Kalamazoo 2026 Sponsored Session - Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future

Here are the final details on our sponsored session for this year's International Congress on Medieval Studies.

Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future

61st International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)/Online through Confex

Session 282: Friday, 15 May 2026, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Co-Sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association; Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College; June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University.

Presider: June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University 

1 - The Dragon and the Witch in the Medieval Greek Romance Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe

Rui Carlos Fonseca, Univ. Madeira; Centro de Estudos Clássicos, Univ. Lisboa

This paper examines the roles of the Dragon and the Witch in the fourteenth-century Greek romance Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe. Due to their actions contrary to human nature, both magical figures are killed by royal male characters.

Rui Carlos Fonseca is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Madeira, Funchal, and Researcher at the Centre for Classical Studies, University of Lisbon. He holds a Ph.D. in ancient Greek literature (2013). Among other publications, he is the author of Epopeia e Paródia na Literatura Grega Antiga (2018). He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Classical Studies, working on Byzantine vernacular romance (2015–2021). His research interests focus on Homeric poetry, Byzantine literature, and Reception studies.

2 - Medea Translated and Erased: Late Medieval Depictions and Reconfigurations of Medea

Molly Bronstein, Univ. of Toronto

This paper examines Medea’s reception in Middle English and Middle French, arguing that a distinct division in her more notable representations—that is, a tendency to either to erase or amplify her sorcery—makes her an especially fraught and useful figure for the violence of textual lineage and translation.

Molly Bronstein is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto's English Department as well as Victoria College, where she teaches literary studies and creative writing. She previously earned her PhD in Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies from UC Berkeley in 2022 and has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Her research focuses on translation history and Ovid’s medieval reception. (She's also a horror and fantasy writer with an interest in the ongoing legacy of monsters and witches in recent speculative fiction.)

3 - “She is not known to God:” The Female Giant as Familial and Social Horror

Tina Boyer, Wake Forest Univ.

This paper analyzes giantesses in the German epic Eckenlied, arguing their true horror stems from social transgression, not physical monstrosity. By fighting like men, they challenge patriarchal norms, embodying medieval anxieties about female autonomy, kinship, and the “wild” woman outside patriarchal control, revealing a complex gendering of the monstrous.

Tina Boyer is an Associate Professor of German at Wake Forest University. Her research interrogates the intersections of medieval German literature and linguistics. She is the author of “The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature” (Brill 2016) and has published extensively on topics ranging from medieval religious morality to contemporary digital folklore, including work on the Slender Man mythos. Her recent scholarship includes a co-edited special edition on "Conceptions of Race in Premodern German Studies” for the journal Seminar, forthcoming at the end of the summer.

4 - Illuminated Nightmares: Marginal Monsters in Medieval Manuscripts and Their Digital Afterlives

Cristian Vechiu, Independent Scholar

How did medieval readers experience the grotesque creatures lurking in manuscript margins? Through analysis of reader interactions and material evidence, this paper reconstructs the medieval encounter with marginal monsters and explores how these liminal beasts created "movements of the mind" that shaped perceptual strategies still active today.

Cristian Vechiu is an independent researcher whose work focuses on medieval mysticism and Renaissance esoterism, while maintaining a close look upon the religious ideas of Late Antiquity (as a nexus from which streamed major spiritual practices and conceptions from the Early Middle Ages to the end of the Renaissance). He has a PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Bucharest, with a thesis on Anselm’s last treatise, De concordia. During his PhD he was a short-term fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He recently participated at the XXIII International Association for the History of Religions World Congress, with a presentation titled “Being a Scholar as an Outsider”. For the last ten years he has been teaching courses in the history of religions at a cultural NGO in Bucharest.