1. Director

Richard G. Newhauser (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania), is Professor of English and Medieval Studies and Chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Trinity University (San Antonio).  He is an internationally known scholar specializing in the history of the virtues and vices from late antiquity to the early modern period.  He is a former Fellow at the National Humanities Center, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellowship from the ACLS, and the director of an NEH Summer Seminar in 2004.  Prof. Newhauser regularly teaches a seminar for undergraduates at Trinity University entitled "Sins and Sinners in Western Culture" that examines changing understandings of morality in changing cultural contexts, from the monastic environments described by Evagrius and Cassian in the early Middle Ages to twentieth-century life in America as witnessed in Berthold Brecht's musical The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petit Bourgeoisie or the film Seven.He has created sessions dealing with the construction of the sins in their cultural context at important conferences, such as the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, and meetings of the New Chaucer Society, the MLA, and the Medieval Academy of America.  He is the author of The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 41 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); the editor of collections of essays on medieval ethics:  In the Garden of Evil: The Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005); The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, under contract with Brill (representing work by participants in the 2004 NEH Seminar); and co-editor of Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 130 (Leiden, 2005).  Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Ashgate Press, 2006) will reprint a selection of his previous essays. 

2. Visiting Instructors

The seminar seeks to encourage interaction between the American participants and some of the finest European and American scholars working on questions of medieval moral constructs and other experts whose work will help to continue the revitalization of the study of the sins in the Middle Ages.  These visiting instructors will provide invaluable lectures for the seminar and join the participants for lunch and informal conversation after the seminar meetings.  Other well-known scholars in residence in Cambridge over the summer will also be invited to have lunch with the participants in order to enhance their experience and interaction with major scholars in their fields.

•       Prof. David Ganz, Professor of Latin Paleography, Department of English and Classics, and Director, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King's College, University of London.  Prof. Ganz's knowledge of Carolingian ethics will give the participants direct contact with important primary sources for the study of penitence and the sins.  
   

•        Prof. Edward Peters, Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.  Prof. Peters's recent interest in palaeopsychology will help orient the seminar to see the place of the seven deadly sins in the history of psychology. 
   

•        Prof. Siegfried Wenzel, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Pennsylvania.  Prof. Wenzel served as the director of an NEH Summer Seminar on the Seven Deadly Sins sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.  He has been at the forefront of historical interest in medieval preaching and the seven deadly sins for many years.  
   

•        Dr. Richard Beadle, Fellow, St. John's College, University of Cambridge, and Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge.  Dr. Beadle is an internationally known expert on English manuscripts of the later Middle Ages and will provide the participants with an insider's look at the English texts on the sins in the manuscript collection at St. John's College.
   

•        Dr. István Bejczy, Senior Researcher, Department of History, Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, Holland.  Dr. Bejczy's expertise in twelfth-century moral theology that stems from his current project directing research fellows in the production of a multi-volume history of the cardinal virtues will benefit the participants in the seminar in the examination of the origins of academic theology.
   

•        Dr. Miriam Gill, Director of Certificates of Art History and Architectural History, University of Leicester.  Dr. Gill is an expert on wall painting in England in the later Middle Ages and has frequently published on depictions of the vices in parish churches in England.  She is in contact with the rectors of the churches in Hessett and Stanningfield and will be the ideal guide to these sites.
   

•        Dr. Nigel Harris, Senior Lecturer, Department of German Studies, University of Birmingham.  Dr. Harris's expertise in the interaction between lay and clerical groups in Bavaria and Austria during the later Middle Ages will help make comprehensible the ways in which an urban environment and urban politics influenced the content and presentation of pastoral theology.
   

•         Dr. Sylvia Huot, Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and Reader in Medieval French Literature, University of Cambridge.  Dr. Huot's expertise in medieval French literature and illuminated manuscripts of French origin in Cambridge libraries will deepen the participants' understanding of pictorial representations of the sins.