.

His research revolves around monastic communities that thrived during the Middle Ages. To understand people who lived then, scholars rely on texts written in medieval Latin. Up until now, texts from that time that are translated from other languages into Latin have been overlooked, he said.

He’s identified over 90 authors who’ve been translated from Greek into Latin. Many were Christian authors who wrote mainly about theology, church doctrine, and heresy. These “patristics,” as they’re known, were considered “church fathers” at the time.

“While there have been studies on the Greek church fathers and the writing they’ve done in Greek, there’s been almost no study of how those works were translated into Latin, and how those Latin texts were read and understood in medieval Europe,” Bruce said.

“People just think ‘Oh well, it’s just a translation, and it can’t be that important. What can it really tell us?’ But the fact that people went to the pains of translating Greek into Latin and continued to read and copy these texts over the course of the Middle Ages is important.”

Since there is currently no centralized catalogue that researchers can use to access these texts, Bruce wants to create one from scratch. He’s already begun the work compiling and writing entries with help from Kasey Fausak, a Fordham Ph.D. candidate in Medieval History, who is supported by a professional development grant from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The N.E.H. has been really generous in providing funding for this. It’s basically ground work humanities—going into the manuscripts, finding texts, and presenting them in a way that’s legible and will foster future research,” he said.

Slavery in the Atlantic World

For Miki, an associate professor of history, the grant will give her time to write Brazilian Atlantic: Archives and Stories of Illegal Slavery, a book about illegal slavery in the 19th-century Atlantic World that she has been working on for several years. The project, which she described during a 2018 research seminar at the Rose Hill campus, is a narrative history of the slave trade of Brazil in the mid-1800s that punctures the idea that slavery was primarily a United States-based phenomenon that was abandoned by then, with the triumph of abolitionist movements.

“Not only do we mostly hear about the U.S. South instead of Brazil or Cuba, but the U.S. North is often considered the place of liberty, where fugitives traveling on the underground railroad fled to,” she said.

“But if you look at illegal slave trade records, it turns out that a lot of the financing for [the ships that carried slaves]  came from New York City and Boston.”

Dispelling myths about slavery is something Miki has a lot of experience with. Her last book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), tackled common perceptions of slavery in Brazil. Last year, the American Historical Association awarded it the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history.

“I’m interested in questioning these big stories that we take for granted,” she said.

The narrative of Brazilian Atlantic will center around the Mary E. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured in Brazil in 1856, she said. It will be a character-driven book modeled somewhat on Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, (Vintage, 1994). The challenge, she said, is figuring out a way to weave together stories of characters as disparate as the slave ship’s captain, the financiers, and the enslaved passengers, most of whom were never accurately identified in the manifest of the Mary E. Smith.

As a historian, she said, it is her responsibility to resist the desire to write a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

“We want a clean arc of a story that’s satisfying. But those of us who work in the history of slavery know we can’t get that. The archives are full of gaps, because the people who sold slaves saw them as merchandise,” she said.

“Rather than glossing over them to try to tell a story that goes from point A to point B in the end, I want to write something that also captures those questions. If you’re making a jacket or a dress, do you only see the outside of the beautiful clothes? What if you actually saw the craftsmanship, the seams and how things are made? Maybe making those things visible is part of the process. These processes are important to understanding slavery itself.”

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article and the works resulting from the grants do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The International Symposium on Digital Scholarship took place from June 3 to 5 at Birkbeck College and Fordham’s London Centre. Sponsored by the University’s Office of Research, it featured a mix of lectures, workshops, and formal and informal gatherings geared toward furthering research opportunities and international collaborations.

If last year’s gathering illustrated how cross-border collaboration is key to tackling vexing challenges of our time, the London gathering showed how, in the digital realm, no one discipline can go it alone.

Bringing Technology and Scholarship Together

“Digital scholarship is notable for its interdisciplinary nature, since it involves not only IT and computer science, but also the humanities, social sciences, and schools of education,” said Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., the academic coordinator for the digital symposium.

The Joseph Fitzpatrick S.J. Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies and curator of Fordham’s Medieval Sources Bibliography, Kowaleski has deep connections to both London and the digital humanities.

In London, she delivered a keynote address, “Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: Acknowledging Collaborative Work in Digital Scholarship Projects.” She also presented a research project that touches on both London and the digital realm, titled “Prosopography, Database Design, and Linked Data in the Medieval Londoners Project.”

The project is a collaboration with Katherina Fostano, visual resources coordinator in the department of Art History, and Kowaleski said it was notable that Fostano presented at the conference, as did Elizabeth Cornell, Ph.D., director of communications at Fordham’s department of information technology. Adding professional staff such as librarians and graduate students to the mix, was key to the conference’s success, she said.

