(Brepols, 2026) is derived from the third and fourth installations of the  conference. The purpose of the conference was to examine how the bishop, one of the key characters in the administration of medieval Europe, shaped how medieval European history has been recorded and remembered. Bolstered by the sense that the bishop, as an organizing idea, matters, the inaugural conference, In the Hands of God’s Servants, sought to examine the construction, enhancement, and expression of episcopal power at a local level. Papers selected and adapted for publication appeared in , which offers microhistories of episcopal power and authority, fracturing what we know about the bishop into episodes that represent dioceses and dependents, and the individuals that ran them. The singularity of these stories inspired the subject of the second conference on Episcopal Personalities. Papers from this conference were published in , which explored the work and responsibilities of the bishop, how a bishop’s persona shaped his approach to the episcopal office, and how a bishop’s charisma affected the way in which he was received or remembered by the communities he served.

Analysis of the bishop’s personality encouraged the organizers to mine the slippery space between the office and the man, not only for the ways this space elides differences between the episcopal personae of priest, pastor, or prince, but also because the space sheds light on from where— or from whom — a bishop’s power derived. The third conference, The Bishop as Diplomat, took up this question as its focus, turning away from the bishop as an agent for and as himself, to the bishop’s role as a representative of the power and authority of others. The papers offered at this conference examined how bishops developed the skills and tactics needed for diplomacy, as well as how and when these skills were deployed, and in what circumstances. They also explored what it meant for a bishop, who was already representing an office beyond himself, to be a diplomat, which often required the bishop to re-present someone else.

Two years later, organizers turned to a theme that had been at the edge of each of the previous conferences: the Bishop as Patron. This conference focused on visual, material and social expressions of episcopal power as well as how those expressions were managed to ensure the legitimacy or the legacy of a bishop. Papers examined traditional examples of patronage, such as those demonstrated through the construction, expansion, and renovation of buildings and the production and reception of manuscripts. The papers asked how and with whom bishops built relationships, and how those relationships were maintained (or neglected).

The essays selected from these last two conferences were edited, expanded and combined into a single volume. Together, they offer a broad overview of how relational culture defines how, why, and for whom bishops work.

is divided into four parts. The introduction, authored by Gatti and Silvestri, explains how this book, the last in the “Power of the Bishop” series, responds to and expands on the usefulness of the “bishop” as a category of scholarly focus. Next, a prologue by Philippa Byrne asks, “What was Episcopal about Episcopal Patronage?” The remaining essays are divided into two sections. The first section, “Episcopal Patronage as Re/Presentation”, foregrounds the material aspects of episcopal patronage, such as churches, manuscripts, hagiographies, rites, rituals, frescoes, windows and tombs. This section includes a chapter by Gatti, “Diplomatic Gestures: Art and Ambivalence in Eleventh-Century Italy”, in which she compares visual images of the bishop to the embodied language of diplomatic gestures. The final section, “Patronizing Bishops: Clients, Diplomats, Allies, and Rivals”, examines episcopal patronage as an extension of episcopal relationships with families, kings, emperors, and clients, with predecessors and successors, as alliances and antagonisms, and between bishops and their congregations, as well as the monastic and secular clergy.

Creating a coherent collection in a field as broad and disparate as medieval studies can be challenging. In fact, the hardships experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, prohibitions for travel, the closure of archives and libraries across the UK, Europe, and North America, as well as the crises in higher education and funding cuts for scholarly work, made completing this book particularly difficult. In fact, it was because of these challenges that a decision was made to publish papers from the 2017 and 2019 conferences together after plans for a separate volume fell through. This effort fulfilled a commitment made by the conveners to publish high-quality scholarly papers that had been selected and expanded for publication.

Joi Mayo ’08 leads , a community development non profit with neighborhood groups working to establish more recreational and educational opportunities for the Nations Ford/Arrowood corridor near the state border with South Carolina. The area faces challenges that range from poverty to pollution to crime to heavy traffic.

“I see a lot of other communities, and they’re able to advocate and to really be thoughtful about how they want their community to be developed,” Mayo said. “I wasn’t seeing the same thought and intentionality from our city and county leaders where I live.”

Over the past year, Mayo and colleagues involved with Transforming Nations Ford have hosted community forums and advocated through Charlotte media for a regional recreation center and the establishment of an incubator space for local nonprofits.

“I’m so very proud of the work we’re doing with Transforming Nations Ford and am excited to make sure that everyone’s being heard,” Mayo said. “Empowering communities and collectively working together to deter the impacts of systemic racism on Black and brown communities is important work.”

