Graduate Research Symposium 2021

 Congrats to our grad students Em Friedman MA '21 and Christoforos Sassaris MA '21, who presented posters at the Villanova Graduate Research Symposium this fall. Em's topic was Feminist Abolitionism Across Time, and Christoforos's was Locating the Byzantine in Medieval English Literature: The Auchinleck Manuscript. More information about the graduate research symposium can be found here.

Here is Em's abstract:

The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was an interracial women's abolitionist group active in Philadelphia from 1833-1870.

This project explores the PFASS's ideological and rhetorical strategies by close reading documents in their archive, including annual reports, minutes, correspondence and personal letters to other abolitionists, speeches and financial records. The PFASS's archive is housed with the Abolitionist Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. By focusing on the three Women's Anti-Slavery Conferences —held each year 1837-1839—I argue that the PFASS creates frameworks and deploys rhetoric that re-purposes categories like prayer, womanhood, the roles of women and the values of Christianity in order to do the cultural work of movement building. In this way, the ideological strategies of the PFASS form a lineage with contemporary feminist abolitionism. I close my paper turning to the writing of two Black feminist abolitionists, adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to show how they, too, adapt and re-assign meaning to frameworks like ecology, science writing, and spirituality.

And here is Christoforos's:

The reception of the Byzantine Empire and its culture in Britain remains understudied. This line of inquiry is overshadowed by studies of Byzantium’s more frequent and visible interactions with the societies of Continental Europe and the Near East, explored in works such as Donald M. Nicol’s classic Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations, as well as more recent studies. After all, as Michel Balard’s recent article (“Colonisation and Population Movements in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages”) reminds us, most Westerners who settled on Byzantine lands were Venetian and Genoese. The study of British reception of Byzantium is also overshadowed by explorations of British writers’ reception of Classical Greece and Rome, Byzantium’s cultural and political antecedents. As a result, the topics of Britain and Byzantium are not jointly addressed in a substantial way in either of the two most recent notable studies of perceptions and interactions between Byzantium and the West—Cross-Cultural Interaction Between Byzantium and the West and Byzantium and the West: Perception and Reality. This is surprising because the histories of Britain and Byzantium have always been intertwined. For instance, it was in York, England, that Constantine the Great came to power before founding the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in the Greek polis of Byzantion. Later, English troops comprised most of the Varangian guard, the Byzantine Emperor’s personal bodyguards. And, during the Christmas of 1400, King Henry IV welcomed Emperor Manuel II Paleologos to the English court. Byzantium played a significant role in the English imagination during the Renaissance as well; for example, Paradise Lost poet John Milton expressed a widespread belief of his time when he mistakenly wrote that Constantine the Great was English in his unfinished History of Britain and elsewhere (this belief has its origins in medieval British texts, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae). The significant role of Byzantine reception in British culture is evident as late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Peter Sarris reminds us in his primer on Byzantine history, Edward Gibbon’s critical view of Byzantine politics in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire influenced generations of British thinkers. In the following century, English architect Sidney H. Barnsley studied Byzantine churches around Greece and later implemented Byzantine aesthetics in his design of the Chapel of St. Andrew in Westminster Abbey, located only a stone’s throw away from the historical nucleus of British culture and politics. While the important role of Byzantium is evident in several stages of British history, the most logical place to begin a study of this topic is the medieval period, because that was when Britain and Byzantium directly interacted with each other. Terminology becomes a problem when trying to track down relevant primary texts in the Middle English language. Although Byzantines usually identified as Roman, Western Europeans associated the term “Rome” with the “old” Rome and the Papacy. We cannot rely on the anachronistic term “Byzantine” either, as it emerged long after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. To locate the Byzantine in British literature, we must instead examine references to Greeks, the many variants of this word in the flexible vocabulary of Middle English, slang terms like “Gryffon,” and references to geography and religion. The Auchinleck manuscript, a 14^th-century collection of texts, is especially helpful here. In the manuscript, a romance called The King of Tars presents an Eastern Christian kingdom named Tars, possibly meaning Thrace, which was once part of Byzantium. A text about St. Katherine reframes the Roman Emperor Maxentius as a medieval king of Greece, thus collapsing Greek and Roman into a single category that reflects Byzantine identity. In the romance of Sir Isumbras, the English protagonist joins a group of Byzantine metalworkers, a highly developed trade in Byzantium, which produced a variety of items out of gold, many of which found their way to Western Europe (especially after the Fourth Crusade). In another romance, the English Guy of Warwick protects Constantinople in battle and, unlike the Western armies that sacked the city in 1204, refuses to seize the Byzantine throne. This text also resists the medieval stereotype of the “treacherous Greek” (i.e., Byzantine Greek), which is quite prevalent in Continental texts of the same period. Constantinople briefly resurfaces in this romance’s sequel, mainly as a place that represents religious conviction. Richard Coeur de Lyon depicts the Third Crusade, when King Richard the Lionheart clashed with Byzantines in Cyprus and Messina, largely because he needed funding and supplies. These and other examples not only reflect the military nature of most Anglo-Byzantine interactions, but also reveal a relatively strong awareness of Byzantine religion, geography, commerce, and cultural identity in 14^th-century Britain. These texts thus demonstrate that Byzantine reception is a significant aspect of English-language literature, and it should be studied alongside the more visible reception of Classical Greece and Rome.