This interview was conducted by Léopold Lambert in September 2013, and made available on Archipelago: The Podcast Platform of The Funambulist in January. I’ve just made time to listen. Very interesting insights on publishing, medieval studies and much more.

Every publishing house constructs an editorial line of its own. Sometimes it has to do with the topic, sometimes with a question, sometimes with the authors… In the case of punctum books however, the editorial line is to be found in the failure of the book it publishes to properly take place into a given academic category. The manifesto that lies behind such choice is the topic of the conversation I had with Eileen. The not-so-well-known (at least for me) medieval era meets the scheme of the archipelago dear to this platform, as we imagined together a non-institutionalized university where knowledge is freely shared (punctum’s books are all available in open-access) and disciplines declared obsolete.

Eileen Joy is specialist in Old English literary studies and cultural studies, with interests in poetry and poetics, historiography, ethics, affects, embodiments, queer studies, the politics of friendship, speculative realism, object oriented ontology, and the post/human. She is the Co-Founder and Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group, the Founder and Co-Editor of “postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies”, Co-Founder and Editor of “O-Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies”, Co-Founder and Director of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion, and Co-Founder and Assoc. Director of punctum records.