Hilary Rhodes

A broad address on some of the reactions, rhetorical strategies, challenges, and questions that are engendered in the process of teaching, discussing, and writing about medieval queer history, both in conversation with undergraduate students and ordinary laypeople, and in the practice of formal academic scholarship. Presented at the American Historical Association Virtual AHA panel, "Teaching Premodern Women and Gender," February 2021.

The author's M.A. thesis, tracing the intellectual and physical history of the concept of "crusade" from its earliest genesis to its modern-day, post-9/11 incarnations, with particular focus on its medieval justifications and criticisms, the connection of crusading to European colonial projects of the 15th century on, and its reinvention in the digital age as a strategy for both Islamic extremists and Euro-American intelligentsia. Concludes that the crusade model of violence, not just as a temporal period but a scholarly hermeneutic, has profoundly and permanently shaped Western history, and cannot be dissociated from it.

This paper approaches a study of the development of Middle English by carefully situating it within its external as well as its internal history. It opens with an examination of the relevant historical and linguistic background, before moving into a detailed look at the influence of French at each level of the language: phonological, orthographical, morpho-syntactical, lexical, and literary. It then explains these developments within the politics and culture of eleventh and twelfth-century England, before looking at the slow revivification of English beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In short, it takes into account both the structural and social considerations of the Norman Conquest on the language, and traces the process of how English emerged on the far side still fairly systematically intact, but deeply and permanently changed by its osmosis with French.

Studies the message of late American-born Islamic extremist, Anwar al-Awlaki, and analyzes it through a framework of political theory and rhetoric, to rescue dialogue about religion from the othering construct of "irrationality" and help to make sense of the ongoing "war on terror."

This paper begins with a look at the American Religious Right, stemming from its roots in the troubled racial politics of the 1960s and its consolidation and rise to power in the 1970s and 1980s. It will then consider how its repertoire has been largely narrowed to a pair of hot-button social issues – abortion and gay marriage – and critically evaluate the claim as to whether we are living in a “post-Religious Right” world. Secondly, it will assess the possibility for a new liberal coalition, a so-called “Religious Left,” and which social groups might possibly form the basis of such an effort. While understanding that the delicate interface of religion and politics must be treated with care and is a highly subjective matter, it will seek to unite the good intentions of liberal political theory with the driving moral and spiritual fulfillment of religion at its best.

In this paper, I examine the many and complex ways in which the popular television show "Supernatural" engages religion and its own nature as a story about origin stories. I begin with a brief overview of the show and main characters, examining the ways in which the internal logic of the story itself is structured around familiar allegorical lines. I conclude that both positively and negatively, Supernatural is in fact an important postmodern religious hypertext and commentary cunningly disguised as a secular fantasy-horror television program, and boldly reinscribes its theological and social space in oftentimes radically subversive ways.