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Archive of Featured Alumni

This archive contains past postings on Medieval Institute alumni.

Kimberly (Campbell) Laing, MA, 2004

After my graduation in 2004, I married fellow Institute graduate Gregory Laing and we bought a house in Kalamazoo while he pursues his PhD in English at Western. No kids yet, but we have two rescued greyhounds that fill out our family. I work for the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency as a Project Manager. I run various state and federal grant programs as well as providing professional development for K-12 teachers. In order to support my continued interest in medieval studies, I developed an online section of MDVL 1450: Heroes and Villains of the Middle Ages, and I have taught it for the last three years. (posted 2009)

 

 

Dorothy C. Porter, MA, 2001

My name is Dot Porter, and I work in digital humanities. My current position is Metadata Manager at the Digital Humanities Observatory, run out of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. "Digital Humanities" is a fairly broad term that refers to the application of technologies to humanities research and teaching. I focus mainly on the research aspect of the field, and it's fair to say that I never would have entered the field were it not for my graduate work in Medieval Studies. While a student at WMU I was intrigued by the various electronic projects that were just becoming popular, which focused on bringing usually hard-to-view manuscript materials to a broader audience, particularly The Canterbury Tales project, Piers Plowman, and the Electronic Beowulf. After completing the MA I took an MS in Library Science at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and from January 2003 I was the Program Coordinator at the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities. I first worked with Kevin Kiernan on the Electronic Boethius project and later worked with Ross Scaife on a number of different projects in the digital Classics. In October 2008 I took up my current position in Ireland. Although my current project list is quite broad, I still enjoy working with medieval materials when I can, and my own research interest focuses on the expression of the physical materiality of text-bearing objects within digital environments - including, of course, medieval manuscripts. (posted 2009)

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Photos:

• Kimberly Laing (MA, 2004) and Gregory Laing (MA, 2004) with their greyhounds
• Dorothy C. Porter (MA, 2001)