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After
completing my B.A. in German, Linguistics, and Psychology
at Queen's University, Canada in 1990, I spent a year
teaching English in the small town of Oerlinghausen,
Germany on a pedagogical exchange program. In the course
of that year, I decided to continue my studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. There I completed
an M.A. in Germanic Linguistics and a Ph.D. in German
literature, concentrating on medieval and early modern
cultures. After receiving my doctorate in 1998, I took
up my current position in the Department of Germanic
Languages at the University of North Carolina.
My doctoral work grew in a rather indirect way out of
a paper on rituals of arrival in the "Nibelungenlied"
that I wrote for a conference. This paper generated
my interest in ritual and representation, and I started
looking more closely at the overtly visual quality of
high medieval narratives that emphasize performance,
display and self-representation. These and other forms
of communication seemed to be at issue in Wolfram von
Eschenbach's "Willehalm," so that this text became the
centerpoint of my dissertation on word, image, and performance.
The dissertation considered the ways in which interaction
and communication are represented on every narrative
level of "Willehalm"-from the thematic content of the
fable, to the different voices that recount the poet's
adaptation of the French source, to the visual narrative
that parallels the written text in a thirteenth-century
manuscript fragment. One of the most interesting aspects
of this manuscript fragment is the way in which the
text and image together demonstrate a self-conscious
appraisal of the tensions between the narrator, the
performer, and the author of the story. In the dissertation
I explored secular and non-secular forms of communication,
touching on the cultural adaptation of French source
material, the representation of cultural and religious
diversity, the tension between history and fiction,
the performative aspect of medieval literature, as well
as the politics of constructing manuscripts. In revising
the dissertation, I have expanded the section on manuscript
illustration and the discursive relationship between
word and image in the earliest illustration manuscript
redaction of the text.
My work on visual forms of communication in the high
Middle Ages and on artifacts such as the "Willehalm" manuscript fragment has led me to my next book project that examines illustrated vernacular manuscripts and
their significance for a lay culture that relied on
performance and visual representation for the transmission
of written information. Rather than regard word and
image as two parallel narratives that warrant independent
study, I am interested in how word and image are integrated,
particularly in secular manuscripts designed for a largely
illiterate court audience.
My teaching and research interests include a wide range
of topics, such as: Arthurian Romance, Chivalry, Chronicles,
Courtly Culture, the Crusades, Emotion, Gender and Sexuality,
History of the Book, Humor and Satire, Old Norse Sagas,
Orality and Literacy, Performance, Ritual and Representation,
Viking Age, Violence, Visual Culture, Women in the Middle
Ages, Word and Image. In the fields of linguistics and
textual criticism, my teaching and research interests
include Early New High German, Gothic, History of the
German Language, Literary Theory, Middle High German,
Narrative Theory, Old High German, Old Norse, Old Saxon,
Paleography, Structure of German, Translation.
In general I approach pre-modern literature from a cultural
historical standpoint and my courses always include
'non-literary' texts such as juridical documents, debates
by scholastics and theologians, chronicles or visual
narratives. In both my scholarly pursuits and my courses
I am invested in placing pre-modern studies within a
modern theoretical framework. By this I mean that, while
I consider it crucial to maintain the historical specificity
of medieval and early modern material, modern theoretical
views can help one to re-examine pre-modern texts and
can open up new avenues of study. Similarly, approaching
medieval and pre-modern issues from a modern perspective
renders them accessible to students and pertinent to
on-going scholarly debates.
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