Dr. Leah Pope Parker, Assistant Professor of English, will present the Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC) Teacher of the Year lecture titled, "Disability and the Medieval Apocalypse: Body and Soul.”

How did medieval Christians use concepts of disability to anticipate the Apocalypse? And how did anticipating the Apocalypse impact the ways medieval Christians thought about disability?

In this lecture, Dr. Parker will discuss two Old English poems—Christ III and Soul and Body—that imagine corporeal decay and corporeal resurrection through the language of earthly bodily difference, predominantly injuries and impairments that we would call disability today. These poems reveal how bodily variation was used to contemplate variations in the soul in 10th-century England, with consequences for how disability and embodied difference are viewed and even experienced up to the present day.

Each year, the MHC honors outstanding humanities instructors from Southern Miss and other colleges/universities in Mississippi through its Humanities Teachers Awards. These awards celebrate Mississippi's humanities teachers and serve to promote the continued interest in the humanities throughout the state.

Reception to follow in the LAB lobby.