Relevant Research lecture on the misunderstood Middle Ages is April 22

<!--StartFragment-->The College of Arts & Sciences is proud to present its fourth presentation of the Relevant Research Speaker Series, showcasing CAS faculty scholarship and creative work.

The Middle Ages are too often understood as a period of darkness and superstition, the opposite of modern culture, says Dr. Daniel Kline. Drawing upon his own research and Umberto Eco's seminal 1986 essay, "Dreaming the Middle Ages," Kline will outline five ways in which new research challenges traditional ideas of the Medieval Period. His lecture, "The Modern Middle Ages: Or Five Ways in Which the Medieval Period Never Ended," is on Thursday, April 22 at 7:30 p.m. in UAA's Fine Arts Building Room 150.


The lecture will be presented in three parts. First, Kline will outline the traditional understanding of "the Middle Ages" as a historical period in order to demonstrate the inherent difficulties of temporal periodization. Second, using multimedia sources, he will summarize new research into medieval

• (1) temporality (the understanding and uses of history),
• (2) spatiality (the re-examination of geography and location),
• (3) spirituality (the relationship of individual and communal religious identity to broader social structures),
• (4) textuality (the transmission and appropriation of different forms of texts), and
• (5) iconography (the development and use of images) to argue that in many important ways, the medieval period never really ended.

Finally, Kline will discuss the implications of "medievalism" -- post-medieval appropriations of medieval culture -- for modern culture, particularly popular culture. Artificially separating the medieval and the modern creates as many problems as it solves, and Kline concludes that, in many ways, our own historical moment is more "medieval" than we might otherwise imagine.




Kline is an associate professor and coordinator of the graduate program in English at UAA, where he specializes in medieval literature, literary and cultural theory, and computer-assisted pedagogy. His research concerns children, violence and sacrifice in late-medieval England. He completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University, Bloomington, and in addition to numerous scholarly presentations, Kline has recently published academic essays in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Philological Quarterly, Chaucer Review and Essays in Medieval Studies. He is also author of the Electronic Canterbury Tales. Kline can be reached at afdtk@uaa.alaska.edu.



UAA's College of Arts and Sciences brings you this presentation as part of the Relevant Research Speaker Series. It is free and open to the public. For more information please call (907) 786-1707.