Ceræ Committee

Ashley Castelino is a medievalist, working primarily on human-animal studies, critical food studies, and medical humanities across Old Norse, Old English, and Middle English literature. He holds a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford, with a doctoral thesis on extraordinary dogs and their function in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. He currently serves as the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, working on university access, outreach, and public engagement.

Barbara Taylor is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her research focuses Shakespeare studies and early modern theatre history, with a special interest in imaginative fictions, cultures of belief, and ecological perspectives. Her dissertation looks at Shakespeare’s late romances as experiments in re-enchantment, particularly as they respond to an early modern crisis of the spiritual imagination. Her other academic interests include medieval romance, classical reception, and contemporary Shakespeare adaptation and performance. She holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Ancient History, as well as an MA in Shakespeare Studies. She has previously worked in research and dramaturgy at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, and in independent theatre in Australia.

Abbie Fray is a PhD researcher at the University of Bern. Her doctoral project investigates affect, identity, and embodiment in late medieval English literature during times of transformation. Her work sits at the intersection of queer studies, literary theory, and late medieval history. She holds an MSt in Medieval History from the University of Oxford and a BA in History from Durham University.

Lynn is a third year PhD student in history at Purdue University. Her interests lie in the intersection between gender and education in Carolingian monasteries and the universities of the fourteenth century. Lynn a Bachelor of Arts in History and English at MacEwan University in Alberta, Canada, and a MPhil in Medieval Studies at Trinity College Dublin exploring the spread of medical education in the Carolingian Empire. Her wider research interests include Christian mysticism, manuscript studies, and premodern queer theory.

Maria Gloria Tumminelli is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her project, titled “Mediterranean Diasporas: The Migration of Albanians and Gypsies from the Ottoman Empire to the Kingdom of Naples in a Comparative Perspective (15th-18th centuries)“, explores the migration patterns of Albanians and Gypsies during the Early Modern period. She holds a PhD from the University of Pavia in Modern History, focusing on “Gypsies in the Spanish Empire System: Soldiers, Bandits, and Vagabonds between Milan, Naples, and Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries”. Her research interests include the migration of minorities in Mediterranean countries, integration and identity, the dissemination of ideas and stereotypes, and asylum law in the early modern age. 

Quinn Bouabsa Marriott is a first year PhD student at the University of St Andrews. His research explores the agency of Eastern Christians as mediators between the Mongols, specifically the Ilkhanate, and the Franks of the ‘Crusader States’. In addition to this, Quinn has also shown a wider interest in how the Middle Ages appear in video games, and the value they hold in informing us of growing trends in pop culture. Quinn holds a BA in Medieval History from Queen Mary University of London as well as an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds.

TBA.

Natasha Bailey is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her research seeks to answer how elite women in early modern Italy conducted their friendships, practically; with a particular focus on the emotional resonances of these practices. Her other research interests include early modern material culture, including letters and fashion items, and the history of food and dining.

Michele Seah is a scholar of queens and queenship with broader interests in more general royal studies. Her doctoral research focused on the economic and financial resources of the later fifteenth-century queens consort of England. Examining their scale and extent, her research facilitates greater understanding of how queens consort were provided for and how they used such resources. Her research projects reflect her interests in other English royals, focusing on diverse persons such as Henry II, a twelfth-century English king, and Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr, the last two queens consort of Henry VIII, king of England in the sixteenth century.

Colin Fisher is a second-year PhD candidate at Háskóli Íslands (University of Iceland). Their research focuses on investigating the treatment of Jews in Old Norse literature in the context of mythological and legendary material about giants. Their interests encompass Old Norse literature, medieval Jewish-Christian relations, monster studies, and the proliferation of medievalisms in modern right-wing politics. They are a 2024–2025 Leifur Eiríksson Foundation fellow and a frequent organizer for the Háskóli Íslands Student Conference on the Medieval North.

Erica Steiner is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney in the Celtic Studies department, and her thesis explores the history and historiography of Insular tattooing from antiquity to the early medieval period. As well having as a BA (Hons) in Medieval Studies, with a thesis entitled ‘The Dating and Datability of Beowulf in an Historical and Eschatological Context’, Erica also holds a BSc in Marine Geophysics. Her other research projects include studies in landscape archaeology and geomythology, issues of etymology and (mis)translation, as well as representations of the past in modern media.

