Our Guests.

Carissa Harris teaches medieval literature at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her research and writing focus on obscenity, rape and consent, medieval gender and sexuality, and long histories of rape culture and misogynoir. Her favorite medieval book is The Book of Margery Kempe, after whom her cat is named.

Alison Kinney’s first book of cultural history, Hood, was published by Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series in 2016. She’s written online and/or for print at The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, Longreads, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Believer, and several other publications and has had four Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2016–2019. Alison has taught nonfiction writing at The New School and at Catapult since 2017 and was hired in 2019 as an Assistant Professor of Writing at Eugene Lang College.

Simone de Rochefort is a Senior Video Producer at video-games website Polygon, and she’s one of the hosts of the tech podcast Rocket on Relay FM. She’s also a notorious Hemingway aficionado, and you may remember when she joined us for our bonus episode after we read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

Shamma Boyarin is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Victoria. He is also the director of the Religion, Culture and Society Program. His research and teaching interests span medieval literature (with a specific focus on Hebrew and Arabic literature), religion, and pop culture.