Camille Deschapelles (C’26) to Present Honors Thesis Research at Meeting in the Middle Conference

The Department of English congratulates Camille Deschapelles (C’26) on the acceptance of her paper, “Believing in the Grail: Affective Medievalism from Chrétien de Troyes to Dan Brown,” for presentation at the Meeting in the Middle Conference at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County this April.

The presentation is on Camille’s undergraduate English honors thesis and examines how Grail narratives—from Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Conte du Graal (c. 1190) to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003)—invite audiences to believe through narrative artifice and emotional engagement. By pairing medieval romance with modern conspiracy fiction, the project explores how the Grail tradition endures through what scholars describe as “affective medievalism,” the experience of the medieval past as both distant and still unfolding.