A Ph.D candidate in the Department of Rhetoric, Masha Raskolnikov intends in her dissertation, Debating the Self: Arbitrariness and Allegory in the Middle English Poetry of Disputation, a genealogy of the pre-modern subject as it is represented in medieval English debate poetry. She finds that Middle English debating allegories present literary subjects in the process of being formed and figure their own arbitrariness through the figures of female personifications. Thus gender poses a significant and enabling problem in the allegorical mode, serving as a trope for the arbitrariness that is common and crucial to many medieval debating allegories. In 2001-2002, Masha Raskolnikov will hold Una’s Fellowship at the Townsend Center.