Heide Estes, Ph.D., professor of English, will deliver her lecture, “Disability, Gender, and Jews in Old English Poetry,” at The Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies hosted by Columbia University on May 5 at 5:30 p.m. The lecture is open to the public and will be hosted in person and streamed on Zoom. Guests must register to attend.
Her talk will examine the way that Jews, gender, and disability overlap and function in a variety of Old English poems and other texts. Estes will discuss the use of figurations of Jewishness, gender, and disability to construct idealizations of Christian masculinity, as well as how Jews, women, and the disabled were excluded from social life and religious practices of early medieval Europe.
Estes is currently writing a book on these topics that will be published by Amsterdam University Press.
The Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies (formerly the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, ASSC) aims to foster intellectual exchange among faculty and graduate students whose interests embrace the languages, literatures, and cultures of early medieval Europe, with a focus on northern Europe. Currently based at Columbia University, New York University, Rutgers, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the University of Chicago, and King’s College London, the Colloquium seeks to expand the resources available to scholars from these universities and other institutions in the area, and also to create a welcoming intellectual community for anyone who is interested in early medieval studies.