Deborah McGrady head shot

Deborah McGrady

Deborah McGrady, director of medieval studies and professor of French at the University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, is a specialist of late-medieval French literature and culture. Her work has dealt with key period writers, such as Guillaume de Machaut, the subject of her first monograph, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience (Toronto University Press, 2006, rpt. 2012) and Christine de Pizan, the subject of her first edited collection, Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, co-edited with Barbara Altmann, Routledge Press (2003, rpt. 2016). Interested in the culture of material artifacts, she has explored in her research reader reception, the materiality of texts (from the codex to the digitized text), and the dynamics of literary economies. Her recent book on The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France (Toronto University Press, 2018) complicates current assumptions about the history of literary patronage through a study of author’s tempered reactions to the royal literary commission at the courts of Charles V and Charles VI of France. She is currently engaged in two book projects that explore new arenas: a monograph on the uses and abuses of Joan of Arc from medieval to modern times and a monograph on the “Poetics of Trauma during the Hundred Years War.” A strong promoter of new scholarship, she also serves as executive editor of Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures (Johns Hopkins UP).

Yalman Onaran head shot

Yalman Onaran ’91

Yalman Onaran ’91 is a research content manager at Barclays Investment Bank in New York and serves on the Wooster Alumni Board. Before joining the bank, he was a journalist covering banks worldwide at Bloomberg News. He was covering Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns for Bloomberg when they became the first to fall in the 2008 financial crisis. His first book, Zombie Banks, about the unresolved troubles of the banks in Europe and the U.S., was published in 2012. In his 23 years at Bloomberg, he also opened the financial news organization’s Istanbul and Ankara offices and wrote for its monthly magazine. Before joining Bloomberg, he worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press in the Middle East, covering wars as well as politics and economy in the region. In the early 1990s, his travels in Central Asia culminated in articles chronicling the challenges of the newly independent former Soviet satellite states for the Christian Science Monitor. He majored in economics and sociology at the College of Wooster before getting master’s degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University. A native of Turkey, Onaran became a U.S. citizen in 2009 and lives with his husband and son in suburban New Jersey.

Beatrice Adams

An assistant professor of history at The College of Wooster, Beatrice Adams received her Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora History from Rutgers-New Brunswick in the spring of 2021. While at Rutgers, she served as a researcher for the Scarlet and Black Project and contributed to three volumes of the project’s award-winning book series. She also served as a researcher for the Rise Up Newark Digital History Project—a public history project that explores the dynamics of the Modern Black Freedom Movement in the urban North. Her book in-progress, “We Might as Well Fight at Home: African Americans Claiming the American South,” examines the experiences of African Americans who remained in and returned to the American South during the Great Migration and the emergence of the New Great Migration. Her research has been supported by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in History and Religion & Philosophical Studies from Fisk University in 2012 and her Master of Arts in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2013.