Kim Bergqvist is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stockholm University, Sweden. His dissertation investigates aristocratic insurrections, resistance, and political values in Castile-León and Sweden, c. 1270–1370. His other academic interests include medieval history writing, questions of genre and fictionality in medieval literature, the history of emotions, and medieval queenship. He holds a BA and an MA in History from Stockholm University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, and at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an instructor in Viking and medieval studies at DIS Stockholm.

Onofrio Gasparro is a field archaeologist with international experience, specialising in stratigraphic excavation and high-resolution recording via drone-based photogrammetry, with subsequent integration of 3D models in GIS for analysis, mapping, and publication. He has participated in missions in Armenia, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. His current research examines Armenian stelae (khachkars) – linking inscriptions, iconography, and architectural settings –and medieval caravanserai across Iran and the South Caucasus, with attention to route networks, water management, and reuse. Alongside research, he is active in museum education (Italian/English) and community heritage initiatives. He holds a BA in Historical Sciences and is completing an MA in Archaeology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Julián holds a BA in Politics and International Relations from the Universidad del Salvador, and a DPhil from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). He has studied Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classical and Medieval Thought at both the UNLP and the Universidad de Buenos Aires where he is currently a postdoctoral researcher. His research focuses on the history of political and economic thought in the XIII and XIV centuries. For his doctoral thesis he analysed Nicole Oresme’s monetary treatise, and he is currently working on a critical edition of Quaestio XI of Liber I of Nicolas de Vaudemonte’s Commentary on Politics. He is interested in how economy, value, money and exchange have been conceptualised and developed from antiquity to modern times.

Saaleha Iqbal is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on late medieval European responses to the Islamic world, especially interested in the representations of Muslims in literature. Her thesis examines the representations of Muslim women in Old French literature and is informed by a range of related texts including crusade histories and other European courtly literatures. She holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature with Creative Writing and an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Most recently, she completed a year-long internship at the International Medieval Bibliography and a placement at Chetham’s Library (Manchester, UK) where she created a catalogue of the library’s collection of medieval manuscripts.

TBA.

Ali is a researcher in Medieval Literature and Tolkien studies, with a particular focus on Old English and Old Norse heroic traditions. He holds an MA in English from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and his published work examines themes of heroism, death, mourning, and melancholia in early medieval texts and modern fantasy. His recent research turns toward the sounds of battle in classical, medieval, and modern warfare, as well as in Tolkien’s writings. He is planning to pursue a PhD to further develop this cluster of research.

Athena Spanidou is a PhD candidate in European History at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her engagement with gender history, and especially with topics concerning gender identities, queer subjectivities, and social selfhood, lies at the core of her doctoral dissertation, For an Alternative Path in Women’s History: Women’s Cross-Dressing in Later Medieval Europe, funded by the Leventis Foundation. Her broader research interests include women’s and gender history, premodern cultures, queer theory, and the history of sexualities. Since 2022, she has also been the managing editor of the academic e-journal Mos Historicus: A Critical Review of European History.

Denis Sukhino-Khomenko obtained his PhD in history at the University of Gothenburg. Denis’ expertise lies in the early medieval period and interdisciplinary approaches to it. His doctoral research Thegns around the North Sea: Elite, Nobility, Aristocracy of the Late Viking Age (2024) looked at the social institutions and the accompanying ideas in the 10th–11th century Anglo-Scandinavian socio-political continuum. Denis was previously a guest researcher at the University of Copenhagen and has previously published both domestically and internationally. Denis is presently directing his focus toward the digital humanities and new approaches in history.

Andrea’s research focuses on literature and the senses, working at the intersection of cognitive, affective and literary theory, and the history of emotions. By playing close attention to newly emerging understandings of perceptual simulation, she is particularly interested in the complexity of dynamic cognitive acts, and relationality encompassing mind, body and space/place, in experience of motion, the senses and introspection between humans, the non-human and more-than-human expressed in literature. She has been awarded a GDA (Advanced) from the University of Melbourne in English Studies (First Class Honours) and a BA from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). She has formerly worked as a journalist.