The Medieval Studies Institute

I joined the English Department of Indiana University in 1999 after teaching at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Hawaii. My research has been concerned with gender, sexuality, and more recently, utopianism in medieval literature and culture. All of my work has been interested in the connections to be made across historical periods and the ways in which our habits of studying the past become implicated in the histories we discover. From my first book’s exploration of gender in medieval mysticism (in the rogue Middle English mystic Margery Kempe, and others), my research has worked with contemporary feminist and queer theories to understand the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. My third book, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t, was a pioneering study of female sexuality in the Middle Ages in the context of a critique of the categories of sexuality with which scholars sometimes study the past. My most recent book, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, marks a significant shift away from the gender and sexuality in medieval texts, but it is also akin to my other work in its effort to think the medieval past “before” modern categories—whether those categories are sexual categories, like heterosexuality and heteronormativity, or whether they are literary categories, like utopian literature.