Meredith ap Robert

Category: Academia

  • Degree #4, part 1

    I’m done with my MA at Purdue! All that’s left to do is fill out a few forms, pay a thesis deposit fee … and say all the things I really wanted to when I was asked to fill out a grad survey. And I’ve got a lot to say. This is the first part,…

  • What the Middle Ages Can Tell Us About Racial Reconfiguration and Political Realignment Today

    We are living in an era of renewed “flexible definitions,” when everything old is new again —  “a moment in which cultural race and racisms, and religious race, jostle alongside race-understood-as-somatic/biological determinations — uncannily renews key medieval instrumentalizations in the ordering of human relations.” The Welsh weren’t the first cornered into renouncing their identity to…

  • Thoughts from the 60th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies

    Thoughts from the 60th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies

    The 60th Annual International Conference on Medieval Studies. It all comes down to an awful lot of hurry to talk about some very old texts. But that’s America. An insistent drum whose beating makes you forget the pounding of your pulse, the rhythm of your breath, and cadence of the seasons.

  • Diary of a dysgwr

    Diary of a dysgwr

    Lifelong learner.  A laudable philosophy. Looks nice on your LinkedIn. But in practice? As something more than a slogan? Exhausting.  In my 20s, fresh out of school, it felt like an invigorating mantra. A celebratory affirmation of the wonder of the universe. As I approach 40 and find myself nearing the likely halfway point of…

  • Writing from the other side of a year

    Writing from the other side of a year

    A year ago, I found out that I was losing my job.  Two months into a graduate program is particularly bad timing (or at least it felt that way at the time). And right after moving in together with my husband to our first apartment, in a new city, with no friends or social network. …

  • In Reflection: A Year of Self-Discovery in Wales

    In Reflection: A Year of Self-Discovery in Wales

    I spent the first twenty-odd years of my life doing everything I could to hide myself. Talk to just about any queer person over the age of twenty-five, and they probably have a similar story. It wasn’t until my late teens that I started tottering toward self-acceptance. Unfortunately, my first relationship put this journey on…

  • Thoughts as I Finish My Dissertation

    These days, the act of sitting down and writing a dissertation on an eight-hundred-year-old text feels absolutely absurd.  I believe on some level that what I’m doing is important and in fact relevant—whatever that means.  What is relevant these days?  These days are dark; indeed, some of the darkest I have lived.  A recent social…