Download PDF | (The New Middle Ages) Adam J. Goldwyn (auth.) - Byzantine Ecocriticism_ Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance-Palgrave Macmillan (2018).
252 Pages
Acknowledgments
As a project that began in earnest five years ago and that had been gestating for (at least) five years before that, Byzantine Ecocriticism only came to fruition because of the time, generosity, and support of people and organizations too numerous to list; I will nevertheless try to do my best to recall them here. My first thanks go to the City University of New York (CUNY) students who passed through my classes between 2006 and 2009, first at Brooklyn College and then at the City College of New York.
Their insights and questions, with one of which I open this work, helped me see, at an early stage in my career, the urgency and necessity of engaged scholarship. Several other people from those years also deserve mention: Phillip Mitsis and André Aciman are aspirational models of generous mentorship; Karen Emmerich has always offered me good advice and great pep talks; and I am very grateful for the friendship of my graduate school colleague turned co-editor and co-author James Nikopoulos.
My colleagues at Uppsala University helped me find my footing in Byzantine Studies during a post-doctoral fellowship from 2011 to 2013; special thanks go to Eric Cullhed and Terése Nilsson, who comprised the audience of the initial presentations in various states of disarray that I delivered during those years and in several subsequent returns; I have benefited greatly from the innumerable informal discussions and from the rich intellectual environment they helped create there. While at Uppsala, I also met Przemysław Marciniak, who welcomed me into the extended family of Byzantinists associated with the University of Silesia: Katarzyna Warcaba, Tomasz Labuk, Nikos Zagklas, and Baukje van den Berg.
A substantial financial investment in this work was provided by the Swedish Institute at Athens (SIA), where I was a research fellow for the fall of 2013. The Gustav Karlsson Memorial Lecture I delivered there towards the end of my residency was the first public forum in which the ideas that would later become Chap. 4 were presented. I wish to thank Gunnel Ekroth for, among other things, encouraging me to apply, and Arto Pentinnen, the director of the SIA, for his kindness while I was there. Andronike Makres, whom I first met as an exchange student in Athens in 2002, deserves thanks in equal parts for her generous hospitality and for her insights into various aspects of Classical and Byzantine Greek history, literature, and culture, and for being an inimitable guide to the landscapes and monuments of Greece. During that time, too, Vasiliki Dimoula opened up new worlds of Modern Greek poetry to me, and I have very happy memories of our reading and translating together.
I first arrived at Dumbarton Oaks in 2008 for the Medieval Greek Summer School, where long study sessions with Katherine Lu-Hsu and others were indispensable to my survival. Alice-Mary Talbot, who taught me there, can also add me to the long list of Byzantinists who owe her a deep debt of gratitude for her guidance and mentorship over the years. I was welcomed back to Dumbarton Oaks as a fellow for the academic year 2016/17 in order to complete this project. Special thanks to Elena Boeck for her warmhearted skepticism, all the fellows in and out of Byzantine Studies for providing a wonderfully stimulating intellectual and collegial environment, and the hardworking library and other institutional staff.
I also wish to thank my colleagues in the English Department at North Dakota State University (NDSU) for making me feel at home in Fargo and for generously shouldering the extra work that the absences I required to complete this book have entailed. I tested many of the readings contained in the volume on my students in the various courses in medieval literature and literature and the environment I taught at NDSU, and I thank the students for working through these texts and ideas with me, for keeping literature fresh and fun, and for helping me achieve a level of creativity and insight I could never have achieved on my own. An independent study with Emilee Ruhland was particularly enjoyable, and I would be remiss in not wishing her the best in her future pursuits.
Perhaps no one has suffered more at the hands of my Greek than Dimitra Kokkini; I owe her an apology more than a thanks. For well over a decade, she has painstakingly revised thousands of lines of translation with me, stoically enduring every indignity I could heap upon her native language at all stages of its historical development. Her attempts to teach me even the rudiments of Greek grammar and syntax have been equal parts heroic and futile, but I have enjoyed it nevertheless, #readingknowledge. Ingela Nilsson has helped me to such an extent and in such diverse ways—in supervising my post-doc, securing funding and helping with grants, discussing ideas, reading drafts, co-authoring papers, co-editing volumes, co-organizing conferences, and in being a mentor and friend— that it has become increasingly difficult to express my gratitude to her in different ways in each publication.
I was lucky to stumble into her orbit, and it is a simple truth that my career, much less this book, would not have been possible without all the doors she has opened for me and, as importantly, all her advice and careful reading of my work over the years. This book would not have been possible without the help of Bonnie Wheeler, the editor of the New Middle Ages series; Allie Bochicchio, the literature editor; and Emily Janakiram, the editorial assistant, who accepted the proposal, encouraged my writing, and helped manage the process of bringing it into print. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Anastassiya Andrianova, who has not only immeasurably enriched my life outside of the academy, but has also been both my chief cheerleader and my most trusted critic.
Her compassion for animals and care for the environment, in life and in scholarship, has been an endless source of admiration and wonder for me, and her example sets the standard for what it means to make kin with the myriad beings with whom we share the only life-generating and lifesustaining planet we have yet discovered in this vast universe. Portions of Chaps. 1 and 2 appeared in a different form as “A CaseStudy in Byzantine Ecocriticism: Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic Metaphors in the Medieval Greek Romance,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23.2 (2016), 220–239, published here by permission of Oxford University Press. Portions of Chaps. 1 and 4 appeared as “Towards a Byzantine Ecocriticism: Witches and Nature Control in the Medieval Greek Romance,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 39.1(2015), 66–84. © Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission.
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