A few updates from the road
The road goes ever on and on indeed!
It’s been a wild year, friends, in which I wildly overdid it with back-to-back conferences. Will I do this again? Probably, but hopefully not for a while. My hope is, once conference season calms down (two more to go and then I’m free!), I’ll be able to get all of these conference papers up to JTR, or start ironing them out into actual peer-reviewed papers. Fingers crossed!
In tidying up my various spreadsheets and tracking documents, I realized that there were a few things that I hadn’t shared around. So, let’s start with an announcement, and then some links.
AN ANNOUNCEMENT.
As most of you already know, I have been accepted to do my PhD at the University of Glasgow, and I finally have decided to start this fall rather than defer (due to not receiving funding). I’ll be working on interrogating the queer historical contexts within which Tolkien was writing (whether he realized them or not). It’s a joint PhD with the Center for Fantasy and the Fantastic (E. Lit) and the Center for Gender Studies (History), and I couldn’t be more thrilled! My goal is really to show that, whether he was aware of it or not (that is to be determined via research), queerness in the Legendarium is baked into the foundations of the text, and are not accidental readings! I have so much work to do, and I cannot wait.
Athrabeth Podcast
Back at Oxonmoot last year (2023), I was honored to be on a panel for the Athrabeth Podcast, discussing Tolkien Scholarship/Fandom and New Media. My co-panelists were Marcel R. Bülles and S. R. Westvik, and we had a really interesting discussion on the state of things with the ever-changing landscape of social media etc. I haven’t listened to it, because I hate hearing myself speak, so hopefully it holds up! Link is HERE!
A few public-access conference papers
While the majority of the conference papers that have been dominating my life are not publicly accessible (working on it!) a few of them ARE, so I thought it would be best to share some links.
First up is my paper “Sauron, Seduction, and the Queering Mechanism of the Ring” for Mythcon’s Midwinter Seminar this February, “Something Mighty Queer”. This paper is a sliver of something very major going on in my mind for PhD, and watch this space because Cameron Bourquein and I are working on some stuff related to…all of this.
The other one I forgot to share is my Tolkien Society Seminar paper from last year’s seminar, “Númenor, the Mighty and Frail”. The entire program can be found on that link. My paper, “Sauron’s Femme Fatale Sources and Their Role in the Númenor Narrative”, can be found below! If you’re watching both this paper and the one above, I would suggest starting here, because I reference this one in my Mythcon one.
The third one that is available online…I’ve already linked to! That would be my paper on the Dwarves and the question of Antisemitism for the Tolkien Society Winter seminar. That link can be found HERE, with an associated blog post.
Phew, I think that’s everything? I think that’s everything. Two more conferences to go….