Pre and early modern trans studies 3
March 23-25, 2025 at Boston University
Welcome to the third installation of the Early Modern Trans Studies Symposium, lovingly known as EmoTrans! This year we are stretching our reach backward to give the premodern some airtime. This iteration of PrEmoTrans includes scholars of Classics, Late Antiquity, and Medieval Studies, in addition to Early Modernity.
Sunday, March 23
Welcome from Micah Goodrich, Boston University (12:30)
Session 1 (1:00-2:15)
Sawyer Kemp, Assistant Professor, Queen’s College CUNY - “To Roll with Pleasure in a Sensual Sty;” Or, Some People Are Into That: On Trans Sexuality and Milton’s Comus”
Ky Merkley, Postgraduate, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - “How To Be (Or Not To Be) a Man in Greco-Roman Literature: Leveraging the Gap between Embodiment and Gender Identity to Establish Normative Identities”
Tatiana Avesani, PhD Student, Johns Hopkins University - “Dante’s Trans(lation) of Orpheus”
Coffee/Tea Break (2:15-3:00)
Session 2 (3:00-4:15)
Neah Lekan, PhD Student, Johns Hopkins University - “No Occasion for Men:” Toryism & Transvestigation in The Convent of Pleasure
Phoebe Pan, PhD Candidate, Northwestern University - “Trans Genres & Poetic Metempsychosis”
Colby Gordon, Associate Professor, Bryn Mawr College - “Like; Or, Donne’s Autogynephiliac Sappho”
Happy Hour at Time Out Market (5PM)
All presenters, participants, volunteers invited!
15 minute walk from HTC
Monday, March 24
Session 3 (9:00-10:15)
Jordan Chauncy, PhD Student, Cornell University - “Amis, Amiloun, and the “Hool” Man”
Alice Fulmer, PhD Candidate, University of California Santa Barbara - “Who’s Afraid of Eunuchs?: Trans/crip Epistemologies of Chaucer’s Pardoner”
Micah Goodrich, Assistant Professor, Boston University - “He/Him/Hole: The Pardoner, Again”
Session 4 (10:30-11:45)
C. Libby, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University - “Reimagining Gender: Trans Sacrality, the Medieval Imagination, and the Proliferation of Identity”
Kris Trujillo, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago - “From Mystical Queer to Trans Mysticism”
Jamie Taylor, Bryn Mawr College - “Thigh Master: Polemical Erotics in the Toledot Yeshu”
Lunch for Presenters (11:45-1:00)
Session 5 (1:00-2:15)
Blake Gutt, Assistant Professor, University of Utah - “Medieval Trans Pessimism with Tiresias”
Erik Wade, Assistant Professor, SUNY Oswego - “There’s a Monster at the Beginning of This Book: Trans Possibilities in the Liber Monstrorum and the Canterbury School of Hadrian and Theodore
Caz Batten, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania - “Unmaking Men: Gender Transformation in the Medieval North”
Coffee/Tea Break (2:15-3:00)
Session 6 (3:00-4:15)
Sarah LaVoy-Brunette (White Earth Ojibwe), PhD Candidate, Cornell University - “Queerying Settler Schematics”
Danielle Allor, Visiting Assistant Professor, Haverford College - ““There is no sex in plants”: medieval botany and agender withdrawal”
Aylin Malcolm, Assistant Professor, University of Guelph - “From Skin to Graft: Climate, Whiteness, and Transition in Silence”
Dinner for Presenters (6PM)
Tuesday, March 25
Session 7 (9:00-10:15)
Basil Arnold Price, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, Los Angeles - “Broken Trans*masculinities: On Trans*negativity, Maiden-Kings, and Old Norse Studies”
Tess Wingard, Postdoctoral Scholar, Trinity College Dublin - “Tranimalising the Dominicans: animality and sex in Thomas of Cantimpré’s Bonum universale de apibus (c.1259)”
Nat Rivkin, PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania - ““Nevermore a manly shape retaine”: Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Fairness, and Trans Femininity c. 1602”
Session 8 (10:30-11:45)
Jacob Romm, PhD Candidate, Yale University - “Transvestigating Johannes Pfefferkorn: Reading the Convert's Body in Early Modern Europe”
Niyanta Sangal, PhD Student, University of Maryland - “Exploring Gender Variance in the Early Modern Mughal Manuscript of the Hamzanama”
Simone Chess, Associate Professor, Wayne State University - “Marlowe’s Sissies and Trans Archives”
Lunch for Presenters (11:45-1:00)
Session 9 (1:00-2:15)
Kersti Francis, Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston University - “Intersex Natures in Le Roman de Silence”
Johanna Alden, PhD Candidate, Boston College - “My People Would Not Recognize Me”: The Abbot of Druimenaig, Social Relations, and Discursively-Constructed Genders”
Stephanie Burt, Professor, Harvard University - “George Herbert's Body, or, Lyric Against Sexology”
Coffee/Tea Break (2:15-3:00)
Session 10 (3:00-4:15)
James Mulder, Lecturer, Bentley University - “‘My mind’s distempered and my body’s numbed’: Marlovian Dysphoria”
Nick Winters, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University - “The Many-Gendered Cosmos: A Trans Account of Ancient Astrology”
Esteban Crespo-Jaramillo, Visiting Assistant Professor, Boston University - “Archipelagic Poiesis for Gender Utopias'“
Conference Schedule
This symposium is generously co-sponsored by Boston University’s Global Medieval Studies Program, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, English Department, History Department, Classics Department, Religion Department, Romance Studies Department, BU Center for the Humanities, and BU LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff.
Image: Besançon Bibliothèque municipale ms 151 f.54v