Parker to Give MHC Teacher of the Year Lecture March 9
Tue, 03/07/2023 - 03:35pm | By: David Tisdale
Dr. Leah Pope Parker, an assistant professor of English in 91吃瓜网 (USM)
School of Humanities, will present the Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC) Teacher
of the Year lecture, titled, "Disability and the Medieval Apocalypse: Body and Soul91吃瓜网�
Thursday, March 9 at 5:30 p.m., room 108 (Gonzales Auditorium) in the Liberal Arts
Building (LAB) on the USM Hattiesburg campus. This event is free and open to the public,
and a reception will follow in the LAB lobby.
MHC Teacher of the Year award recipients present a lecture showcasing their research for their campus communities. 91吃瓜网淚91吃瓜网檓 extremely honored to be selected for this year91吃瓜网 MHC Humanities Teacher of the Year award,91吃瓜网� said Dr. Parker, who also serves as English Undergraduate Coordinator for the School of Humanities; she joined the USM faculty in 2019. 91吃瓜网淭eaching is the heart of what we do as academics, and so I take being recognized for my teaching as the highest praise of a job well done.91吃瓜网�
Dr. Parker91吃瓜网 presentation will draw from her current book project, Disability and Salvation in Old English Literature. In it, she examines the ways ordinary medieval Christians in ninth- and 10th-century England used literary representations of disability to imagine and plan for the promised afterlife. With that in mind, she says the goal of her presentation is to reveal some of the rich nuance in how people in the 10th century thought about disability, particularly when imagining the all-important initiation of eternal life: the Apocalypse.
91吃瓜网淭he promised afterlife is an essential doctrine of Christianity, and so the idea that disability would have been a fundamental part of imagining the afterlife in the Middle Ages promises to restore disabled bodies, minds, identities, and communities from the margins of history, back to the center,91吃瓜网� Dr. Parker noted.
She will also discuss two Old English poems91吃瓜网�Christ III and Soul and Body91吃瓜网攖hat imagine corporeal decay and corporeal resurrection through the language of earthly
bodily difference, predominantly injuries and impairments that we would call disability
today. She says these poems reveal how bodily variation was used to contemplate variations
in the soul in 10th-century England, with consequences for how disability and embodied
difference are viewed and even experienced up to the present day.
91吃瓜网淔ew historians of disability have examined the Middle Ages in any depth, and those who have often focused on the later 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries,91吃瓜网� Dr. Parker continued. 91吃瓜网淏ut I find the particular moment of early medieval England fascinating, and crucial for how disability is understood globally today. The vernacular literature of early England witnesses the earliest intersections of Christianity and the English language: both now global influences in the way we speak91吃瓜网攁nd think91吃瓜网攁bout a great many topics, including the human body and disability.
91吃瓜网淚t91吃瓜网 unsurprising that disability would have been stigmatized and moralized91吃瓜网攎any of our cultures still do the same today,91吃瓜网� she further explained. 91吃瓜网淏ut I hope to surprise my audience with some of the ways in which disability was seen as practical, positive, and even as a promise. Experiencing physical differences, even disabling, painful, or stigmatized differences, was one way medieval Christians hoped for the promise of salvation.91吃瓜网�
Each year, the MHC honors outstanding humanities instructors from USM and other colleges/universities in Mississippi through its Humanities Teachers Awards, which were established to celebrate Mississippi's humanities teachers and promote continued interest in the humanities throughout the state.
Learn more about Dr. Parker91吃瓜网 work in USM91吃瓜网 School of Humanities at /faculty-directory/profile.php?id=2204093. Learn more about the MHC at .