Southeastern Medieval Association
2015 Elections
Candidate Biographies
Candidates for Vice President
Elizabeth Dachowski, professor of History at Tenneessee State University in Nashville,
earned the Ph.D. in Medieval History at the University of Minnesota. Her research
interests focus on monastic and political history of France in the later tenth century, but
she has frequently branched off into neighboring regions (notably England and Gascony)
and related fields (poetry, notarial registers, travel and trade). Her teaching interests
include World History and all aspects of pre-modern European history (anything before
1700), and she has a strong commitment to bringing the study of primary sources into the
classroom at all levels of study. She first attended a SEMA meeting as a graduate student,
and has been continuously enrolled as a member since permanently relocating to the
southeast in 1999. She served on SEMA’s board from 2002 until 2005 and again from
2010 to 2013. She received SEMA’s prize for best first book for First Among Abbots: The
Career of Abbo of Fleury in 2009. If elected to serve as Vice President, she is looking
forward to playing a role in the many high-quality programs in which SEMA is engaged,
including the annual conference, sessions at national and regional conferences, awards
for teaching and scholarship, and Medieval Perspectives.
Mary A. Valante is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Appalachian
State University. She received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in
1999. She currently serves on the Board of SEMA as the History representative, and
co-organized the conference in 2012. She is the author of The Vikings in Ireland:
Settlement, Trade and Urbanization, as well as articles including “Castrating Monks: Vikings,
Slave Trade and the Value of Eunuchs,” (Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages 2013),
“Notitiae in the Irish Annals” (Eolas 2006), and “Re-assessing the Irish ‘Monastic Town’”
(Irish Historical Studies, 1998). She is currently researching unwanted children in early
medieval and Viking-Age Ireland.
Candidates for the Executive Council
Seat 1
Anne-Marie Bouché (PhD, Columbia University 1997) is currently Associate Professor of
Medieval Art History at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida. Her
research focuses on how medieval art constructs and communicates complex
meaning. In addition to several articles, she is the co-editor (with Jeffrey Hamburger) of a
collected volume of conference papers, The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in
the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2006). She has been a member of SEMA since
2010, has co-organized several sessions at the annual meeting and has served one term
previously on the Executive Board. She is interested in finding ways to build interest in
SEMA particularly among scholars working in disciplinary areas that are currently less well
represented in the membership: history, religious studies, musicology, medieval
archaeology, art history..."
Anne-Hélène Miller, a native of Toulouse, France, first completed a DEA at the University
of Geneva, before receiving a PhD at the University of Washington with a specialization in
French Medieval Studies and Critical Theory. She is currently an Advanced Assistant
Professor of French and Francophone Studies, affiliated with The Marco Institute for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has
published articles on Guillaume de Machaut, Brunetto Latini, Le Songe du Vergier, Jean
Froissart, Late Medieval Paris, and Anglo-French relationships. She is presently a Fellow at
the Tennessee Humanities Center, where she focuses on a book project that reexamines the
emergence of France as a distinct linguistic nation during the long fourteenth-century.
She is also contributing to two NEH funded projects of Scholarly Editions and Translations,
Eustache Deschamps’s Mirror of Marriage and Moralized Ovid, and prepares the first
annotated English version of Philippe de Mézières’s Dream-Vision of the Old Pilgrim and Life
of Peter Thomas in collaboration with R. Barton Palmer. She serves on the Board of the
journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture and is the President of the International
Machaut Society.
Seat 2
Laura K. Bedwell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor,
a small liberal arts school in Central Texas. She earned both her Master’s and PhD in
English literature at Baylor University; her focus of special interest is the late Middle Ages,
particularly Malory—though she dabbles in Chaucer and the Pearl-poet as well. She has
been a member of SEMA since 2006 and is published in Arthuriana, Medieval Perspectives,
and Studies in American Naturalism (people do strange things in grad school). Her life is
primarily spent teaching, reading, writing, planning, and grading, but she also makes time
for a husband, three almost grown sons, and a lot of knitting.
Britt Mize is Associate Professor and Interim Associate Head of English at Texas A&M
University. He attended his first SEMA conference in 1996 and received his Ph.D. at the
University of North Carolina in 2003. His research spans the earlier and later Middle
Ages but nearly always focuses on the concept and uses of tradition. His first monograph
(Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality) was published in 2013, and
he is currently at work on a book that views later medieval representations of Judas
Iscariot through the critical lens of Adaptation Studies. His essays have appeared in the
Chaucer Review, Anglo-Saxon England, JEGP, Studies in Philology, Comparative Drama, and
elsewhere.
