People

Mark Sundaram is an interdisciplinarian, medievalist, philologist, linguist, academic, musician, and philosophical layabout. He is the co-host of the Endless Knot Podcast and is the main force behind the Alliterative YouTube channel and this website; he writes the scripts and creates the videos, including writing and recording the music. He is @Alliterative on Twitter. Mark has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at Laurentian University.

Aven McMaster is a Classicist who studies Latin poetry and Roman social history. She is the co-host of the Endless Knot Podcast and does production work on the Alliterative channel videos, and maintains the website. She can be found at @AvenSarah on Twitter. Aven has a PhD in Classics from the University of Toronto and taught at Thorneloe University at Laurentian.

Ian McMaster has made contributions to the music and some voice-overs; Susan McMaster has helped with additional script editing.

Emma Pauly has edited and transcribed a number of interview episodes of the podcast.

Christine Cousineau did a work placement with The Endless Knot Podcast, contributing to publicity and assisting with the production of the 100th episode.

Site Details

The banner image on the home page is "The Seven Liberal Arts" by the Florentine painter Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi (1406-1486).

The font used for the title is Du Bellay, created by Daniel Midgley. I thank him for making the font available for free.

The "endless knot" is a common visual motif of an interconnected knot with no beginning or end, found in many cultures around the world. My use of the phrase here is a reference to the 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which it refers to the emblem of the pentangle or pentagram which Gawain has emblazoned on his shield, where it is a symbol of interconnectedness of things–a pentagram can be drawn without ever lifting the pen from the page, and each point is connected to two other points of the star. Here at The Endless Knot it also gains significance from its comparison to the cognitive science hexagram or heptagram which shows the interrelated nature of various fields in cognitive science. I've created my own Endless Knot pentagram based on this notion which connects cognitive science, linguistics, literature, history and anthropology, which are all areas you’ll see related here.

Channel trailer

Introducing a new series of videos about language, thought, and history. Website: http://www.alliterative.net/ Blog: http://www.alliterative.net/blog Twitter: https://twitter.com/alliterative Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alliterativeendlessknot Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/115113245513532543153/about Tumbler: http://alliterative-endlessknot.tumblr.com/ SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/alliterative Click here to sign up for our email list, to be notified when new videos are posted: http://eepurl.com/6YuJv

Citations and Mentions

Episodes 51 & 52 of the podcast are cited in “The “Happy Slave” Narrative and Classics Pedagogy: A Verbal and Visual Analysis of Beginning Greek and Latin Textbooks”, KP Dugan, New England Classical Journal, 46.1 (2019) 62-87.
Episode 51 is cited in Nye, M. (2019). “Decolonizing the Study of Religion”. Open Library of Humanities, 5(1), 43. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.421
The podcast was featured by musician Leslie Feist as one of her recommendations when she was guest host of CBC Radio’s “Podcast Playlist”