“high places round these lakes”: Medieval Studies and White Settler Colonialism at UW-Madison

Abstract

Small histories like this one remind us our investments in Old English poetry are never only or simply in Old English poetry. Rather, they’re part of complex networks of investments, often in whiteness, often as stolen property, including its tremendous privileges for white settlers like myself. Leonard’s academic career as a scholar, translator, and poet and his close friendship with Brown represent for me some of this assemblage of attachments among medieval studies and white settler colonialism and privilege. In my work, they represent critical spaces to explore, work through and against (our own) conscious and unconscious postmedieval attachments to whiteness and settler colonialism — critical work I consider one of the many responsibilities of practicing medieval studies today as a white settler.