Seat 3
Mark Bradshaw (Brad) Busbee is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
English at Samford University, where he teaches courses in medieval literature and writing.
He is co-editor for Grundtvig-Studier, an international journal published in Copenhagen, DK,
and the co-editor (with Jane Beal) of the festschrift Translating the Past: Essays on
Medieval Literature in Honor of Marijane Osborn. His co-edited collection of essays
Approaches to teaching the Middle English Pearl is forthcoming from the MLA. Busbee has
published essays on Old and Middle English literature, as well as nineteenth-century
Scandinavian scholarship on medieval literature.
Lee Templeton is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan College,
where he currently serves as the Chair of the Faculty Council and teaches a range of
courses that fall under the “British Literature Before 1800” heading. His research focuses
on issues of gender, grief, and chivalric identity in medieval romance, and he is currently
editing a collection on grief and gender entitled Knowing Sorrow: Grief, Gender, and Identity
in the Middle Ages. He has published articles and reviews in Medieval Perspectives, Sound
Fabrics: Studies on the Intermedial and Institutional Dimensions of Popular Music, Symploke;
Preternature, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. He has been an active member of SEMA
since 2000.
Seat 4
Christine Kozikowski is Assistant Professor in the School of English Studies at The College
of The Bahamas where she seeks to incorporate something medieval into every class. She
received her PhD from the University of New Mexico in English in 2013 and her primary
research focuses on the intersection of law and literature, particularly privacy and
reputation. Her forthcoming article, “Mary Shelley and Nineteenth-Century
Medievalism,” will be published in the Critical Insights series from Salem Press early next
year, and she is currently interested in examining critical receptions to the Middle Ages in
postcolonial societies. Although a recent member of SEMA, she is excited to become a more
active participant in the association!
Write-In: __________________________________________
Seat 5
(the winner of this election will be seated on the Council if Mary Valante, a current
Council member, is elected as Vice-President.)
Aneilya Barnes is associate professor of history at Coastal Carolina University, and her
research focuses on the Christianization of ancient Rome and the roles of women in the
early Church, particularly through the lens of Rome's sacred spaces and shifting landscape.
She has authored several peer-reviewed articles on late-antique Roman architectural
history, including her essay "Female Patronage and Episcopal Authority in Late Antiquity,"
in Envisioning the Medieval Bishop (Brepols, 2014). She also has a textbook, Comparative
Cultures: World Civilization to 1500, that is scheduled to be in print for the national market
in the coming year. Additionally, she continues to work on her manuscript, Gender and
Domestic Space in the First Christian Basilicas. Her upper-level courses include the history
of early Christianity, the Roman Empire, sex and gender in the early Church, and the early
Islamic world. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas in August of 2007 just
prior to her arrival at Coastal Carolina University the same month
Peter Larson received his BA in Classics and History from the College of William and Mary,
and holds MAs in Medieval History from the Catholic University of America and Durham
University and his Ph.D. from Rutgers. He currently is Associate Professor and Director of
Graduate Programs in the Department of History at the University of Central Florida.
Larson is the author of Conflict and Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and
Peasants in Durham, 1349-1400 (Routledge, 2006), a socio-political study of how English
peasants re-forged their lives after the Black Death. His next monograph explores how
ordinary men and women in northeastern England experienced the transition from
medieval to early modern, and he then plans a broader study on women's experiences and
gender roles in northern England; after that, maybe something on Sweden. Besides
British history he teaches on the Crusades, heresy and magic, and sport history as well as
graduate historiography & theory.
Graduate Student Seat #1
Joseph Wingenbach is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Louisiana
State University where he studies under Jesse Gellrich, Malcolm Richardson, Greg Stone,
and Chris Barrett. His former dissertation director and mentor was the late Lisi Oliver.
His dissertation is entitled, “Þe Inglis in seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 - 1330. The
study argues that depictions of Englishness between the Conquest and the Hundred Years
War which drew on the Anglo-Saxon past were far less haphazard and imaginative than
they are often characterized as being, as suggested by the continued use of uniquely
English themes, motifs, and even texts dating from the OE period. Wingenbach has
presented twice at the annual SEMA conference (2012 & 2014) and his essay, “‘[T]o the
gome he gave up his needs’: The Influence of Orality on the English Arthurian Romance
Tradition”, has been accepted for publication in Medieval Perspectives.
Write-In: __________________________________________
Graduate Student Seat #2
Write-In: __________________________________________
Write-In: __________________________________________