The Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program is welcoming Anna Kłosowska as this year’s Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Lecture speaker at 5:15 p.m. Sept. 27 in the Regency B/C room in Nebraska Union.

Kłosowska’s lecture, “Light upon Light: Art from Syria and Africa in Gothic France” will focus upon art objects — specifically enameled glass art — made in Syria and exported throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. The talk especially focuses on French middle class women’s patronage within this art trade. Kłosowska’s integration of material culture studies with Middle Eastern and European history, literature, race studies, and gender will provide a colorful and enlightening lecture with interdisciplinary outreach. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Kłosowska is professor of French at Miami University of Ohio and a member of the Department of French, Italian and Classical Studies at MU. She is also an affiliate of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Her talk features new work from her book in progress, “Remarkable Objects: Silk, Metal, Ceramics, Paper, Ivory,” which reimagines French cultural history through biographies of five objects from Afro-Eurasia. This continues some of her work medieval critical race studies, as evidenced in another recent volume, “Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures” (open access, punctum 2020), co-edited with Catherine Karkov and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei. As well, she has been researching and writing on narratives of enslaved black women in the early Renaissance, especially focusing on the Black sapho.

Kłosowska frequently works at the intersection of gender, queer and trans topics, as in her first book “Queer Love in the Middle Ages” (2005) as well as a recent essay collection, “Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern” (2021), co-edited with Greta LaFleur and Masha Raskolnikov. She has also published a bilingual edition of the poems of the Renaissance French poet, Madeleine de l’Aubespine (2007) as well as authored over 50 articles in many journals (including “Romance Languages Annual,” “Journal of the History of Sexuality,” “postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies,” and “Arthuriana” to name a few) and edited book collections (including “Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide,” “Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching,” “Fragments Toward a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” and “Speculative Medievalisms: Discography”). She also co-teaches a Global Book Lab at Miami, a collaboration between the Rare Books Collection, the Art Museum and the College.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln Medieval and Renaissance Studies program recognizes Mary Martin McLaughlin’s landmark scholarship through this memorial lecture and Kłosowska’s career history of cutting edge research on medieval women, gender studies and queer and trans studies makes her an especially fitting speaker for this series.

An informal reception will follow the lecture.