Welcome to the Bodies and Being lecture library. Click on the videos below to watch the recordings of our previous speakers.
Dr Anna Cusack discusses how executed bodies could be eradicated, passed to surgeons, subjected to display, or simply be buried. Executed bodies confronted the people of London regularly, and their interactions with these remains reveal the mentalities of the time.
Chris White presents his research into the provenance of the “Ethiopians” in Orderic Vitalis’ Historia ecclesiastica, tracing the history of stereotyped blackness being associated with hypersexuality, the “monstrous races” and the demonic.
The Bodies and Being Team present their research into the bodies of pre-modern women in advance of the Bodies and Being Roundtable at Leeds IMC 2025. This research explores religious interpretations of corporeal femininity from the medieval to early modern periods.
Laura Gathagan is an Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. She introduces her book ‘The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders, c. 1031-1083: Embodying Conquest’ which focuses on Mathilda as a consummate practitioner of representation through embodiment.
Jessica Minieri is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Binghamton University. Her dissertation ‘Stolen Bodies and Hollow Crowns: Abduction, and the Expansion of the Crown of Aragon, 1280-1490’ explores captivity, imprisonment, and forced marriage for royals in Aragonese-Controlled Mallorca and Sicily.
Bodies and Being 