“One of the things that my research shows, and that I have experienced, is how crucial librarians are to digital efforts now. I’m grateful that Fordham has included them in this program,” she said.

London and New York, Working as a Team

Representing the Graduate School of Education (GSE), Professor of Childhood Special Education Su-Je Cho, Ph.D, and doctoral student Kathleen Doyle jointly presented “Using a Digital Learning Platform to Increase Levels of Evidence-Based Practices in Global Teacher Education Programs.” It detailed Project REACH, a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that makes widely available the best evidence-based practices for training prospective teachers.

George Magoulas, Ph.D., Alex Poulovassilis, Ph.D., and Andrea Cali, Ph.D., members of Birkbeck College’s Knowledge Lab, helped them collect and analyze data through the website.

Working with a partner in London made sense for this project, Cho said, because one of her goals is for Project REACH to get more use internationally. She, Doyle, and the GSE’s Alesia Moldavan, Ph.D., assistant professor of mathematics education, will collaborate with Christine Edwards-Leis, Ph.D., associate dean of research, and enterprise and doctoral student Jennifer Murray from St. Mary’s College in London on a new endeavor geared toward student teachers’ mental health. Once finished, it will be incorporated into Project REACH.

“The student teaching experience is very stressful, because it’s not their own classroom they have to student teach in. It’s someone else’s classroom. By providing this kind of platform, they can also share their concerns and knowledge and frustrations with the students overseas,” she said.

For Doyle, the trip was an opportunity to see how colleagues from other disciplines assemble collaborative teams.

“I really appreciated learning across the fields. Being in the Graduate School of Education, I’ve been mainly focused on that field. It was refreshing to hear about the other ways digital scholarship is utilized in other disciplines,” she said.

Urban Challenges That Cross Borders

Gregory T. Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, presented “Keeping Place in ‘Smart’ Cities: Situating the Settlement House as a Means of Knowing and Belonging in the Informational City.” The project, which he is developing with the assistance of Melissa Butcher, Ph.D., reader in social and cultural geography at Birkbeck College, will highlight the efforts of New York City’s Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center and London’s Toynbee Hall.

The project will focus on the “settlement house” model of community center that was founded a century ago to confront segregation and displacement and promote belonging.

“New York City and London are examples of global cities that are going through significant technological change, both in terms of the cities themselves becoming more digitized as well as the economy and the kinds of jobs and the kinds of education that’s being elevated. With that comes all kinds of difficult changes and gentrification that causes displacement,” said Donovan, who is also organizing November symposium at Fordham called Mapping (in)justice.

“We’re going to look at how we might network [Lincoln Square and Toynbee] through digital technology and think about how they’re managing to keep pace in these communities that are often being displaced in this kind of digital gentrification.”

When she lies down to sleep at night, she’s in the 21st century. But during the day, Barnhouse is firmly ensconced in centuries long past.

Barnhouse, who is earning a doctorate in history on May 20 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has long been interested in questions about how law, the practice of the religious life, and social expectations of men and women intersect in the Middle Ages.

“I’ve been fascinated by stories about the Middle Ages since I was young enough to be falling out of trees while pretending to be Robin Hood,” she said.

She’s also been interested in medieval health. In her dissertation, “The Elusive Medieval Hospital: Mainz and the Middle Rhine Region,” Barnhouse researched four independent hospitals in Mainz, Germany: a 12th-century foundation, another hospital established by women forced to leave that foundation, a leper hospital, and a private foundation that functioned in the 1350s. She explored the seldom-examined comparisons between leper hospitals and other hospitals.

She said that leper hospitals have often been treated in scholarship as a separate category, distinct from multipurpose hospitals. Such a division is more a modern construction than actual history, however, as all kinds of medieval hospitals were legally defined as religious institutions. Therefore, she argues that “the regulation of medieval leper hospitals was not driven primarily by any fear of the disease.”

“The history of medieval hospitals remains quite fragmented even as it grows,” said Barnhouse, who visited Mainz on a Fulbright Fellowship from 2013 to 2014.

“I’m attempting to provide a basis for further synthesis that will enable us to incorporate medieval hospitals into our larger hospital history, to get a longer view of health care, and to avoid isolating the Middle Ages and making careless assumptions.”

Although it was the era’s vividness that piqued her initial interest in the medieval, what keeps Barnhouse coming back for more, she said, are the questions that don’t have obvious answers.

