Kathryn Sanford
Kathryn Elizabeth Sanford is a third year PhD student of English Literature at the University of Miami. She works primarily with medieval and early modern literature and is particularly interested in matters of monstrosity. In her future research, she intends to explore how monstrous elements impact romantic narratives in medieval literature. She currently serves as the Administrative Assistant of the New Chaucer Society, but has previously taught courses in the Writing Studies department at the University of Miami. She has also worked with Breakthrough Miami in a number of roles, most recently as the Summer Assistant Site Director at the Palmer Trinity Site. In her personal time, Kathryn is a TTRPG enthusiast and a hobby jewelry maker.
Work Experiences
Administrative Assistant
The New Chaucer Society is an international scholarly organization that aims to support teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age. As the Administrative Assistant of the New Chaucer Society, Kathryn is responsible for managing membership, website maintenance, and congress assistance.
- Membership management involves keeping the member database up-to-date, overseeing payments to NCS, organizing receipts of payment, sending out relevant correspondence to members, and serving as the primary customer service representative by fielding any questions or queries received.
- Website maintenance involves the general upkeep of the NCS website, keeping the online directory current, posting new materials such as blog posts, news, announcements, and SAC contents, as well as compiling and creating a newsletter for spring and fall.
Summer Assistant Site Director
Breakthrough Miami is an eight-year, tuition-free academic enrichment program that serves high-achieving middle school students who are from underserved communities in Miami. As the Summer Assistant Site Director, Kathryn worked collaboratively with the full-time directors of the Palmer Trinity Site to ensure that the programming for the 2022 Summer Institute successfully met and exceeded the needs of the Scholars, their families, and the Teaching Fellows. One of Kathryn’s primary responsibilities in this role was data collection and management. She was responsible for implementing standardized assessments, aggregating student scores, and organizing these records in databases such as Salesforce and SAMIS.
Course Instructor
Kathryn has taught two courses at the University of Miami: a standard ENG 105 course, and an ENG 106 course that focused primarily on exploring conceptions of the monstrous other in various media forms. As an instructor, she aimed to convey to students the value of a humanities course by emphasizing the importance of writing and critical thinking skills across all professions.
Teaching Fellow
As a teaching fellow at Breakthrough Miami's Palmer Trinity Site, Kathryn spent three summers creating and teaching accelerated courses for high-achieving middle school students. She taught an 8th grade physics course and two 7th grade ELA courses during her time as a teaching fellow.
Writing Center Tutor
Tutors at the University of Miami Writing Center offer free, one-on-one assistance to students and faculty with all types of writing concerns. Tutors offer advice at all stages of the writing process, coaching clients on how to bring out the best in their written work.
Freelance Writer & Editor
With a background in creative writing, Kathryn has occassionally dabbled in freelance writing and editing work, taking on private commissions from clients to either produce or edit a written work.
Projects
Monstrous Marginalia: A Menagerie of Medieval Marginalia
Monstrous Marginalia is a digital humanities project that showcases examples of monsters in medieval marginalia, built by utilizing Wax as a website base for a digital collection. Though Monstrous Marginalia is a small collection, its contents are curated to demonstrate an assortment of monstrous marginalia across a variety of different manuscripts. Dragons, griffins, giants, and more readily come to mind as emblematic of medieval monstrosity. However, these monsters can be understood to represent far more than mere flights of fancy. A monster can be read as a representation of the fears, desires, anxieties, fantasies, and other latent sentiments of the culture that created its body. The monster does not emerge from a vacuum-- and the shape of a monster should indicate something about the humans who brought it into existence. The choice to draw a monster in the margin of a manuscript, especially when that monster is not relevant to the text on the parchment, speaks to humanity's persistent fixation on monstrosity, and begs us to ask: what is it about monsters that has captured the human imagination for centuries?