Colloquium on Premodern Literature and Culture

The UNC Colloquium on Premodern Literature and Culture is an interdisciplinary speaker series dedicated to the study of premodern writing in all of its forms. The Colloquium meets Thursdays at 5:15 PM, roughly five to seven times per semester; it is convened by H. M. Cushman (hcush@email.unc.edu) and Krista Telford (ktelford@unc.edu). It was founded in 2018 by Taylor Cowdery, H. M. Cushman, and Jessica Wolfe.

Spring 2026 Schedule

• 1/22    Khristian Smith (UNC Chapel Hill)
  • “John Webster’s Unaware-wolf: Horror, Imagination, and Monstrous Transformation”
• 1/29    Mary Floyd-Wilson (UNC Chapel Hill)
  • “Devilish Conception in Shakespeare’s Richard III”
• 3/5      Su Fang Ng (Virginia Tech)
  • “Entertaining Asia in Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• 3/26    Kathryn Mogk Wagner (UNC Chapel Hill)
  • “Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Multilingualism”
• 4/16    CJ Jones (University of Notre Dame)
  • “From Page to Performance: How Scribes Thought About Liturgical Regulation and Why It Failed”

Fall 2025 Schedule

• 8/28    Ingrid Nelson (Amherst College)
  • “Medieval Media: Technologies of Romance”
• 9/25    Everett Lang (UNC Chapel Hill)
  • “Textbook Tyrants: Casaubon’s Suetonius and History as Polemic”
• 10/2    Christopher Cannon (Johns Hopkins University)
  • “The Oral Transmission of Piers Plowman”
• 10/9    Daniel Davies (University of Houston)
  • “Frames of War in The Canterbury Tales”
• 11/6    Hudson Vincent (Davidson College)
  • “The English Baroque”
• 11/13  Alison Beringer (Montclair State University)
  • “In Cahoots with the Devil or in the Image of God? The Sculptor in Medieval German Literature”

The Med-Ren Colloquium acknowledges the generous support of the School of Arts and Sciences and MEMS @ UNC.