Mayo majored in history and minored in Italian studies while at Elon. Because of that academic passion, Mayo spent time learning about people once enslaved and the vestiges of slavery.

She served as a middle school math and social studies teacher in Kentucky as part of before �þ��� in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools. In 2022, Mayo joined , a public/private nonprofit collaboration to grow, diversify and steward the city’s urban forest, as a community engagement manager.

“Outside of TreesCharlotte, Joi has an even greater impact on her neighbors, community, and the city as a whole,” said Mandy Ravin, who has worked with Mayo through TreesCharlotte. “She is very involved in her community, and she serves on a variety of groups and boards, actively participating in equity and social justice endeavors and dedicates her time and talent to amplifying the voices of her community.”

In both her professional work and civic involvement, Mayo said she adheres to a core belief: achievements of Black Americans should be celebrated year-round and not just in the month of February. She also hopes to return to her earlier academic interests by working with UNC Charlotte in collaboration with a local museum to help create an oral history project centered on the Nations Ford region. As longtime residents grow older, Mayo wants to ensure stories are told.

“I think it’s so important to capture the culture of that area,” Mayo said. “It’s a good time for non-African American people to really remember the great things and the benefits that African Americans have contributed to this country.”

“T�󾱲� is a role that I feel like I was born to play,” he said.

Dispensa can’t say much (yet) about the new season, which premieres Feb. 23, other than he plays Luca, a young man working on a merchant ship. The show, starring Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford, is a prequel to the Paramount Network’s hit “Yellowstone” and follows a generation of the Dutton family in 1923.

“T��� sound stages that we filmed on, the costumes, the make-up, you feel like you’re in 1923. It was such an immersive experience,” said Dispensa. “Everybody should see the show because it’s historical fiction.”

“I see myself here”

Dispensa experienced a similar sense of something being just right for him when he stepped onto the �þ��� campus as a high school student from Yorktown Heights, New York.

“It was the only place that I visited where I had a strong emotional feeling of, ‘Yeah, I want to be here. I see myself here,’” he said

Starting on a pre-dental track at Elon, Dispensa soon realized dentistry was not his calling and eventually found his way to film production. His participation in the youth problem-solving organization Odyssey of the Mind allowed him to explore his creative side at a young age, but he still got nervous about performing. It was an Elon acting course that helped bring his guard down and open his eyes.

“I was looking for an elective to take and I saw an acting for non-majors class. I said ‘That sounds like fun. Why not?’ It was a lot of acting games, and they taught you to focus on your partner and throw energy back and forth. It was thrilling for me in a way that I hadn’t experienced.”

The final exam for the course was to deliver a Shakespearean monologue; Dispensa was assigned the “To be, or not to be” speech from “Hamlet.” After seeing his performance, former assistant professor Elizabeth Patterson, who taught the course, recommended him for a higher acting class. Due to his schedule, Dispensa couldn’t take the course, but the feeling Patterson left him with made an impact on his acting career.

“To have that confidence instilled in you when you’re doing something for the first time, who can see your talent and say, ‘Hey, you should do this because you have a knack for it,’ I think that’s the best thing you can offer in terms of a teacher-student relationship, helping someone go more in the right direction for their life,” said Dispensa. “I’m getting emotional even thinking about it because I haven’t thought about it in a very long time.”

The call to act

Elon also provided an opportunity for Dispensa to explore his Italian heritage through the Italian studies minor, being the president of the Italian club and his mentor Samuele Pardini, professor of Italian.

“Pardini just has the right balance of brilliance and down-to-earth relatability that I enjoy being around,” said Dispensa. “Just hearing him talk about the culture and the language, and he also always pushed me as an actor.”

“Andy was a very creative and motivated student, with excellent writing skills,” said Pardini. “I remember he and another student giving a fantastic presentation in an Italian language class in which they also sang an Italian song. You could tell he had a talent as a performer. I am not surprised by his acting success.”

During his junior year, Dispensa explored his heritage further through a study abroad program in Florence, Italy, and, after graduation, taught English in Rome for six months. He was set to attend a graduate filmmaking program in California when he was, again, drawn to acting.

“I got this email from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and it said that somebody has recommended you and has waived the application fee if you want to come audition. I had never auditioned for anything in my life,” said Dispensa, who still doesn’t know who made the recommendation. “T�󾱲� was going to be an opportunity for me to study acting seriously.”

