Posted by Thomas Hinton
31 January 2020One of the pillars of the Medieval Studies community at Exeter, Emma Cayley, left the university over the summer to take up a post as Head of School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at Leeds. Our loss is Leeds’s gain, as I know from personal experience having been hired and served my probation during Emma’s highly successful stint as Head of Modern Languages here (2011-2016). This post is intended as a collective vote of thanks for the sixteen years of service Emma gave to the medieval community at Exeter.
Indeed, we have Emma to thank for the existence of the Centre for Medieval Studies seminar which she set up on a shoestring in its first year of existence, including the key lubricant of post-seminar wine, initially on a contribution basis. Sarah Hamilton recalls that ‘even once funding became more certain, her commitment to wine and collegiality was ongoing and will be sorely missed, as will her commitment to promoting medieval Latin as well as French.’ As will surprise nobody who knows her, footwear features prominently in Sarah’s anecdotes about Emma: ‘one of my earliest memories of her is going to some MA event at the cathedral and as we left she dived into a shoe shop; on a visit to Beijing she dragged all of us into a covered market to look for shoes….’ Yolanda Plumley similarly remembers Emma’s sartorial excellence as an enhancement to the pleasure of collaborative plotting about Medieval Studies over lunch meetings. She adds: ‘one of the highlights for me of the fifteen years we spent together at Exeter was the delightful conversation that unfolded between us on debate in medieval music and literature over the twelve weeks of an MA option we once taught together.’
Emma’s unshakeable commitment to her PhD students is a common theme in their comments. Pete Knowles, who completed his PhD in 2015, describes her as ‘the best PhD supervisor I could have asked for; from being filmed leafing through the Exeter book manuscript with grout on my fingers, to translating Old French over a bottle of fizz in a pub garden one summer evening, I finished my doctorate with three years of fantastic memories and a friend for life.’ As a result of his innovative collaborative PhD programme, Pete now works as an Executive Producer for creative tech company Antenna International. More recently, Emma was instrumental in securing three Nicklaus-Cartwright PhD Scholarships in French. The high calibre of medievalist applicants led to us benefitting from the presence of Edward Mills and Coline Blaizeau, both now in the latter stages of their doctorates. As Edward comments: ‘without Emma’s decision as Head of Department to invest in PhD funding, I doubt I’d be doing a PhD today.’ Coline speaks in similarly glowing terms: ‘Emma was always kind and understanding, generous and sensitive – all things that made it easy to speak with her openly. I quickly felt comfortable in her presence and able to share my thoughts.’ Edward adds that ‘she has always been a tireless advocate for involving PhD students in the wider life of the Department: I’ll never forget going to see the Exeter Book being digitised, and seeing for the first time how much work she had put into the research and public engagement project that had led up to that moment.’ The beautiful and fitting leaving present that Coline and Edward made for Emma says it all.
Emma’s tireless positivity and enthusiasm have been a great source of strength for Exeter Medieval Studies over the past decade and a half. Her parting gift was the holding here in July 2019 of the XVIth International Courtly Literature Society Triennial Congress. I had the pleasure of co-organising this with her and Michelle Bolduc, another valued colleague whose presence in our ranks came from Emma’s vision of the breadth of Medieval Studies. Edward and Coline offered invaluable organisational help, which in Edward’s case involved giving attendees the same tour of medieval Exeter that he himself had received from Emma after accepting our PhD scholarship offer. We lost count of the number of colleagues who told us it was the best ICLS conference they had attended – and, of course, how pretty the campus is. Emma holds a number of prestigious offices within the Medieval and French academic communities, evidence of her energy, generosity and enthusiasm for these fields of study. She is currently president of the ICLS, as well as being Co-Editor of French Studies and a member of the AUPHF Executive Committee. We wish her well in all of her future endeavours, and look forward to an opportunity to welcome her back to Exeter soon!