Department of English

I am a scholar of late-medieval religious writing and culture, but I teach widely, including courses in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, visual and material culture, drama and performance, poetry and poetics, and service-learning.  I currently lead a campus-wide initiative focused on the environmental arts and humanities through the A+H Futures Program.

Both my teaching and my research are undergirded by an abiding interest in how art, and our close attention to it, can transform us. I am also committed to experiential learning and occasionally lead courses on walking and pilgrimage (for the student blog from a recent pilgrimage course on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, see https://iucamino2019.blogspot.com/).

My first book, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England (Cambridge, 2010), focused on visual art, vernacular literature, and the rhetorics of religious reform in fifteenth-century England. My second book, Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature (Chicago, 2024), examines how medieval adaptations of biblical narratives laid the groundwork for modern environmental thinking, from idealizing primitivisms to environmental apocalypses.

I am currently completing two additional monographs.  The first, Instruments of Christ: Performing the Passion in Early England offers a longue duree study of the social, formal, and theological uses of the arma Christi (objects used in the passion narrative) in image and text from 8th century liturgies to 17^th century lyrics.  The second, a small book of personal essays about walking medieval pilgrimage routes is provisionally titled: Saunter: Medieval Pilgrimages in Modern Europe.

“God in a Cake: Teaching the Material Contexts of Early English Drama,” in Teaching Medieval English Drama, edited by John Sebastian and Emma Lipton (forthcoming).

“‘A Common Light’: Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” in The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose, edited by Emily Steiner and Sebastian Sobecki (forthcoming).

“Piers Plowman and/as Speculative Fiction,” co-written with William Revere (UNC Ashville) and our students (Yearbook of Langland Studies, forthcoming).

“Believing in the Pardoner’s Objects,” in Objects of Belief, edited by Joshua Easterling and Fiona Somerset (forthcoming).

“Holy Impediments, Pedestrian Care: Walking Cuthbert’s Way,” in Walking in the Middle Ages, edited by Katie Walter (forthcoming).

“Apocalyptic Ecologies: Eschatology, the Ethics of Care, and the Fifteen Signs of the Doom in Early England,” Speculum 96.1 (January 2021): 1-37.

“The Present of Future Things: Medieval Media and the Signs of the End of the World.” In Reassessing Alabaster Sculpture in Medieval England, edited by Jessica Brantley, Elizabeth Teviotdale, and Stephen Perkinson, 229-260 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2020).

“Idiot Psalms: Sound, Style, and the Performance of the Literary in the Towneley Shepherds’ Plays.” The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form, edited by Robert Meyer-Lee and Cathy Sanok, 119-140 (Boydell and Brewer, 2018).

“‘By Provocative Means’: Power, Protection, and Henry VIII’s Prayer Roll.” Exemplaria 27:4 (2017): 296-313.