Dr Joe Stadolnik was an IAS Junior Research Fellow from 2017-18.
Research Theme: Lies
Joe Stadolnik studies expertise and its expression in medieval English literature, science and social life. His current work explores how self-styling performances of medieval doctors and alchemists - with their carefully calibrated expert manner, sleights of speech and artful lies - provided English writers with readily adaptable rhetorical materials for poetic remaking. Joe works on the 'Lies' research theme at the IAS, to convene seminars and events that investigate modes of deception practised in the premodern world as well as our 'post-truth' one, as the Institute considers lying is a philosophical, political, cognitive and poetic problem this year.
Joe studied English at the University of Rochester (NY, USA) and completed his graduate work in English (PhD) and medieval studies (MPhil) at Yale University, where he was a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities. He has published an edition and translation of an unpublished essay by Jorge Luis Borges on the Beowulf manuscript in PMLA. His medieval scholarship has also been published in New Medieval Literatures and Medium Aevum. He is a member of the editorial board of Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll, which runs training workshops at Yale, UCL, and elsewhere, in which graduate students produce collaborative digital editions of medieval documents.