Publications

Published in the University of Pennsylvania's Manuscript Studies: A Schoenburg Institute Journal for Manuscript Studies, I explain the importance of an ownership rhyme found in both the Paris Apocalypse (BnF, MS fr 403) and an Oxford manuscript (Bodl. MS 110). 

"Christus homo factus Wm Cleue prosperet actus: Examining a Provenance Mark with Suggestions About the Later Ownership of the Paris Apocalypse (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 403)" (Fall 2022)


Published in Perspectives médiévales on a woodblock, either the oldest extant piece of western printing apparatus or an eighteenth century creation, housed in the John Rylands Library. 

Abstract: 

Housed in the United Kingdom, at the John Rylands Library in Manchester (item number 17252), the xylographic printing block that we study in this article has an uncertain date. Some scholars believe that it dates to the fifteenth century and that it is, consequently, the oldest extant woodblock printing apparatus. Other scholars believe that it was made in the eighteenth century and it imitates the medieval iconography. Lacking more scientific investigations, the exact date of the woodblock cannot be established. Our article investigates both possibilities of dating in regard to the iconographic tradition (the carved image on the block represents a scene from the life of St. John, largely inspired by the illustrated Apocalypses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) and of our understanding of the block. We examine, therefore, the status of the block as an object that is an authentic fifteenth-century object and as an eighteenth-century imitation. 

Another of my publications in Arthuriana examines medievalism and Anglo-Irish tensions in T. H. White's Once and Future King

Abstract: 

In The Witch in the Wood, T.H. White’s depiction of the Orkney clan becomes a manifestation of his own grappling with tensions between England and Ireland and his personal relationship with these nations through references to Brian Merriman’s Cúirt An Mheán Oíche and the works of Malory, among others. 

I have also worked on the film adaptations of Nabokov’s Lolita, which was my first publication in the University College Cork's Alphaville.  

Abstract:

 This paper compares and analyses the differences between Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) and filmic versions by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and Adrian Lyne (1994), focusing on the respective characterisations of Clare Quilty, as mediated through his encounter with Humbert Humbert at a pivotal scene at the Enchanted Hunter’s Lodge. Following an in-depth analysis of the scene in question, the article then examines Kubrick’s Lolita, exploring the homosocial undertones of Peter Sellers’s Quilty, and the attendant commentary on heteronormative culture of late 1950s/early 1960s America. Finally, Lyne’s interpretation of this encounter will be analysed to discern how a menacing Quilty alters the narrative and deviates from the previous representations, updating the social commentary to incorporate a distinctly 1990s milieu in the process. Treating the two films as iterations and/or 

mutations of the original literature, the article proposes a comparatist-driven analysis to discern each artist’s intentions toward the narrative as exemplified by this crucial meeting of minds.

I wrote an invited blog post for the John Rylands Research Institute and Library about a small fragment I found in one of the Rylands' most illustrious illustrated manuscript, Latin 98.