This coming fall, Barnhouse’s love of all things medieval will continue, as she’ll be teaching medieval history and literature as a visiting assistant professor at the College of Worcester.

She is also a founding member, along with Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge, of the podcast series Footnoting History. Since the series’ launch in February 2013, she has contributed 18 episodes on women’s history, medical history, opera, and British popular fiction of the early 20th century. It’s both an outlet for Barnhouse to talk about interests not directly connected to her research, and a model for establishing communication between academics and the public.

“At Footnoting History, not only do we tell cool stories of historical research, but we explain how we found them.”

The Oxford Outremer Map project is a collaboration among the center’s faculty, students, and fellows to restore a 13th-century map that depicts the coastline of the Crusader states, now modern-day Israel and Palestine. The map was likely made or copied by an English monk named Matthew Paris, said Laura K. Morreale, PhD, associate director of the center, and offers a glimpse into various—sometimes abstract—functions of medieval maps.

“It’s very different than how we understand maps today,” Morreale said. “Some of the locales are biblical, so they’re not recognizable in modern terms. A couple places even depict what the mapmakers thought would happen in the future. So, not only is it a practical map, it’s also a kind of visualization of what they hope will happen one day.

“That’s part of the larger conversation,” she said. “Maps should be approached the way you would approach a piece of literature. You don’t just look at the text, but you think about its context and the material reality that surrounded it.”

When Nicholas Paul, PhD, an associate professor of history, encountered the map reproduction as part of the center’s French of Outremer digital humanities initiative, he found the document in poor condition. Besides suffering the expected wear-and-tear over eight centuries, the map had been drawn on the back of a used sheet of parchment. Over time, the colors on the front bled through and obscured Matthew’s drawings and notes.

For years the map was overlooked by medieval scholars, despite its depiction of an important region. Hoping to make it legible again, Paul and Tobias Hrynick, a doctoral student in history, brought the map to the Medieval studies center, where then-graduate student Rachel Butcher, GSAS ’15, worked to spruce it up in Photoshop.

The result is a full, colorized digital version of the map, complete with interactive features and annotations written by the graduate students and fellows.

“It’s not just digitally presented—it’s digitally enabled scholarship,” Morreale said. “It’s user-guided, so users can interact with the map on their own terms. There’s also a discussion section, where users can write in with their input, and there’s a ‘mysteries of the map’ section, where we list the parts of the map we haven’t yet been able to identify. We’re encouraging people to write in if they have some knowledge about these.”

At a colloquium on April 9, scholars discussed the significance of both the map itself—including its relevance to medieval cartography and whether Matthew Paris was indeed its author—and how scholars can use the digital restoration to maximize teaching and research.

“We’re in the process of creating a module for people who want to use this map in classrooms,” Morreale said. “That, in my mind, has been one of the greatest aspects of this project. We were able to take a discussion in our office and project it out into the larger, scholarly world. It’s now accessible to anyone who is interested, with just a few clicks.”

The event will take place on Tuesday, April 14 at 7 p.m. in Fordham’s McGinley Hall, Room 237, on the Rose Hill campus.

The panel will be composed of alumni from medieval studies, philosophy, theology and history whose careers range from business consulting to fundraising.

“The students who study these type of subjects and go out into the work world are often amazed by the social benefit the background gives them,” said Laura Morreale, the center’s associate director.

Christopher Adams, GSAS ’11, now a software engineer at the payment app Vemo, majored in philosophy. He said that his background was often an icebreaker during interviews.

“It doesn’t disqualify me,” he said of his major. “There’s a fear sometimes of majoring in something that might limit your options, but it is actually very impressive to a potential employer because they see it and think, ‘What an interesting background.’”

At last year’s panel Brian Klinzing, GSAS ’96, senior director of corporate and foundation relations at the BrightFocus Foundation, said that his job brings him into contact with fascinating people on a daily basis, including several Nobel Prize winners.

Morreale said that the gathering also functions as a homecoming of sorts for the alumni. She described the tone at times as almost confessional.

“They come back to the academic setting and say, ‘I was passionate about an academic career when I was in school, but find I’m happy with where my studies and my career have taken me,’” she said. “The event helps our current students be more aware of the marketable skills they are getting along the way.”

This year’s panel includes:

Peter Slonina, GSAS ’10, associate at the management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton

Jennifer Speed, PhD, GSAS ’09, grant coordinator at the University of Dayton

Abigail Weinberg, GSAS ’02, outreach librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library

Heather Wightman, GSAS ’99, Lion Heart Autographs

Rob Vosburgh, GSAS ’99, gift planning director at the University of Pennsylvania