{"id":4594,"date":"2022-10-05T22:53:38","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T22:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=4594"},"modified":"2024-08-06T19:30:31","modified_gmt":"2024-08-06T19:30:31","slug":"chatting-with-new-professor-coral-lumbley","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/home-2\/the-words-october-2022\/chatting-with-new-professor-coral-lumbley\/","title":{"rendered":"Chatting with New Professor Coral Lumbley"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Coy-Bjork ’24<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Coral<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We are thrilled to welcome Assistant Professor Coral Lumbley (she\/they) to the Macalester English Department as our new medieval specialist! Coming most recently from New York University, Professor Lumbley has focused their research in medieval cross-cultural studies, race in the premodern world, premodern trans\/gender studies, ecocritical and environmental studies, and Welsh and Arthurian literature. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had the joy of getting to sit down with Professor Lumbley to talk about her background, transition to Macalester, and classes for this academic year. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our conversation went as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB:<\/b> How has your first semester at Macalester been so far?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>It\u2019s been a whirlwind. I just relocated to the twin cities and started at Macalester, so I\u2019m brand new, but so far it\u2019s been great; I\u2019ve been touring different pancake restaurants in the cities.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>What\u2019s your top recommendation for pancakes as of now?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>The Highland Grille.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>How has it been coming to Minnesota?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>It\u2019s been lovely; it\u2019s easy to get around and do things. In New York, if you\u2019re going to go one direction, you have to plan your entire day around that direction\u2013otherwise you\u2019ll spend three-to-four hours on the subway. Here, it feels like everything is just fifteen minutes away from everything else; there\u2019s this incredible range of stuff to do. It\u2019s also very relaxing. I\u2019ve lived in the midwest before and grew up in rural Texas, so I\u2019m not new to places smaller than New York City, but the twin cities are a nice combination of the very small rural places I\u2019ve been and the massive city I still live in half the time. I didn\u2019t know how it would feel, but it feels good.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>How did you first get interested in medieval literature specifically?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>I really liked fantasy literature, and got curious about where it came from and why I enjoyed it. I was also really interested in this idea of \u201cthe dark ages.\u201d It kind of sets up this mystical period of \u201cwe don\u2019t know much; what was going on?\u201d As an undergraduate, I got more and more curious about why I didn\u2019t know anything about the medieval period in my education leading up to college, and I had a great professor who just illuminated the middle ages in a really engaging way.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>What classes have you been teaching this semester? <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>I\u2019m teaching \u201cReading Along the Silk Roads,\u201d which has been fantastic. We\u2019re currently in our Arabic travels unit, so we\u2019re getting to know some different travel narratives really closely as well as the different voices of these travelers. Our conversations are revolving more and more around the ethics of historical studies: archeology, anthropology and even literary study. What are the ethics of poking our noses into various cultural histories as an American academy? How do we do historical cultural studies ethically? That has been a really enriching vein of thought that we\u2019re continually diving deeper into\u2013which is an archeological metaphor I suppose. We kind of lack a good vocabulary for intellectual exploration that isn\u2019t informed by colonialist and imperialist histories: \u201cdiving deeper,\u201d \u201cpushing farther,\u201d \u201ca \u2018pioneer\u2019 in the field;\u201d we have these histories baked into the vocabulary. So, as we\u2019re doing historical studies, how do we get out of that vocabulary as we\u2019re trying to unpack the unethical bits of these historical endeavors; it\u2019s fascinating. I\u2019m enjoying it a lot, and the students are bringing in great intersections from other classes that they\u2019re taking.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My other class this semester is \u201cThe Literature and Language of Medieval Wales.\u201d That has been a lot of fun. There is a language component where we\u2019re learning some Welsh, and there\u2019s a literature component where we\u2019re reading original medieval Welsh fiction, and it\u2019s a really good time. We\u2019re reading it in English, but it\u2019s so important to have the basics of the language when you\u2019re reading the literature. Otherwise we wouldn\u2019t know how to pronounce the names of our main characters or places. I think that the Welsh language has always been a barrier of entrance to its literature, but that literature is very cool; there\u2019s monsters, dragons, warriors, and goddesses; the stories are fascinating, but they\u2019re hard to access if you don\u2019t have a bit of the language because the Welsh language is just fundamentally different from English.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>What classes will you be teaching in the spring?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>\u201cSilk Roads\u201d will be running again. I\u2019ll also be teaching the \u201cBritish Literature Survey:\u201d the \u201cgreatest hits\u201d of pre-1700s British literature, and that\u2019s going to be fun. It is themed \u201cthe self society,\u201d so it\u2019s going to be focused on how writers position the self in regards to their larger context throughout history. This class is a way to get people more comfortable with saying, \u201chow do I look at traditions where I can\u2019t look for myself in the same way I can in a modern movie or a modern novel?\u201d There\u2019s also going to be a focus on gender and women authorship, which was relatively rare, but more present that most folks have encountered.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>Are there any words or phrases in Welsh that you\u2019re particularly fond of?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>There are many\u2013of course! The most famous Welsh word is \u201chiraeth.\u201d It essentially means nostalgia or longing, so it has tones of homesickness as well as \u201ctime-sickness,\u201d and I like the word a lot more than nostalgia; I don\u2019t think in English we have quite the same word. Although, I don\u2019t want to over-romanticize Welsh because it is a practical language that\u2019s very much alive today, but hiraeth I think is a special word, so it deserves some of the attention that it gets.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCB: <\/b>Is there anything else on your mind?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CL: <\/b>It\u2019s been great being here. I feel so at home already\u2013in the classroom and with colleagues; it\u2019s lovely, so I feel very happy to be here\u2013very lucky. Of course teaching is tiring, but after classes I go home and I think \u201cman, someone decided that I should get to do this for a living,\u201d and I feel very spoiled, so that\u2019s a nice feeling.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Thank you to Professor Lumbley for giving their time for this interview. We are so happy to have you here!<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Responses have been edited for clarity.<\/span><\/i><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Coy-Bjork ’24 We are thrilled to welcome Assistant Professor Coral Lumbley (she\/they) to the Macalester English Department as our new medieval specialist! Coming most recently from New York University, Professor Lumbley has focused their research in medieval cross-cultural studies, race in the premodern world, premodern trans\/gender studies, ecocritical and environmental studies, and Welsh […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":4592,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4594","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4594"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7723,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4594\/revisions\/7723"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}