July was a joyous month for us at Bodies and Being because it meant celebrating our first anniversary together at the International Medieval Congress. Well, sort of. Francesca and I, and a virtual James, convened to host a round table and bask in the glory of our first year while Natalie stayed home and attended to the important duties of preparing for the coming academic year.
I am blown away by the success of our crazy venture after just one year. But before we list all the awesome things that happened, here’s a little backstory.
*Cue dreamy harp music*
Bodies and Being was born at IMC 2024, when Francesca and I met after I gave a paper on the reform of the churching rite in early modern England. The conference did not start out very promising as I, accustomed to the temperate climate of Alberta, Canada, was sweating buckets in the steamy Leeds sun. It was so hot, in fact, that I decided not to dress up, not to wear makeup and to just put my hair in a ponytail. * I looked a right mess as I stood before the whole four people who showed up. Imagine my distress when I realized I was also being livestreamed across the planet and recorded for posterity. So, if you’re wondering who the panting, sweaty English religion historian is each year, it’s me.
However, that talk was a turning point because Bettina Bildhauer and Francesca Squitieri were both attending and both had loads of really great questions for me. I hope my answers detracted from the sweat still pouring down my face an hour after arrival. Another woman from the University of St Andrews spoke up that, as it seemed we all had a shared interest in blood, we should think about a WhatsApp research group. I immediately loved the idea and started one up. That group of the four of us never really took off and I was worried it would fade away completely due to our busy lives, but I hadn’t reckoned with Francesca. Francesca, it turns out, is every bit as enthusiastic as I am about scholarship and she marched full steam into a website launch, logo, email, etc. Within a couple of months, Bodies and Being was up and running and we began to plan our first speakers. We also managed to snag James and Natalie to join the Bodies and Being team which was extremely fortunate as both have considerable expertise in body studies.
From that point on, we just approached the project as an inevitability, a natural outgrowth of our passion for our work and we are so lucky that it has attracted as much notice as it has. Within a few weeks, I had set up a BlueSky account for us and gathered over a thousand brilliant followers eager to engage. Our philosophy is quite simple – we are not asking for permission to exist, to call ourselves scholars, experts, authors, despite our relative newbie status (except Natalie who has that rare thing we all covet, tenure). Even though most of us are employed by universities, we don’t think our institutional affiliation is what gives us permission to take the initiative. We believe in not just breaking down barriers to public scholarship but frankly, just ignoring them outright. We have made a concerted effort to appeal to a wide variety of people from seasoned professors and scholars to people like my friend Sarah who is astonishingly brilliant but has not yet had the opportunity to earn a degree and the random guy I met at Melrose Abbey who, as a reenactor, had a considerable knowledge of medieval medicine. We have had students as well as historical fiction authors, archaeologists, and knitters interested in historical knitting and dyeing processes. We hosted three speakers and approximately six monthly colloquia as well as a roundtable at IMC 2024. We are so excited to have been a part of the scholarly community, and we look forward to contributing to that collegiality over the coming years.
And speaking of the future, next year will have even more opportunities for us to build up our speaker series and invite more people to contribute to our blog. We are already talking about collaboration with several of the scholars who have participated in our events and among our team is a still slightly hazy but very fruitful edited volume proposal in the making. I (Autumn) am putting together a plan to do some blog post interviews highlighting scholars and their work and you can help by volunteering as tribute. In fact, we would love to have you consider contributing a blog post about anything body-related, or perhaps you want to be a speaker for one of our monthly slots? Or maybe your vibe is more just hanging out at our informal colloquia, talking about your work and making new friends. Either way, we would very much love to welcome you to the fold.
Happy new academic year and happy birthday to us!
*In my defense, I have always run hot so, yes, the UK is, in fact, far too hot for me despite my desert upbringing in the US. Also, I still maintain that northern sun is hotter than all other suns combined. I said what I said.
Bodies and Being 