On October 24, Michael Twomey (Dana Professor, English) delivered a paper at Cornell University, as part of a conference honoring Arthur B. Groos, a specialist in medieval German literature and modern opera who is retiring at the end of this semester.
Michael's paper, titled "The Arthurian Environment," presented an ecocritical analysis of landscapes in medieval English, French, and German romances about King Arthur, arguing for the importance of ecotonal ecologies, unnoticed by modern readers, as liminal sites in which transformative narrative events take place. Michael was one of three of Professor Groos's former students to be invited to speak. The other eleven speakers were from Canada, Germany, and Portugal, as well as from Cornell.
Professor Groos is known among medievalists for books such as Romancing the Grail, about Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parizival, and Medieval Christian Literary Imagery (co-authored with R. E. Kaske); and he is known among musicologists for his work on the literary and historical sources from which Giacomo Puccini and Luigi Illica created the opera Madama Butterfly.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20151101212607687