Mythmoot IX: Remaking Myth

Join us from June 23-26, 2022, for Mythmoot IX: Remaking Myth

Dr. Michael D.C. Drout is Professor and Chair of English and Director of the Center for the Study of the Medieval at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, where he teaches classes in Old and Middle English, Old Norse, Linguistics, Science Fiction and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He has authored and co-authored several books, including ones on Aglo-Saxon, Beowulf, Old English, and the Liberal Arts. He edited J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics and the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and co-edited Transitional States: Cultural Change, Tradition and Memory in Medieval England. One of the founders of the journal Tolkien Studies, for which he has co-edited 19 volumes, Drout has published over sixty journal articles and books chapters on topics including Beowulf, digital humanities, Old English psalter glosses, Tolkien, math in science fiction, the hellmouth in the poem “Guthlac,” and Anglo-Saxon medical remedies. He also serves as a consultant for The Lord of the Rings On-line MMPORG, Drout has appeared in two History Channel mini-series and recorded thirteen audio courses.

Dr. Faith D. Acker holds a PhD in Renaissance Literature from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590-1790 (Routledge, 2020). Faith precepted her first Signum University course in 2011 and has, since then, lectured on Signum’s MA courses “Shakespeare and the Middle Ages” (2017) and “The Life and Times of the English Epic” (2019) in addition to teaching at the University of Sheffield (2012-13), Cornerstone Academy (2013-17), Montgomery College (2017-18), Northern Virginia Community College (2017-19) and Southeastern Louisiana University (2020-21). Her current research examines the satirical portrayals of servants and tradesmen in seventeenth-century epitaphs.

Jeff LaSala is a production editor for Tor Books at the Macmillan Publishing Group, a freelance writer, and a longtime tabletop gamer. As a Tolkien columnist for Tor.com, he writes essays that discuss, praise, and adoringly poke fun at all things Arda; for the Silmarillion Primer and its follow-up series, Deep Delvings into Middle-earth, he is entirely to blame. Jeff has written RPG adventures and campaign lore for Goodman Games, Dungeon and Dragon magazine articles for Wizards of the Coast, and the Eberron novel The Darkwood Mask. He can even be accused of hoodwinking a host of fantasy authors into writing cyberpunk fiction in the experimental, multimedia anthology known as Foreshadows: The Ghosts of Zero.