Aylin Malcolm

@malentendre.bsky.social

1231 Followers 915 Following

Literature prof | now writing about: medieval plant grafting | they/them | science before 1700, book history, sci fi, whale facts 🐋 🌐 aylinmalcolm.com 📍Toronto

A grey, white, and orange cat with maniacal green eyes lies on her back, grabbing a rainbow ribbon

A basic, battered black leather wallet with a large circular sticker on the front reading CREAM CHEESE

Curled on a rustic wood shelf, a cat yawns, head and shoulders dramatically illuminated by a beam of light

A small, sleepy dilute torbico cat (with a white fluffy belly and white mittens) half smiles, half grimaces while receiving neck scratches

Poster text is as follows:
Call for Papers: ICMS 2026, May 14–16, Western Michigan University. Naturing Bodies, Embodying Nature. This session seeks to explore the intersections of embodiment and environment in the Middle Ages, considering how bodies—organic and inorganic, human and non-human, material and immaterial—constitute, shape, and envelop one another. By “naturing” bodies, we seek to erode neat divisions between humans and the natural world to uncover the earthy entanglements linking humans to the environments they shape and are shaped by. Attuning to John Scotus Eriugena’s claim that nature is the name “for all things, for those that are, and those that are not,” we invite papers that reflect on the fundamentally relational ontology of humans, non-humans, and environments. Abstracts up to 300 words can be submitted to the ICMS proposal portal before September 15.

Four layabout soldiers stand on the left. Far down the road on the right, Jesus kneels beneath his cross. The air is hazy with wildfire smoke

Cover slide for a lecture titled "Chick Lit: Parody in The Nun's Priest's Tale," with a fifteenth-century image of a hen and rooster eating grain

The thirteenth-century Roman de Silence depicts climate and gender as materially entangled, linking the titular character’s (trans)masculinity to wind and heat. I argue that this poem envisions nonhuman nature as enabling resistance to gender binaries while bolstering racial and class hierarchies. I trace the effects of climate on the protagonist Silence’s skin tone, showing how epidermal whiteness underlies their fluid gender and indelible aristocratic identity. I then consider how Silence’s interactions with Merlin represent gender and species as unstable and intertwined. Finally, I interpret Merlin’s description of a grafted plant as an emblem of interspecies collaboration and trans thriving.

Woman and hawk; detail from Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 764, folio 76v

Jonah getting dunked in the ocean by his fellow sailors, from the medieval manuscript of "Patience" (Cotton Nero A.x)

Priest administering the host to a wolf; from manuscript of Gerald of Wales's Topography of Ireland

Cover of Medieval Ecocriticisms volume 4. Includes a medieval illustration of a half-bird siren looking in a mirror and a centaur looking over their shoulder (from Getty MS Ludwig XV 3, folio 78).

Title page for a forthcoming issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms with: intro by Nat Rivkin and Aylin Malcolm; “Settler Fantasies and Queer Disruptions: A Nonbinary Reading of Gerald’s Wolves” (SARAH LAVOY-BRUNETTE AND JORDAN CHAUNCY); “Birds, Blood, and Nonbinary Bodies in Marie de France’s Yonec” (AYLIN MALCOLM); “Cautious Lion, Canny Woman: Queer Animality in La Response du bestiaire” (TESS WINGARD); “Trans Activisms and Interspecies Entanglement in the Middle English Patience” (ELLIS LIGHT); “Of Giantesses, Greenland, and Trans Ecology in Jökuls þáttr Búasonar” (BASIL A. PRICE); “Trans Antagonisms and Affirmations in Henry Medwall’s Nature” (MICAH JAMES GOODRICH)

Screenshot of the details for Panel 58, "Premodern Digital Ecologies," on Thursday May 9 at 1:30 PM. https://icms.confex.com/icms/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/5128

Title page of a "Medieval Trans Natures" issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms

Several medieval images of contented-looking people holding limbs dangerously close to lit fireplaces

Screenshot of abstract. See the link in the post for full text.

A round, hand-painted wooden sign imitating an oreo and advertising "FRIED OREO" in front of a butcher shopfront with an array of neon lights

A semicircle of five white toilets, backs to the center, on a patch of weeds

Image of CFP text. See https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/08/04/premodern-digital-ecologies-59th-international-congress-on-medieval-studies-may-9-11.