Ep.1 Reframing medieval knowledge systems: A conversation with Francisco Peña, Francisco Gago and Katie Brown

“We, the humanities, always have to be defending our existence. . . because we are being threatened more than ever, we are more relevant than ever.” In this episode, Franciso Pena, Francisco Gago, and Katie Brown, share insights about collaborative humanities looks across disciplines and borders gleaned from winning a SSHRC Partnership Grant for their project, “The Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: A Digital Edition of the General e Grand Estoria (DEGE).”

Topics covered in this episode include:

-Why medieval literature is important to us today. -Digital humanities, Generative AI, and learning to be adaptive.

-Collaboration in global contexts and uncertain borders.

-Why we need to defend the humanities more than ever.

Links:

Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: https://dege.ok.ubc.ca/ “UBCO professor spearheads global effort to translate, analyze rare 13th century text” July 9, 2025: https://research.ok.ubc.ca/2025/07/09/ubco-professor-spearheads-global-effort-to-translate-analyze-rare-13th-century-text/

Speakers Bio:

Francisco Peña Fernández is Professor of World Literatures at UBC, Okanagan campus. He holds a degree in Geography and History from the Universidad de Sevilla, a PhD in Hebrew and Aramaic Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a PhD in Spanish from the University of California, Davis. His research is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. It spans Medieval Studies, Literary and Biblical Studies, and Religious Studies. He engages in a synthesizing analysis of literature, history, and religion so as to develop new understandings of Medieval Iberian cultures.

Francisco Gago-Jover holds a degree in Geography and History from the University of Valladolid, an MA in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. in Hispanic-Romance Linguistics and Philology, with a dissertation focused on medieval Spanish military lexicography. His research centers on historical lexicography and medieval linguistic corpora, resulting in two military dictionaries, a critical edition of the Spanish Ars moriendi, and numerous paleographic transcriptions. He is the director of the Old Spanish Textual Archive, a lemmatized and morphologically tagged corpus of over 400 semi-paleographic transcriptions. He has taught at several American and Spanish universities and regularly leads digital humanities workshops.

Katie Brown is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Exeter. She holds a BA in Modern Languages and European Studies from the University of Bath, an MA in European Studies from Cardiff University and a PhD on contemporary Venezuelan literature from King’s College London. As a researcher, editor and translator, Katie specialises in women’s writing and narratives of displacement. She is now applying her interest in collaborative translation to medieval Spain through the Digital Edition of the General Estoria project.