Welcome to five new members admitted this month: they hail from the USA, Australiai and England.
Dr Adrian McClure (USA) recently received his PhD in Medieval Literature from Purdue University. His work typically focuses on the intersection of medieval literature and religious identity, and combines literary and historical analysis. Other areas of interest include trauma theory, gender studies, antisemitism studies, and modern medievalism. In 2019, his interdisciplinary study on the Oxford Roland as a Trinitarian text addressed to both lay and learned audiences, which ended with a call for greater attention to religious discourse in the study of popular medieval literature, was published in Speculum. He is currently working on articles on the Book of John Mandeville and Charles’s Williams’s Arthuriad, and on turning his thesis, entitled “Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Albigensian Crusade,” into a book.
Dr Deborah Mulligan (AUSTRALIA) earned a PhD at the University of Southern Queensland, where she is currently an Honorary Post Doctoral Researcher. She also holds a Master of Education degree and has extensive experience as a teacher. Her current research interests includes researchers at risk, researching within the educational margins, and the marginalization of older men. She currently serves as a mentor to doctoral national and international students at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and as Co-Chair of the Post Graduate Early Career Research group at USQ.
Dr Jasmine Hazel Shadrack (ENGLAND) is a composer, musician, and scholar who gained her PhD in 2017 whilst lecturing full time in Popular Music studies at the University of Northampton, UK. She is an extreme metal guitarist and black metal vocalist, and her research areas include trauma studies, disability studies, feminism, performance, extreme metal, autoethnography and psychoanalysis. She has been publishing since 2014 and has just published her first monograph, Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss (Emerald Publishing, 2020). Dr Shadrack sits on the editorial board for the Metal Music Studies journal and is currently working on two co-edited collections, Music and Death vol. 2 and Metal and Dis/Ability with Professor Amber Clifford (University of Missouri, USA). She is currently composing a Requiem Mass and working on a dark folk collaboration with Francesca Stevens, entitled Dōlǒur.
Dr Gareth Shaw (ENGLAND) received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Nottingham (UK) in 2017. His thesis (entitled "Boys' Love, Byte-sized: Queer-themed Microfiction in China's Online Spaces") was funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. In addition to currently working as a freelance proofreader and copy-editor, he is actively engaged in CDA research on China's online discursive spaces. He has a special interest in the use of the Internet by China's LGBTQ+ communities, and his previous publications have discussed Internet-based urban mobilization within Chinese environmental health movements and the online distribution of independently-made LGBTQ+ documentaries in China.
Dr Nathan Wendte (USA) earned his PhD in Anthropology from Tulane University in May 2020. Previous degrees include an MA in Anthropology from Tulane (2017) and a BS in Business from Indiana University (2011). His research explores the intersection of language and identity in contexts of language shift, migration, and language revitalization. He is currently drafting a book manuscript based loosely on his dissertation work among Creoles of the Gulf South states of Texas and Louisiana. He remains active in the revitalization movements for Louisiana Creole and Tunica (an indigenous language of Louisiana).