I have a couple of new articles out in early 2022. Both consider the question of how much we can know about other living things, which fascinated medieval thinkers as much as it does modern ones.

• “What the Mole Knows: Experience, Exempla, and Interspecies Dialogue in Albert the Great’s De animalibus.” Published in New Medieval Literatures.
  • On experimentation, literary devices, and animal cognition in a major thirteenth-century zoological compendium.
• “Of Monks and Movable Beasts: Animals as Fellow Travelers in the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis.” Published in Viator.
  • On mobility and human-animal relations in the popular legend of St. Brendan, including encounters with a whale and an otter.

I’m excited to announce the launch of Coding Codices, a podcast on digital approaches to medieval studies, which I am co-producing with other members of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. New episodes will be released on the first Friday of every month.

For more information and a list of episodes, visit podcast.digitalmedievalist.org. We’ve also recorded a special episode for new listeners:

Coding Codices is the second podcast I’ve worked on during the past year. In the spring of 2020, I produced Northern Elements, a three-part documentary series about the natural materials of Canada. To listen, visit soundcloud.com/aylin-mal.

As part of a series of lockdown lectures from Penn, I was asked how we figure out the pronunciations of words in languages that aren’t spoken anymore. As it turns out, literary studies can be very helpful!

In the past few weeks, I’ve published a number of short pieces on topics ranging from medieval manuscripts to contemporary poetry. All are currently available to read for free online.

• My edition of Hester Pulter’s “The Dolphin” is live on the Pulter Project website.
• I have a note about an astronomical manuscript (UPenn MS Codex 1881) in the most recent issue of Manuscript Studies.
• I reviewed Ru Puro’s debut collection of poems, Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House, for Jacket2.
• My translation of Émile Nelligan’s “Violon D’Adieu” has been published in DoubleSpeak.

I have also been curating a series of blog posts about marine ecosystems, titled Blue Notes, for the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.

My literature and science seminar was featured in a recent Penn Omnia article by Lauren Thacker. We chatted about the structure and content of the course as well as the challenges of shifting to remote instruction. You can read the interview at omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/science-fiction.

Ole Worm’s Cabinet of Curiosities, from the “Museum Wormianum” catalogue (Wikimedia Commons)

The presentation that I gave at the 12th Annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age has been posted on the Schoenberg Institute’s Youtube channel. This video also includes talks by Kelly Tuttle and Emily Steiner:

I’m very pleased to announce that my digital edition of an astronomical anthology at the University of Pennsylvania is now live at aylinmalcolm.com/ljs445. Features of this site include a collation visualization, sidebar annotations, and a series of curated “tour stops” highlighting the unusual characteristics of this deceptively unassuming manuscript.

This edition uses the Manicule web application, and was produced in collaboration with Whitney Trettien. To access its documentation or download the edition, visit https://github.com/avamalcolm/LJS445.

I recently appeared on an ecopoetry-focused episode of the PennSound Podcast Series, alongside Julia Bloch, Director of the Creative Writing Program; visiting poets Allison Cobb and Brian Teare; and fellow PhD student Knar Gavin. The episode, “New Writing Through the Anthropocene,” is available on the Jacket2 blog.

For a recording of Cobb and Teare’s reading at the Kelly Writers House the same night, see this KWH-TV video. 

My curations for Hester Pulter’s poem “Universal Dissolution” are now available on the Pulter Project website. These short essays showcase secondary materials that offer context for Pulter’s poetry, from sea monsters and unicorns to early modern celestial cartography.

The Pulter Project is a wonderful initiative bringing wider recognition to a deserving seventeenth-century poet, and is well worth a close look.

On September 12th, I joined Prof. Emily Steiner to give a 60-Second Lecture about eleven medieval words that might be due for a comeback. We also spoke to Penn’s Omnia about how we made it.