Dr Laura Varnam, Univ’s Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature is chairing the Michaelmas Term seminar of her John Fell funded project ‘Creating Medieval Criticism Now’. The seminar will be on The Forms of Criticism, featuring poet Susie Campbell, writer Nik Gunn, and cartoonist and illustrator Esther McManus, all members of the Guild of Medievalist Makers.

The speakers will explore the benefits and challenges of their particular creative practice (poetry, the historical novel, comics) as their mode of critical engagement with the Middle Ages in the modern day.

Susie Campbell completed a creative practice poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes in 2024. Her poetry is medievalist, experimental and multi-modal. Her poetry publications include Tenter (2020), The Sleeping Place (2023) and Wastelands (2025). She has a chapter in the forthcoming book Beyond Medieval Archives due out from UCL Press later this year, plus a new poetry pamphlet Sarsen forthcoming from Little Hirundine Press this November.

Nik Gunn is a writer and medievalist. He received his PhD from the University of York in 2017, specialising in Anglo-Norse linguistic and literary exchange in the Viking Age. He held teaching positions at UCL and Oxford before leaving academia in 2022. He now works in creative and cultural industries policy.

Esther McManus teaches BA Graphic Communication Design ​(Central Saint Martins, UAL) and MA Illustration (Camberwell, UAL). She is currently undertaking a PhD titled ‘Under Construction: Representing Queer Archival Presence & Absence Through Comics’ at UAL. As a cartoonist and illustrator, her books and comics explore personal and collective relationships to history, informed by archival research.

Please sign up via Eventbrite.