Boyda Johnstone

Faculty Fellow

Boyda Johnstone is Associate Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her articles on medieval dream literature have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Medieval Feminist Forum, New Medieval Literatures, and she has a chapter in Dreambooks in the Middle Ages: A Global Perspective (2026). She is currently writing a book, provisionally entitled Falling Awake: Radical Dream Visions in Late Medieval Literature, on the proliferation of writing and thinking about dreaming in the late Middle Ages in England. Dreaming, unencumbered by material realities and yet arising from present conditions, can unlock horizons of futuristic possibility that maintain hope as an active practice. She has previously served on the advisory board of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS). Boyda is a dedicated union activist and always strives to integrate her politics with her scholarship and teaching.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.