Sparking passion

His schooling set the stage for a career in New York City theater before he eventually did go to California, appearing in TV shows like “NCIS Hawaii” and “T��� Chosen,” but “1923” has been a game-changer.

“T��� director Ben Richardson, is brilliant, one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. He helped me at every single turn,” said Dispensa of the “1923” filming process. “You’re working with professionals at the highest level, and I feel comfortable doing that: when everybody shows up and has a smile, is ready to go and is solution-oriented.”

Working around so many professionals started at Elon, and Dispensa says, like the Phoenix, it allowed him to “spread his wings.”

“Elon is a place where there’s a lot of really creative people in all different facets, whether it’s business or communications or entertainment, and I just remember being inspired by so many different students and faculty,” he said. “T��� college experience should help you sift through what sparks your passion.”

“Writing Home: Selected World War II Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler” was . Pardini compiled and edited the book from letters left to him by Fiedler’s family.

Among many contributions, Fiedler authored what is considered one of the greatest essays ever written about American culture, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” and a book of literary criticism, “Love and Death in the American Novel.”

He worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence as a cryptologist and translator from May 1944 to December 1945 and wrote of his experiences in various locations of the Pacific Theater to his wife and two sons. Fiedler couldn’t write directly about his intelligence work. Instead, he wrote about themes, events and situations that include the ethical contradictions of war. The letters offer a glimpse into a formative period in his life, shed new light on the contribution of Jewish servicemen in WWII, and a view into modern world history by a man who would become a prominent figure in American intellectualism and literary culture.

“He’s a legendary figure,” Pardini said. “T��� letters are an historical document in and of themselves, but they’re also the result of an unfortunately forgotten but crucial moment in our country’s history and WWII, which is the NAVY’s creation of a Japanese Language School to train super gifted university students to learn Japanese and become code breakers and intelligence officers. They eventually were essential to help defeat Japan.”

Pardini came to know and was eventually mentored by Fiedler during post-graduate studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. They became very close, and Pardini once lived with Fiedler and his wife. When Fiedler died at 86, Pardini was the only non-family member to carry his coffin at his funeral.

He hopes the book will bring attention to overlooked passages of WWII history, as well as the sacrifices made to win the war and preserve democracy, the role Jewish servicemen played in the war, and a “counternarrative to the celebratory myth” of the Greatest Generation.

“T��� fact of the matter is, as the letters made abundantly clear, that war is a tragedy no matter what, soldiers were depressed, they wanted to go home, the horror was immense, including the unnecessary one they inflicted on civilians, which is what happens in wars. And that after a war people must and can learn to live together in peace again.”

At Elon, Pardini teaches courses in American Studies, Italian Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies and the Core Curriculum. His areas of expertise include 20th century modernity, comparative American Studies, Italian and Italian American studies, African American literature, literary criticism and popular culture. Among his other books, “In the Name of the Mother. Italian Americans, African Americans and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen” won the 2018 Italian American Studies Association Book Award.

“You learn so much more playing the game,” Luis Muller ’22 said during the first language lab presentation in “I never thought I was good at languages, but I’m picking up words I’ve never studied. I’m proud of myself for that.”

Essary’s course is the first of its kind at Elon and one of few like it in the country. To his knowledge, only his friend and colleague at Saint Louis University, Associate Professor of Italian Simone Bregni, has taught something like it before, and Bregni was the first. Using gameplay as a once-weekly language lab, students engage with Italian to solve problems, understand characters and their motives, and make consequential decisions in real-time. The students play in teams, and those games — the Italian versions with Italian dubbing and subtitles — are streamed over Twitch for students participating remotely.

On a recent Friday in the lab, a student lost a level in the cinematic choose-your-own-adventure “Detroit: Become Human.” His team collectively groaned, recognizing the directions they misunderstood that would have kept their player in the game. They began the level again with a new word in their Italian vocabulary.

“It’s like a multimillion-dollar movie that you have to be the director of,” Essary says. “Even when they’re not the ones holding the controller, they’re all watching and giving input on what decisions to make based on Italian instructions. I couldn’t hand you a book that would do this for you at this level.”

Essary has been researching the effectiveness of gameplay for learning outcomes for years. He jokes that the first Italian he ever met was Mario from Nintendo’s “Super Mario Bros.” franchise. He uses James Paul Gee’s “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” and the author’s 36 principles of video game-based learning as a foundation for the course. Among those principles: interaction, risk-taking, challenge and consideration, and the situated meanings of words.

