University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Post-Doc, English

Thesis Title: Gifts and Economic Exchange in Middle English Religious Writings

Advisor: Joseph Wittig

About

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I have just finished teaching two sections of composition and one introductory lit course titled "The Ethics of Reading" that incorporated service learning.   

My article on the Middle English _Pearl_ is coming out in this April's issue of _The Chaucer Review_.  The larger project from which this article derives is a book manuscript focusing on how late medieval writers imagined exchanges between individuals and God, or individuals and each other, as gift-exchanges or as mercantile transactions.  I'm writing about three Middle English texts: the poem _Pearl_, the prologue to the long prose treatise _Dives and Pauper_, and _The Book of Margery Kempe_ (which is so wonderfully nutty that it gets two chapters, and perhaps its own book later).   

I am also currently writing an article about the connections between epistemology and moral poetry in Thomas Hoccleve's _Series_.

My other research interests include medieval culture, religion, and social and intellectual history, as well as Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Hoccleve, romance, begging poems, and late medieval and early modern drama.  I'm also interested in the history of the self.

Outside my literary field, I'm very interested in the process (not so much the theory) of academic writing: the practices that academics use to generate ideas and expand upon them, strategies for revision, and the communities that we form for mutual support and exchange of ideas.  I will probably never write on these topics, but I hope to practice them.