We are delighted to announce our new MEMS Fest 2024 committee who will be running our 10th annual festival on Friday 14th and Saturday 15th June 2024.
We are delighted to announce our new MEMS Fest 2024 committee who will be running our 10th annual festival. This will be held on Friday 14th and Saturday 15th June 2024. Congratulations to the team! Look out for further updates coming soon.
Jemima Bennett is a doctoral student in MEMS at University of Kent and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, jointly supervised by Dr David Rundle and Dr Matthew Holford. Her thesis is concerned with the Bodleian’s collection of manuscript fragments, and she is particularly interested in fragments used as endleaves in pre-Reformation English bookbinding with a focus on Oxford. She is looking forward to co-organising the tenth MEMS Fest this year, working not just with the rest of the committee, but also the wider MEMS community, to celebrate all the skills it has to offer. Beyond MEMS, Jemima also enjoys singing in various church and chapel choirs in Oxford; the similarities between her life and her work are not lost on her.
Natalie Tolentino is a 1st year PhD Researcher who hails from Michigan, USA. She is currently undertaking a CHASE sponsored collaborative doctoral project between the University of Kent and Canterbury Cathedral that focuses upon processes of Material Rejection, Recycle, and Fragmentation in sixteenth-century England. Her research interests include memory and death studies, processes of marginalisation, iconoclasm, fragment studies, codicology, as well as information management. When she is not making her supervisors’ lives a ghoulish Lovecraftian caricature of this frail mortal life, she enjoys creative writing, knitting, bouldering, hiking, and learning video game design. As a student representative, she is particularly looking forward to co-organising MEMS Fest this year as she is deeply committed to the strong community ties both within and outside of MEMS and hopes to get to know our diverse community even better in the process.
Harry Gilbert is a second year PhD candidate, kindly funded by CHASE DTP, whose research explores the ways in which the reformed post-Conquest community of St. Andrew the Apostle, Rochester, utilised and manipulated the past to their own benefit through works original to their own scriptorium; specifically, several pieces of hagiography concerning past bishops, both ancient and less so, and a cartulary interspersed with unique narrative. Harry is the Co-Founder and President of the CHASE Medieval and Early Modern Research Network (MEMRN), and, outside of his PhD, enjoys hiking, bouldering, and tending to his garden. Harry is also a father to two girls: a wonderfully chaotic toddler and a rather adorable infant, and is thrilled to be organising the decennial MEMS Festival alongside the rest of the committee, hoping to make this conference an especially fun and engaging celebration of postgraduate research!
Rebecca Gaylord is a MEMS MA student coming to Kent from the United States. She previously participated in MEMS Fest 2023 where she presented a paper on the Great Bovine Pestilence. Her research interests include palaeography, marginalia, gender studies, and the socio-historical impact of plague in the Middle Ages. In her spare time, Rebecca enjoys hiking, reading, and being an international woman of mystery. She is extremely excited to co-organise the decennial MEMS Fest, and looks forward to celebrating the multidisciplinary legacy of the conference with the global and local communities of researchers and non-academics alike.