The Modern Language Association of America announced Associate Professor of Medieval Studies, Jonathan Davis-Secord as the winner of its sixty-second annual William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship. Dr. Davis-Secord’s article, “Trans Saints in Old English,” which appeared in the March 2025 issue of PMLA, rereads two versions of the life of Saint Eugenia alongside that of Saint Euphrosyne (also known as Smaragdus). Dr. Davis-Secord lays out with admirable clarity the need for and stakes of his revisionist approach, patiently demonstrating how advances in one subfield can have significant implications for another. The article is an exemplar of scholarly solidarity that transcends binary assumptions to rediscover how these texts portray the gender fluidity that the protagonists were forced to suppress. In his probing of lives lived in precarity during medieval times, Dr. Davis-Secord also speaks to the risk of erasure or worse, to which all individuals and groups with nonconforming identities have been and may still be subjected. This is a welcome, timely, and important intervention not only in the field of Old English studies but also in the growing interdisciplinary study of trans history.
Associate Professor Wins Publication Award
