On Beauty and Beowulf: Third workshop of Franco Humanities Fellows wraps up a successful first year

A man in maroon sweater gestures, speaking to a smiling blonde woman in a brown blazer and a smiling man in a blue quarter-zip.

The phrase of the day was “thought experiment.” What kind of objectification might be considered moral? How would a hypothetical vengeful nurse deny the dignity and humanity of a patient? What would it take to create a critically successful Hollywood treatment of an Old English epic?

The third workshop of the Franco Humanities Fellows for the 2025-2026 academic year took place on Thursday, March 19. This workshop culminates a year of interdisciplinary conversation and research among the fellows. The two previous workshops followed work from the broadest range of periods – Faliscan cooks and early Chinese empire, contemporary Chicago soundscapes, the politics and experience of learning disabilities in the present, and how we plan for the future. This final workshop let the fellows dive into representation and language in important and novel ways, and with similarly impressive range, in papers that focused on a single word to a seemingly infinite library of translation, and from Romantic Poetry to midcentury philosophy and science fiction.

The first fellow to present his work was Michael Rea. Rea is a professor of philosophy and this year’s Hesburgh Women of Impact Humanities Fellow with his project Love, Beauty, and Objectification. This book explores the interplay among the three concepts in its title, asking how beauty might ground both love and objectification and teasing out the implications of this dynamic. Kate Kirkpatrick, a philosopher at Oxford University and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019), situated Love, Beauty, and Objectification with regards to Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments in her 1946 study The Second Sex. In particular, she explored the consequences of Rea’s work for concepts like “Love of Life” and “Will to Be.” Cristian Mihut, a philosopher at Bethel University and author of Gracious Forgiveness: A Theological Retrieval (Oxford University Press, 2023), posed several hypothetical test cases for Rea’s thinking about empathy in relation to objectifying behaviors and attitudes.

Reflecting on the experience, Rea expressed gratitude for his involvement in the fellows program. “I’m very grateful to the Franco Institute for bringing Kate and Cristian to provide comments. The discussion with Kate and Cris and with my Franco Institute colleagues was enjoyable and quite helpful,” he said. “I’ve really valued the opportunity this year to engage with the work of my colleagues in other disciplines, and I think that this fellowship program provides a tremendous benefit to the College and to the University.”

The conversation continued with Christopher Abram and his project Inventing Beowulf: Innovation and Tradition in the Post-Medieval Poem. Abram is professor of English and fellow of the Medieval Institute. He holds the Decrane Humanities Fellowship among this year’s cohort. His book aims to produce the first comprehensive, critical history of how the most famous Old English poem became a cultural phenomenon in the modern period, and how its changing status across the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries has materially affected the form and substance of the text.  Chris Jones, an Old English scholar from the University of Utah, responded. Jones is author of Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-century Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2018). In his comments, Jones praised Abram’s warm and lucid prose and anticipated the book’s warm reception alongside such works as Hugh Magennis’s Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (Boydell & Brewer, 2011). The other fellows joined in the conversation and entertained questions that Beowulf adaptations often raise, including the long debate over the first word of the manuscript ("hwaet") and the perceived undertones of Grendel’s mother and the much-contested depiction of her in Robert Zemeckis’s 2007 film with Angelina Jolie.

"Discussing my work with the other Faculty Fellows and my external reader at the Franco Seminar was one of the most productive experiences of my career," Abram shared. "We so often end up working in isolation in the humanities, stuck in our disciplinary ruts; it was wonderful to share my ideas with scholars who come from very different disciplinary backgrounds. My colleagues read my work carefully, sympathetically, and critically, and they all shared insights from their own fields that will make my book better. It was a pleasure and a privilege to participate," he said.

"The Franco Faculty Fellowship program this year created an exciting forum for interdisciplinary conversation,” said Kate Marshall, Franco Institute Director. On the group wrapping up the first year of the program, Marshall added, “All of our fellows advanced their projects significantly. We are thrilled to welcome a new cohort this fall."

The Franco Institute staff invites everyone to stay tuned for future announcements about the incoming 2026-2027 group of fellows, and we are grateful for the outgoing cohort’s participation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovative research.

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on March 31, 2026.