Our Guests.

Irina Dumitrescu is a professor of medieval literature at the University of Bonn, but she also has a secret life as a writer of creative non-fiction, especially essays—including one published last year in a volume called How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound, co-edited by Suzanne along with Kaitlin Heller. Most recently, she had an article in the Times Literary Supplement titled “How to Write Well: Rules, Style and the ‘Well-made Sentence’”.

Cord J. Whitaker is a Philadelphia native whose lifelong relationship with the African Methodist Episcopal Church led him to fall in love with Chaucer and medieval literature. Today an associate professor at Wellesley and an internationally known speaker, Whitaker regularly writes and lectures on blackness and the Middle Ages, on white supremacist deployments of the Middle Ages, and on African American political medievalism. His most recent book is Black Metaphors: How Modern Race Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking.

Oriana Schwindt is a freelance writer based in New York, with bylines in New York Magazine, Vice, and Vox, and she co-hosts By-The-Bywater, a Tolkien podcast right here on Megaphonic FM. She is thinking about restarting her own podcast about grift in America (it’s called American Grift). In 2017, she experienced this grift firsthand on a crowdfunded reporting trip to the geographic center of every state in America. Yep, she did all 50. No, your state isn’t her favorite.

Karla Mallette is a professor of Italian and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work focuses on the relationship between literary traditions in the medieval Mediterranean, especially Arabic, Latin, and Romance vernaculars. Her earlier books include The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250, and European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean, and she is just finishing a new one called Lives of the Great Languages: Cosmopolitan Languages in the Medieval Mediterranean.