Maia Béar

Maia Béar's picture

Maia Béar specializes in late medieval English poetry and art. Originally from London, Maia received a BA in English Literature from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2018, where she was a Senior Scholar and received three academic prizes, including the Gould Prize for English. Before coming to Yale, she worked as an English and special educational needs teacher: she is passionate about inclusive pedagogy and academic accessibility. Her thesis, entitled ‘Please Touch The Artwork: Living Stones in Late Medieval England’, explores the intersection of Gothic statuary and English literature from the 13th to 15th centuries using multimedia analysis and affect theory. This project moves beyond scientific historicism and gestural rhetoric to argue for a new focus on the ephemeral in the literary and artistic encounter: feeling, movement, and experience. Maia also serves as the Logistics Officer for Yale Lectures in Medieval Studies and the Co-ordinator for Yale Medieval Lunch; her non-medieval hobbies include captaining the Yale Grad Rugby Club.

Publications:

‘Beinecke MS 1085: a fifteenth-century medical fragment’, Manuscript Studies 8.1 (University of Pennsylvania Press), forthcoming

Conference papers:

- ‘“More Guessed Than Seen”: the troubled medievalism of Percy MacKaye’, to be presented at Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, March 2023

- ‘Tracing Touch in Beinecke MS 1085: Towards a Tactile Palaeography’, presented at Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, March 2022

- ‘Making Things, Making Up For Things, Making Things Up: Female creativity in a Middle English Romance’, presented at Princeton Medieval Studies Conference, March 2021