Jessica Apolloni
Dr. Jessica Apolloni is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Christopher Newport University. She specializes in early modern English and Italian literature, including Shakespeare; the history of crime reports; and legal approaches to literary studies. She received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2016, and her current book project examines the impact of early modern Italian legal concepts traveling to and transforming in England—where legal practices greatly differed from continental Europe.
Jessica’s interest in transnational approaches to law and literature has been supported by grants from Fulbright and the Andrew W. Mellon foundation as well as produced articles in Shakespeare Bulletin and Studies in Philology.
Charlotte Cartwright
Dr. Charlotte Cartwright is a lecturer in the Department of History at Christopher Newport University. She teaches courses on World History, the Early Middle Ages (to 1000), the Later Middle Ages (1000 – 1450), Medieval England and the Crusades. She holds a PhD from the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom). She researches gender, power and family groups in tenth and eleventh century Normandy.
Michelle Erhardt
Dr. Michelle Erhardt is associate professor of art history at Christopher Newport University, where she teaches world art, medieval art, Italian Renaissance art, Northern Renaissance art and Baroque art. She holds a PhD from Indiana University.
Sarah Finley
Sarah Finley is Associate Professor of Spanish at Christopher Newport University. Training in literature, musicology and vocal performance supports her research on sound and music in the early modern Hispanic world. Her book Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a pioneer exploration of sound in the work of Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Finley’s second book Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond will come out with Vanderbilt University Press in 2024. In addition, she has published articles and delivered lectures on auditory culture in early modern convents, Sor Juana’s transatlantic networks of lettered women and Afro-descendant sound in colonial Mexico. Grants from The Huntington Library, the Helmerich Center for American Research, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the Virginia Commission for the Arts have supported her work.
Dr. Grace Godwin is assistant professor of theater at Christopher Newport, and specializes in early modern plays in 20th- and 21st-century performance. She has presented at the Marlowe Society of America, Shakespeare Society of America and SCAENA international conferences, and regularly publishes scholarly theatrical reviews in journals, including Cahiers Élisabéthans, Theatre Journal and The Shakespeare Bulletin. She is currently at work on studies of productions of plays by Christopher Marlowe at the Royal Shakespeare Company and a critical history of the Swan Theatre.
Godwin teaches regularly in London for Midwestern State University’s British Studies Program, and frequently supports TheaterCNU productions, including “The Duchess of Malfi,” “Mary Stuart,” and “Pericles.” She is currently working on a new text-movement piece titled “My Case is Altered” with a team of internationally renowned theater practitioners. She holds a PhD from the University of Illinois and a postgraduate diploma in Shakespeare studies from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Andrea Pauw
Dr. Andrea Pauw is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Christopher Newport University. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Virginia in 2020. A specialist in early modern Iberian literatures and cultures, her research examines aljamiado (Spanish written with the Arabic alphabet) manuscripts produced by moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity in the sixteenth century). Her research has been published in the Hispanic Review and in Routledge’s Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity. Dr. Pauw’s current book project examines representations of moriscos in nineteenth-century history writing, visual art, and the press, arguing that the confluence of interest in the moriscos’ past and discoveries of aljamiado manuscripts profoundly shaped the emergence of the modern Spanish nation-state.
Sharon M. Rowley
Dr. Sharon Rowley is professor of English and director of medieval and Renaissance studies at CNU. She specializes in Old and Middle English language and literature, manuscript studies and Shakespeare. Her book on the Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, is the first full-length study of one of the most important works of prose to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. She has also published many articles on Bede’s ecclesiastical history and the Old English version of it, as well as on Old English prose, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Middle English Breton lays, Old English homilies and otherworldly visions. Her essay “Bede and the Northern Kingdoms,” appears in the Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature.
In addition to a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to work on her book in 2007–08, Rowley has also been awarded grants from the British Academy. Most recently, she was awarded an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant of more than $321,000 to work on a new edition of the Old English Bede with Dr. Greg Waite of the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has been a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University (England), and an honorary research associate in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge. She has been invited to speak in Paris; Cambridge, England; London, Winchester, England; Cork, Ireland; and at the Newberry Library in Chicago and Wake Forest University.
Eric Silverman
Dr. Eric Silverman is associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Christopher Newport University, and a research fellow at Biola University. He specializes in contemporary ethics and medieval philosophy, and regularly teaches courses in ancient and medieval philosophy, modern philosophy, critical thinking/logic, philosophy of religion and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. He published his first book, The Prudence of Love: How Possessing the Virtue of Love Benefits the Lover, in 2010.
Silverman has been awarded a grant from the Immortality Project at the University of California at Riverside (underwritten by the John Templeton Foundation), to fund the Paradise Project manuscript and conference on philosophical issues and the concept of heaven. He holds a PhD from St. Louis University.