Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Early-Career Research Fellowship

In 2008, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation established an early-career postdoctoral Fellowship to enable recent PhDs in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (excluding Law) from Corpus Christi College to spend up to three years at the University of Chicago, and vice versa. The Fellowship recognises early-career scholars of exceptional promise and provides time and resources in support of their research efforts and professional development.

The current Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Early-Career Research Fellow at the College is Dr Sam Lasman. His research focuses on the interplay of the historical and the supernatural in medieval narratives from Europe and the Middle East, particularly the Iranian world and the British Isles.

His main current project, Parahuman Pasts: Monsters, Fairies, and Time in Medieval Narrative, explores the roles played by speculative beings in accounts of the past across three medieval literary ecosystems: Middle Welsh prose, New Persian verse epic, and Old French narrative lais. Within each of these genres, medieval writers deploy parahumans—human-like nonhumans—to fashion the past as a site of intimate alterity, alien yet indelibly linked to the cultural identities and anxieties that structure the present. By populating historical narratives with entities that display human characteristics yet refuse (or are refused) humanity, these texts constitute imaginative attempts to reconfigure received traditions into unprecedented shapes. These in turn often become enduring origin myths, through complex processes of intertextuality, canonisation, and identity-building. 

A second project, currently in its early stages, is tentatively titled Colonizing the Otherworld: Parahumans and Racialized Discourse. This focuses on the euhemeristic characterisation of parahumans as representatives of an ancient, colonised race. While elves, fairies, div, sasquatches, and other legendary folk all fulfill distinct cultural roles, a strand of discourse emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that attempted to rationalise accounts of these beings by reading them as distorted reports of encounters between conquering invaders and indigenous populations. While it received an ambivalent academic reception, this paradigm became widespread throughout popular and para-academic sources. By proposing that discourses of conquest and racialisation have been employed to euhemerise mythological, literary, and folkloric accounts of parahumans, this project examines the ways in which premodern sources have been read and exploited for colonialist purposes.