she/her/hers
Martha Biggerstaff-Jones Professor, English
Affiliate Professor, Gender Studies
Director, Institute for Advanced Study
As Professor of English and Medieval Studies, and an affiliate in the department of Religion, my scholarly work assesses the reach and limits of the imagination, both during the Middle Ages and in the ways we have come to think about the medieval period as a whole. My persistent focus has been on the relation of the imagination to literary, philosophical, and historical trends. This explicitly interdisciplinary approach results, in part, from my somewhat unusual interdisciplinary training (I have degrees in History, Theology, and English). But it also stems from a concern with scholarly method, and an according interest in the limitations of most accounts of historical periodization.
I have just published a new book, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), a study of the surprising preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. In The Medieval New, I analyze what I see as an ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. This new history, moreover, can call into question some present-day assumptions about newness, thus demonstrating the relevance of the Middle Ages to today’s most pressing questions. I also serve as one of the editors for Exemplaria, Medieval / Early Modern / Theory, the author of Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (University of Pennsylvania), and co-editor of Postcolonial Moves, Medieval Through Modern (Palgrave). I have published on a range of topics, including Chaucer, medieval romance, historiography, and psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and gender theories.
(with Abby Ang), “Postcolonialism,” accepted for Routledge Companion to Middle English Literature, eds. Sif Ríkharðsdóttir & Raluca Radulescu (Routledge, 2022). 416-425.
(with Anthony Bale) “Chaucer’s Sense of an Ending” in Grady, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 218-232.
*“Untimely Travel: Living and Dying in Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book,” Kears & Paz, eds., Medieval Science Fiction. Boydell and Brewer, 2016. 79-92.
(with Karma Lochrie), eds. “Medieval and Early Modern Utopias,” Special Issue. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Fall, 2006.
“Infinite Sorrows: Catastrophic Forms in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Special issue on Catastrophe, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52.1 (January, 2022), 93-117.
“The Shock of Tradition: The Case of the Humanities Lab,” New Chaucer Studies, Pedagogy and Profession. Fall, 2021
“Creative Creatures,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 63.3 (Fall 2021): 233-255. Winner of the Tony Hilfer Prize for best essay published in 2021.
“Curious Novelties,” (The G.L. Brook Memorial Lecture). Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 93.2 (2017), 23-39.
“The Trouble with Britain,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, vol 7 (2016), 484-496.
“Chaucerian Translations: Postcolonial Approaches to Teaching the Canterbury Tales,” in Peter Travis and Frank Grady, eds. MLA Approaches to Teaching the Canterbury Tales, 2nd edition. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2014), 149-155.
“Discipline and Romance,” Critical Contexts: Middle English Literature, Routledge Critical Contexts Series. Crocker and Smith, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 276-282.
“Dissention in the Ranks,” postmedieval online Forum: Dissent, December 2012. postmedieval: a journal in midieval cultural studies, 3.2 (2012).
“Chaucer’s Haunted Aesthetics: Trauma and Mimesis in Troilus and Criseyde,” College English, 72.3 (January, 2010), 226-247.
*“Little Nothings: The Squire’s Tale and the Ambition of Gadgets,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 31 (2009), 53-80.
*“Critic Provocateur,” Blackwell’s Literature Compass, 6.6 (2009): 1094-1108.
“Making all things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.” Introduction to the Special Issue on “Medieval and Early Modern Utopias,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 35.3 (2006), 479-492.
“Losing French: Translation, Nation, and Caxton’s English Statutes,” in Caxton’s Trace, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 275-298.
“Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford UP, 2005). 463-478.
“Contrapuntal Histories,” Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, eds. Ingham and Warren. (New York: Palgrave Press, 2003.) 47-70.
with Alexander Doty, “The Evil/Medieval: Gender, Sexuality, and Miscegenation in Val Tourner’s Cat People” in BAD: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, ed. Murray Pomerance (New York: SUNY Press, 2003). 225-237.
“Pastoral Histories: Conquest, Utopia, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 44.1 (2002), 34-46.
“‘In Contrayez Straunge’: Colonial Relations, British Identity and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2001), 61-93.
“Marking Time: ‘Branwen, Daughter of Llyr’ and the Colonial Refrain,” The Post-Colonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 225-46.
“Homosociality and Creative Masculinity in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Masculinities in Chaucer, ed. Peter G. Beidler, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1998, 23-35
“Masculine Military Unions: Rivalry and Brotherhood in the Avowing of King Arthur,” Arthuriana, 6, 4 (Winter, 1996): 25-44.
Tony Hilfer Prize, for best essay published in 2021, from Texas Studies in Language and Literature: “Creative Creatures”
John Edwards Taylor Fellowship, University of Manchester, United Kingdom. (May -June 2018)
The College of Arts