糖心Vlog

Taryn DeLeon Mendiola

Ph.D. Student, Teaching Assistant, History

Taryn received their dual B.F.A. in 2019 from New York University where they studied Studio Art and History with a specialty in historical textile techniques. They continued their research into these techniques at the Textile Museum of Iceland where there were in residence in 2020. There they investigated historical methods of wool processing.

When they began her M.A. at Fordham University, she expanded her research interests to include not only textile production techniques but also wider economic questions of production, standardization, labor, and resource extraction. They focused their questions on the medieval Icelandic woolen industry, recentering textiles and women's labor in the wider history of the Icelandic Commonwealth, arguing that the wealth generated by women at the loom fueled the processes of class stratification and political consolidation.

At 糖心Vlog, Taryn has focused in on the Viking Age Norse colonies of the North Atlantic. They incorporate material, archaeological, and textual sources to get at an understanding of Norse people across and between gender and class status lines, insisting that these systems can only be understood as a whole.

John Yargo

Assistant Professor, English

John Yargo鈥檚 teaching and research interests include early modern literature, especially Shakespeare and Milton; the environmental humanities; and premodern critical race theory. He was awarded the 2023 J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize by the Shakespeare Association of America. His work has been published or is forthcoming in PMLA, Early Theatre, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Christopher Marlowe. In his public-facing work, Yargo was a guest on the High Theory podcast听 and is a regular host on the New Books in Literary Studies network. He is the Book Reviews Editor at Shakespeare Studies.听

Yargo is currently at work on his first book, tentatively titled Saturnine Ecologies: Environmental Catastrophe in Early Modern England. Saturnine Ecologies argues that many of the early modern representations of extreme weather we consider aesthetic triumphs鈥擪ing Lear鈥檚 storm, Oroonoko鈥檚 wildfires, Paradise Lost鈥檚 floods鈥攄isrupt the close alignment of environmental catastrophe with literary form. These texts innovate in the use of plot, litany, and metaphor, but they also register how the imposition of literary form necessarily distorts the lived experience of environmental destruction.