Carol Symes is Associate Professor of History, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She received the Ph.D from Harvard and became a member of Actors' Equity in 1999; she also holds a B.A. from Yale, an M.Litt from Oxford, and a Certificate in Stage Combat from the Society of British Fight Directors (earned during professional training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School). Her first book, *A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras* (Cornell University Press, 2007), has been awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, the David Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Bevington Prize of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. Fundamentally, her research focuses on the history of communication and transmission: the means by which people in the past exchanged ideas and information, and the processes by which artifacts and understandings of the past are transmitted to future generations. Her new book project, *Modern War and the Medieval Past: The Middle Ages of World War I*, was supported in 2008 by a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois and by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, where she was Distinguished Research Visitor. She has also been a Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard. She is an experienced scuba diver and licensed motorcyclist.