We are delighted to introduce the new team responsible for MEMSLib, our award-winning student-led resource project. MEMSLib is a digital library which provides curated listings of open-access online resources for students and researchers of medieval and early modern subjects. It also offers a blog and advice pages, as well as a forum which connects users with a wider community of remote, online, and hybrid researchers. MEMSLib developed out of our shared desire to support academic peers and colleagues during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has continued to grow in the years since.
Emily Allison
Emily graduated from the University of Exeter in 2019 with a First Class BA in English Literature. Her undergraduate research culminated in a dissertation on portrayals of petty treason and its consequences in Early Modern drama and popular literature. Now, after a short break from academia, she is thrilled to be completing an MA in MEMS in her native city of Canterbury. Among her interests are premodern understandings of neurodivergence; Shakespeare’s connections with Early Modern Denmark; and Medieval English towns and Cathedral cities.
Cristina Alvarez Ortiz
Cristina Alvarez graduated in English with an Emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in Spanish at Colorado State University-Pueblo (2019-22), having taken a class on Chaucer and another on History of British Literature. During that time, she also worked as a Spanish tutor and developed a webcomic using her background in freelance illustration. Currently, she is a Masters students at the University of Kent.
Rebecca Gaylord
After a career in broadcast journalism that spanned more than three decades, Rebecca returned to the classroom and earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Southern Utah University (U.S.) in 2022. She is beyond thrilled to be pursuing her MA with MEMS in England’s cradle of medieval history! Having written her undergraduate dissertation on The Great Bovine Pestilence, she is interested in anything and everything to do with the fourteenth century, particularly how that tumultuous time period affected England’s peasants.
Amilia Gillies
Amilia is a second-year PhD student at the University of Kent, supervised by Professor Kenneth Fincham. Amilia’s PhD analyses contemporary perceptions of scandal and corruption at the Jacobean Court from c.1614-c.1621. She graduated with Distinction from the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies MA at Kent (2022), for which she was awarded a “Tomorrow’s World” Excellence Scholarship. In 2021, Amilia completed her BA in History at the University of Kent, for which she was awarded a First. Amilia assisted on the Middling Culture project, and is Branch Secretary for the Canterbury Historical Association.
The new team is already hard at work, responding to the effects of the cyper-attack on the British Library by compiling and making available a list of the catalogues of the Library’s manuscript holdings which are online on sites other than the BL’s own.
Dr Suzanna Ivanic, MEMS’s Director, welcomed the new team, saying: ‘MEMSLib is an outstanding resource enabled by our fantastic MEMS students. This initiative has repeatedly demonstrated the continued need for the core skills required to work with premodern materials as our global and digital world faces a range of challenges! We thank the new team for volunteering and wish them all the best for the time helping MEMSLib to thrive.’