Submission Date

7-24-2026

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

English

Faculty Mentor

Kara McShane

Comments

Presented during the 28th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 24, 2026 at Ursinus College.

Project Description

In How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, Carolyn Dinshaw interprets the concept of now—the experienced present—as a singular and isolating event. In her words, now is never truly there: It is an unexamined transition, erased as soon as it is fixed, thought of, or spoken. All the same, now is still an observable day-to-day sensation, and studies of it consider multiple temporalities—that time is lived differently and this difference is overlapping—in their approach. Late Medieval English texts, Dinshaw argues, are more thematically concerned with asynchrony; they represent different time frames colliding into a single now. Building on this framework, I examine the York Corpus Christi plays, which collapse biblical time with the medieval moment(s) of their performance. In so doing, participants are presented with an unfamiliar mode of experienced time, the details of which mirror those felt by modern queer-identifying individuals. I later collaborate with a peer to produce a stage play, employing my research to examine how we might come to view time in the context of queerness and better incorporate past and future into a perpetual, unfolding now.

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