�þ��� in the course are studying Gee’s principles and using metacognition to understand how gaming promotes quick and meaningful learning of language. During monthly presentations with their team, they deconstruct their recorded gameplay and discuss relevant vocabulary and the metacognition involved in learning through the game.

“T��� nature of gaming makes you want to learn more,” Essary says. “You see the emotion when they play. In that moment, it’s all about whether they know the Italian or they don’t know the Italian. If they don’t, they’ll do almost anything to learn it.”

He sees a future in language classrooms beginning in childhood that would bring about foreign language fluency early in life and make it easier to be a global citizen.

“What if you could have been playing in Spanish as soon as you started playing? You would have absolutely loved it because you already loved the game,” Essary says. That early learning would promote lifelong bilingual skills and easier transition to second-language learning in secondary and �þ��� education settings.

Essary collaborated with Bregni in designing the course. Bregni has taught similar Italian courses using interactive video games twice at Saint Louis University and has been using video games in language learning since the 1990s.

The pair has developed a proposal for a textbook on the pedagogy and is seeking a publisher.

Essary’s research of the value of gaming in education and efforts to bring it to Elon classrooms was funded by grants from the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Academic Technology Committee.

“It’s been years in the making,” Essary says. “It’s the coolest thing I’ve done.”

To get answers to these questions and many more, stop by the Carlton Commons on Wednesday, March 20 between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.  Faculty members from the Department of World Languages and Cultures will be available to offer some advice before you meet formally with your academic advisor. Or just stop by and enjoy an international treat.

As explained in the university catalog, by Oct. 1 of their first year, new students must complete their language assessment IN THE LANGUAGE(S) THEY STUDIED PREVIOUSLY.  You must take the test in the language(s) you studied in high school.

 If you are a new student or a continuing student and one of the following is true for you, please read this entire announcement!  Otherwise, skip it!

1. Did you fail to take a language assessment on-line during the summer or during January when you were instructed to do so?
2. For some other reason, do you NOT have a language placement score recorded in your OnTrack degree audit?
3. Did you receive a message asking you to take or re-take the language assessment in a proctored setting?
4. Are you a native speaker of a language taught at Elon and might you want to take a class taught in your native language to fulfill Core Curriculum requirements (e.g. Civilization, Expression-literature, Advanced Studies)?
5. Are you dissatisfied with the results of your first placement exam attempt and would like to try one more time? You are entitled two attempts.

If you are a continuing student and never fulfilled the requirement to take the language assessment, you may join the new students for an appointment during specific hours on 1/30, 1/31, 2/4 and 2/5. See the posted schedule, which you can access here. NOTE: For students planning to take the assessment in French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian and/or Spanish, in order to guarantee that you have a seat, sign up here for an appointment at least 24 hours before testing time.  If you just show up, we cannot guarantee you a spot nor can we guarantee that testing will be open if no one signs up ahead of time. 

You should allow approximately 30-45 minutes to complete the assessment and associated paperwork. You must bring your laptop and your Phoenix Card or another photo id in order to take the test.

If you have any questions, send an email to languages@elon.edu and use “language assessment – spring semester” in the subject line.

The exam will be proctored by a faculty member who will also provide advice, guidance and permission-to-enroll for winter or spring language courses based on your score.

You must sign up for an appointment by Saturday, Nov. 3 at 3 pm. Click here to reach the sign-up page.  Sign up at least 24 hours before the testing time.  

The FINAL testing times this semester for French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish are 3-6 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 4. Please come to Carlton 221 a few minutes before your scheduled testing time. You must bring your Phoenix card and a laptop with you. Allow approximately 30-45 minutes to complete preliminary paperwork and to take the exam.

After Oct. 1, the exam is for placement purposes only. You will not be able to place out of the requirement through your score because of the university policy that limits that option to students who meet the Oct. 1 deadline.

If you have any questions, send an email to languages@elon.edu and use “placement test – post Oct. 1” in the subject line. 

Language assessment exams will be offered for new students (transfers and spring admits) and current students in January according to the posted schedule, which you can also access here.

In order to guarantee that you have a seat, you sign up for an appointment at the link provided on the web page.  If you just show up, we cannot guarantee you a spot. Sign up at least 24 hours before the testing time.

You should allow approximately 30-45 minutes to complete the exam and associated paperwork. You must bring your Phoenix Card or another photo id in order to take the test.

If you have any questions, send an email to languages@elon.edu and use “language assessment – new student” in the subject line.