Speaker Biographies
Amy Hollywood
Amy Hollywood is a historian of Christian thought specializing in mysticism, with strong interests in feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her first book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), received the International Congress of Medieval Studies’ Otto Grundler Prize. Her second book, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2001) deals with Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, and their fascination with excessive bodily and affective forms of Christian mysticism.
Karmen MacKendrick
Karmen MacKendrick explores the intersection of the human body and language in her highly acclaimed books Counterpleasures (1999) and Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh (2004). Her work Immemorial Silence (2001) draws on philosophy, theology, and literature, from the early Middle Ages to the present, to explore the function of silence in communication.