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About Me

I am a leading expert on old and new media, with a parallel focus on the medieval period and modern digital media. After completion of my PhD in this area in 2014, I have developed my research agenda to engage also with medieval disability studies, in particular the experience of chronic pain in the Middle Ages. I am on the vanguard of research into the historical study of chronic health conditions, with particular interest in what such analyses can bring to our modern formulation of disability and the experience of ill health.

My first book, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, explores the intersections between divine visions in the lives of medieval holy women and our modern consumption of media. It includes in-depth analyses of: photography, cinema, YouTube, social media, and online virtual environments. My second book, Medieval Twitter, analyses similarities between medieval methods of communication and Twitter.

I am a highly experienced public speaker, having presented my work both formally and informally at venues around the world. For instance, in January 2018, I gave a keynote address at the prestigious international Gender and Medieval Studies (GMS) conference. In my speaking engagements, I work to make specialist knowledge and complex insights accessible and engaging. In the GMS keynote, for example, I drew a direct line from medieval sources to our contemporary usage of social media. I highlighted Kim Kardashian West’s use of social media as a means of producing her identity, comparing it to the ways in which the identities of medieval holy women were carefully constructed representations of their “real lives”. To read this paper online, see here.

Recent Publications

Forthcoming

Medieval Twitter, Past Imperfect series (Kalamazoo, MI: ARC Humanities and Medieval Institute Press, forthcoming 2019/2020).

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, co-edited with Blake Gutt, Hagiography Beyond Tradition series (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2019/2020).

‘Introduction’, co-written with Blake Gutt, in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, ed. by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, Hagiography Beyond Tradition series (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2019/2020).

‘Stopping the Clock(s): Intersections of Academic, Crip, and Chronic Temporalities’, in Academic Ableism, ed. by Nicole Brown (London, UK: University College London Press, forthcoming 2019/2020).

‘Chronic Pain and Illness’, in A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jonathan Hsy, Joshua Eyler, and Tory Pearman (London, UK: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2018/2019).

 

Monographs

Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience, Knowledge Communities series (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

 

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

‘The Horror of Orthodoxy: Christina Mirabilis, Thirteenth-Century “Zombie” Saint’, postmedieval, 8.3 (2017),   352-75 <https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2016.19>

‘Marie of Oignies, of Nivelles, or of Villers: The Multiple Textual Identities of a 13th-Century Holy Woman’,   Open Library of Humanities, 3.1 (2017) 11, 1-34 <https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/

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‘Textual Authority and Symbolic Capital: Birgitta of Sweden’s Inclusion in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon’, in Across the Sólundarhaf: Connections between Scotland and the Nordic World. Selected Papers from the Inaugural St Magnus Conference 2011, ed. by Andrew Jennings and Alexandra Sanmark (= Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 4 (2013)), pp. 107-19

<http://www.eaglehill.us/JONAonline/articles/JONA/JONA-Sp-4/20-Spencer-Hall.shtml>

‘Post-Mortem Projections: Medieval Mystical Resurrection and the Return of Tupac Shakur’, MDCCCXXVI Opticon1826, 13 (2012), 56-71<http://www.opticon1826.com/article/view/opt.af>

 

Chapters in peer-reviewed volumes

‘Embracing the Medievalist Margin’, in The Ballad of the Lone Medievalist, ed. by Kisha Tracy and John P. Sexton (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, forthcoming 2018), pp. 161-68.

‘Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (d. 1250)’, in ‘His brest tobrosten’: Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, ed. by Kelly DeVries and Larissa Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 389-416

Media Coverage

Social Media

aspencerhall

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, England, France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Medieval, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Disability, Gender, Material Culture, Religion, Sexuality, Technology, Women