Areas of Specialty: Medieval literature and culture, medieval history, feminist theory, literary theory.

Welcome statement (teaching/research/personal interests): In my research and teaching I am interested in thinking about the relation between literature and history as well as between history and the present. More specifically, I’m fascinated by the roles gender, race, class/status and other categories of difference play in the ways individuals
interact with different types of structures, particularly, familial and political structures. I have written on fathers and daughters in the work of John Gower, a fourteenth-century writer, as well as on the notion of privacy and its relation to economic and urban developments in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.” I have also researched some of the international connections and exchanges between European nations that have been largely unexplored so far and have thus recently edited a book on England and Iberia in the late Middle Ages. I’m also interested in the question of gender and writing. How does gender influence or affect how what we write as well as how and what we read? Currently I’m working on exploring the connections between poverty, property, the sense of self, and gender in medieval literature. I’m particularly interested understanding the extent to which property and rights are connected in the Middle Ages.

Current and Recent Courses: Readings in British Literature I, Chaucer, Medieval Women and Writing, Arthurian Romance, Medieval Sexualities

Dream or Future Courses: Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Theory (a course devoted to reading about race, class, and gender in medieval literature through the lens of postcolonial theory); Film and Medieval Literature (a course on film adaptations of medieval stories, from Beowulf to El Cid or Arthur).