Dr Basil Arnould Price

@basilaprice.bsky.social

854 Followers 546 Following

He/Him 🏳️‍⚧️ ✨ Asst. Prof. of Queer and Medieval Literature @SUNY, previously UCLA, York, UO ✨Gender, Empire, and Race in the Old Norse World ✨my own bad opinions

CALL FOR PAPERS: ICMS (KALAMAZOO) 2027 RETHINKING ECOTHEORY This pair of sessions (sponsored by Medieval Ecocriticisms) questions ‘entanglement’ as the predominant idiom of ecocritical thinking, arguing that the medieval past both yields and necessitates alternative ways of thinking about our ecological investments, both affective and ontological. Drawing upon recent critiques (e.g. Swarbick and Tremblay 2024), this pair of sessions interrogates the limits of ‘enmeshment’ as the predominant idiom for ecocritical approaches to the premodern past. Although the (specifically European) premodern past is often identified as ‘The Green Middle Ages’ (e.g. Chavannes-Mazel 2023, Kehnel 2024), these sessions question the recuperation of this period as one of ethical, reciprocal, and harmonious relations between humans and the natural world. Session 1: DISENTANGLING ECOCRTICISMS How can ecocritical discourse benefit from attuning to bodies and environments in the Middle Ages for whom entanglement is either a problem or an impossibility? We welcome papers that “rethink nature as a limit” (Swarbrick & Tremblay, 2024), considering how the natural world or “Nature” in the Middle Ages makes demands on precarious bodies in a precarious world where uncomfortable boundaries trouble or refuse entangled thinking. APPLY: tinyurl.com/ICMS2027-S1 Session 2: DISAPPOINTING ECOCRITICISMS We invite papers which grapple with the disappointing, dissatisfying, and disconcerting relationalities embedded within medieval ecological imaginaries or practices, or the ways in which the premodern past eludes our desire for eco-motional rescue. We welcome papers from any area of medieval studies that explore the bad feelings that attend medieval relations with the environment, and problematize contemporary theorisations of a harmonious, reciprocal mesh. APPLY: tinyurl.com/ICMS2027-S2 DEADLINE: SEPT 15 Contact: Hunter Allen Phillips (hap48@cornell.edu) and Basil Arnould Price (basil.price@oneonta.edu)
Screenshot of the e-proofing interface for an article.
Screenshot of the article and abstract. Abstract reads as follows: This article addresses an omission in histories of premodern colonialism: the period after Iceland became a dependency of the Kingdom of Norway in 1262/1264. My discussion is structured around two debates in terminology: the use of “colony” in studies of medieval Iceland and the meaning of “post-“in postcolonialism. By reviewing this historiography, this article develops a theory of “post-ness,” which is used to describe an alternative, transtemporal, nonteleological form of periodization, as well as an affect that suffuses how the end of self-rule was re-written and re-imagined across medieval and modern Iceland. Approaching Iceland in terms of “post-ness” affords new insight into the ways in which identities and histories were negotiated before and after 1262/1264, while also suggesting that this underexamined context provides new possibilities for historical and comparative studies of colonialism and anticolonialism.
Screenshot from Feminae, with text as follows: "Article of the Month: Indexers select an article or essay at the beginning of each month that is outstanding in its line of argument, wealth of significances, and writing style. We particularly look for pieces that will be useful as course readings. [Picture of the reconstructed Sutton Hoo helmet]. Price, Basil Arnould. "Sufficient Tragedy: Masculinity as Cruel Optimism in Beowulf." English Studies 105, 5 (2024): 681-702. Available open access from the Taylor & Francis website: https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2024.2393068"
In “Beowulf on Gender,” (2012) Gillian Overing defines masculinity in the poem “as a fantasy of armored independence,” observing that “arms encapsulate the man, demarcate the parameters of the male body […] arms are the man” (10, 5). Despite productive examinations of the enmeshment of human and object in Old English texts (e.g. Paz 2017; Trilling 2019), these studies have yet to contend with how these imbrications produce gender. Since, as Overing suggests, manhood in Beowulf is signified and realized through objects repeatedly identified as created (see Cavell 2014), masculinity is neither natural nor inherent but produced through the body’s entanglement with man-made materials. If, as Susan Stryker (1994) asserts, “the transsexual body is an unnatural body,” are these assemblages not just masculine, but trans masculine? Drawing upon Jeanne Vaccaro (2010, 2014, 2015)’s theories of transgender craft, this paper reads masculinity in Beowulf as ‘handmade’, produced through mixed-media, collective labor, and “the ordinary feelings and textures of crafting transgender life”. Beginning with the arming of Beowulf (ll. 1442-1491), I read this episode as constructing armaments as androgenizing agents, but also as unsettling the body’s supposed fixity or legibility. From there, I examine how failed or lost objects in the poem challenge teleological models of transition, which often determine the foci of the medieval trans turn. By reading Beowulf as “an overwhelmingly [trans]masculine poem”, (see Overing 1995), this reading not only identifies how “material experiences and accumulative felt matter,” make and unmake manhood, but also illustrates what Old English studies offers to ongoing debates within trans studies about the relation between body and feeling.
Picture of the SUNY Oneonta campus.
A picture of Ellen Gallimore, Ed van der Molen, Katy Bennett, Robyn Stewart, and Basil Price around a table smiling.
a printed capital m in bright red, surrounded by flames, a viking axe, and a viking-style wood-worked beast.
A painting of dead prelates and clerics, a detail from ‘Triumph of Death’ Wall Painting (Fresco), ca. 1440’s, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo (Photo P. Hunt, 2025)
Picture of Micah, Kersti, and Basil, three white queer people who are smiling at the camera, sitting at a patio table with a pile of dishes infront of them.
Slide for a presentation entitled Broken Transmasculinities: On Trans Negativity, Maiden-Kings, and Old Norse Icelandic studies. The slide is black and has a pink bar at the bottom. A silver, Viking age statuette is to the right, known as the Viking from Hårby.
picture of a nearly illegible swedish document
Screenshot from the video game Disco Elysium, with the words Homo-Sexual Underground proudly displayed
Flyer for the Dissonance & Dysphoria: 35th Medieval Studies Student Colloquium at Cornell University. In a white box on a gold background, the flyer announces that the event will be on Saturday, Feb 22nd, 8:30am-6:00pm at the AD White House at Cornell University. In white text on a gold background, it says that the keynote will be by Dr. Basil Arnould Price, and the talk is entitled "Broken Trans Masculinities: Old Norse Trans Studies and Its Disappointments."
Proof for a chapter entitled “Suicide as Speech: The Antisocial Feminism of Svarfdæla saga.”
‘I Don’t Want Realism: I Want Magic!’—Magic and Queerness in Later Íslendingasögur (by Basil Arnould Price, a book chapter in Performing Magic in the Premodern North)