Bailey Betancourt fell in love with studying monsters at an academic level during her second year at UC Irvine. She took a class with Professor McLoughlin on the topic and was intrigued by the potential to read the bodies of monsters through multi-faceted perspectives. In pursuing her project, Bailey particularly enjoyed the opportunity to explore other scholars’ works in depth and examine the lineage of theories that have developed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries. In addition to this work, Bailey wrote a research paper under the Music and Culture Honors Program and a thesis on the monstrous body of Francis the First. She has also played bass in the UCI Symphony Orchestra.

According to monster theory, monsters signify the fears and norms of the societies that create them. For instance, peoples of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe portrayed werewolves less maliciously than did Early Modern Europeans because these earlier cultures used werewolves to explore the relationship between the individual's morality and outer appearance. Early Modern writers depicted werewolves as heartless cannibals who preyed upon unattended children, sometimes even undressing them before consuming their flesh. My paper explores how the Early Modern European werewolf functioned in political discourse. In particular, it addresses how discussions of werewolf violence reflect the political chaos caused by religious warfare and crises of succession. In order to do this, my paper examines the treatment and views of accused werewolves in Jean Bodin’s De la Démonmanie des Sorciers in dialogue with other historiographical treatments of the political use of accusations of cannibalism and witchcraft. Bodin was a legal theorist who drew upon biblical, legal, literary, and folk accounts of werewolf malevolence. Specifically, he portrayed the cannibalism enacted by werewolves as an attack on the social wellbeing of the common people. Werewolves thus become a means of discussing the political anxieties of Bodin.

Nancy McLoughlin School of Humanities

This paper reflects a true spirit of inquiry because the author followed up on a topic mentioned in a lower division survey course to write an original thesis. What pleases me most about this paper is the extent to which it represents the author’s intellectual determination and independence. If the goal of a university education is that students will learn to follow their dreams, improve their skills, and teach themselves what they want to know most, this paper speaks to the author’s success. It is a product of her determination to follow her own interests, to seek help in learning how to research, to read widely and carefully, to master research skills, and to write and rewrite, all the while motivated by genuine curiosity and a commitment to answer the questions that she found to be most important. It was an extraordinary privilege to advise such a project.