• Play:
• Song Name: Reading Beowulf in the Ruins of Grozny
• Artist: Eileen Joy
• Album: The 2009 Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference
• Year: 2009

Professor Joy will be giving her keynote lecture entitled ‘Reading Beowulf in the Ruins of Grozny: Pre/modern, Post/human, and the Question of Being-Together’ on Thursday 29th October

Eileen Joy is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (PhD University of Tennessee, 2001), and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, and ethics. She has published articles and book chapters on: Beowulf, suicide terrorism, and Emmanuel Levinas; Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul and the Old English Ruin; historical artifacts and cultural memory; eros and the Old English legend The Seven Sleepers; the Anglo-Latin Wonders of the East and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; and the intellectual history of early modern bibliography. Her current research/writing project is on the Anglo-Latin and Old English Lives of Saint Guthlac and the queer erotics of unsettled and optimistic inter-subjectivities. She is a regular reviewer for Sixteenth Century Journal, is on the editorial board of Blackwell’s Literature Compass, is a column editor for The Heroic Age, and is a regular contributor to the medieval studies group weblog In The Middle. She is the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook (West Virginia University Press, 2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project (special issue, Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 [Summer 2007]), and is also working on a monograph, tentatively titled Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History. She is also the Editor, with Myra Seaman, of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (a joint production of the BABEL Working Group, of which she is the co-founder, and Palgrave Macmillan).