Faculty and Staff
Carol Symes
Assistant Professor of History
Carol Symes holds a B.A. from Yale College, an M.Litt. from Oxford University, and a Certificate in Stage Combat from the Society of British Fight Directors. She received the Ph.D from Harvard in 1999 and taught European history at Bennington College from 1998 to 2002. She is now Assistant Professor of History and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2008), the Queen Teaching Prize for Graduate Instruction in History (2007), and has recently been named Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2008-09). Her teaching interests span the period from antiquity to the seventeenth century, with special attention to the development of communication technologies and the dissemination of knowledge. Her new book, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell University Press, 2007) explores the role of performance in shaping the public sphere of a prominent urban community, and examines the historical circumstances that produced the earliest surviving vernacular plays of medieval Europe. She is also the author of numerous articles on the transmission of pre-modern performance practices, including “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theater” (Speculum 77 [2002]), which won the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize of the Medieval Academy of America in 2004. Her current book project, A Modern War and the Medieval Past: The Middle Ages of World War I, is being supported by a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois. In the spring of 2008, she will be a Distinguished Visitor at York University and a scholar-in-residence at its Centre for Medieval Studies. She is a member of Actors’ Equity and an avid scuba diver.