Confound the Time

Welcome to Confound the Time: Reception in Medieval and Early Modern Studies! We are an annual, international conference in our inaugural year. This year, we are pleased to welcome presenters from 21 countries who will present on a range of topics, including premodern art, religious thought, and popular cultures. We hope that your participation in this conference will lead to fruitful conversations and meaningful connections. 

We believe that access to scholarly community and the exchange of ideas should be available to all regardless of ability to travel or pay. For this reason, Confound the Time is, and will always be, entirely virtual. There are no conference fees for participants, and all events are free to the public. 

This year, Confound the Time will take place on January 24th and January 25th. The conference schedule can be found below. All times are in UTC-6 (U.S. Central Time). 

Click on the buttons below for the 2026 Conference Schedule.

Conference Organizers

Dr. Audrey Gradzewicz is an English Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Purdue University and a PhD in English from The Pennsylvania State University, where she focused on the poetics and materiality of medieval and early modern texts. Originally from Buffalo, New York, her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and The Penn Review, among others.

Dr. Audrey Saxton is an Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College (Kansas) where she teaches classes in writing and composition, world literature, and early period literature. Her research explores how scientific information was translated, adapted, and transmitted in popular genres such as poetry and cheap print in late-medieval England. She will continue her research next summer as a Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library.