Olivia DrakeJeff Rider, professor of romance languages and literatures, professor of medieval studies, has received a residential fellowship from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels for the second semester of the 2011-12 academic year. Rider is in Brussels working with two other fellows on the topic, "Perception and Performance of Social Identity in the Nascent Urban Societies of the High Middle Ages." In addition to presenting a lecture to other fellows at the center, he's presenting lectures at the University of Ghent, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Royal Library of Belgium, the Charles University in Prague, and to a European research group…
Jeff Rider, professor of Romance languages and literatures, professor of medieval studies, is the co-editor of the book The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt and Hypocrisy, published by Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2011. The essays explore medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives in French, Spanish and Italian texts ranging from the 12th through 15th centuries. By following these women characters in their considerations, readers can hope both to learn something about the times the women were writing in, while to enriching and enlarging their own "emotionologies." More information on the book is available…
In the 1970s, veterans, activists and psychiatrists were hard at work getting the disorder that came to be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) included in the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III. During the same period, feminists were building a successful anti-rape movement that crucially insisted that rape is a form of violence. On Feb. 15, Sally Bachner, assistant professor of English, spoke on “Rape Trauma, Combat Trauma, and the Making of PTSD: Feminist Fiction in the 1970s" during the Center for the John E. Sawyer Spring Lecture Series on War. Bachner proposed that…