Academic Publications and Research
Publications
“Philomela’s Cloth: Authority and Expression after Rape,” Florilegium: Special Issue on Sexualized and Gendered Violence in the Middle Ages, vol. 38, 2001 [2025], pp. 58-71.
The presence of the cloth in the Philomela narrative offers the opportunity to restore Philomela’s authority along with her voice, stripped away from her by Tereus. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its many medieval reception texts, the account authored by Philomela is simultaneously inaccessible to the reader and authoritative within the narrative: its presence emphasizes the potential appropriation of her voice, just as it undermines the framing narrator’s authority in retelling her story. In reading authority back into the character, the reader resists their own complicity in her silencing.
“Lawful Language and Global North Atlantic Encounters in the 13th Warrior,” with Nahir I. Otaño Gracia. Law, Justice, and Society: Teaching the Middle Ages through Film, Fordham University Press, 2025.
The 13th Warrior (1999) combines a version of the events of the poem Beowulf with Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s historical account of meeting Russian Vikings. This chapter considers how the film finds points of commonality between characters and culture, often in the space of religion or mysticism, and how those characters utilize types of interpretation to reach mutual understanding. Common understanding is found between characters from culturally and geographically distant backgrounds; however, this understanding falls short in encounters with the indigenous Wendol people. Racist stereotyping of indigeneity ultimately leads to an uncomplicated moral interpretation of the Wendol’s role in a film. At the time of its production, The 13th Warrior presciently tapped into concepts in medieval studies and in medievalism that have gained in popularity and urgency over the past two decades: the interconnectivity of the Global North Atlantic, and the need for an expanded conceptualization of medieval identity and voice.
- “Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris,” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages. Edited by Michelle Sauer, Diane Watt, and Elizabeth Herbert, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
- “Ovid, Heroides,” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages. Edited by Michelle Sauer, Diane Watt, and Elizabeth Herbert, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
From the website: "This is the first encyclopedia devoted exclusively to medieval women’s writing globally. Focusing on the thousand-year period between 500-1500, this comprehensive reference work addresses a long-standing gap in scholarship on women writers from this period. It challenges current understandings of the literary tradition of women by incorporating early writers and texts that remain marginal and by expanding definitions of textual composition to include more collaborative and contextual activities. This encyclopedia also presents women in the context of the global Middle Ages. Entries extend beyond works written in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to include works by women from Europe, Africa, and Asia. By locating medieval women’s writing within its cultural, social, religious, and political contexts, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages will be an ideal entry point for students and researchers coming into the field, and a valuable resource for established scholars."
Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception, and Appropriation in the Middle Ages. Edited by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti, University of Wales Press, 2022.
This volume collects essays on the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. The ubiquity of women amongst the medieval canon provides an opportunity for considering an “other” sphere of medieval culture and power that is frequently not given the attention it requires. The reception and use of female figures from this period has proven influential as subjects in literary, political, and social writings. The lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression, and their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency, and authority on behalf of the writers who employ them. The volume focuses on texts from or about women from China, India, North Africa, and Europe, analyzing materials that are not commonly paired together because of our tendency to focus on national languages and Western European canon.
“Constructing Prejudice in the Middle Ages and the Repercussions of Racism Today.” Medieval Feminist Forum Subsidia on Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse—Medieval and Modern. With Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, edited by Linda Mitchell and Jennifer Edwards, 2017, pp. 176-201.
We trace modern racist ideology back representations of prejudice that arose in the literature, history, and art of the European Middle Ages. We take as our cases common themes from French chansons de geste, Alain de Lille, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Gerald of Wales, and make direct connections to contemporary racial prejudices that actively cause harm in our modern society.
Research
The Tongue, The Cloth, and the Knife
I am currently finishing work on a monograph, tentatively titled The Tongue, The Cloth, and The Knife: Philomela and Expressions of Trauma. This study examines the story of the rape of Philomela alongside other episodes of sexual violence from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the reception of these narratives in the late medieval commentaries of the 12th-14th centuries. I address two central concerns with this project: how medieval authors conceived of a survivor’s responses to her rape; how an incident of violence might be narrated without eclipsing the survivor’s lived experience or appropriating his or her own narrative of the event. As my focus, I consider how Ovid portrays Philomela’s responses to her rape in the Metamorphoses, and how those responses are represented or elided by medieval authors in their commentary on and adaptations of Ovid’s work. Philomela has three distinct responses to the violence done to her by her brother-in-law Tereus: the first verbal, the second visual, and the third violent. I trace the escalation of her expressions and how such responses to a traumatic experience are turned conventional, on the one hand, by readers’ expectations and authorial appropriation, and how, on the other hand, some authors attempted to individualize expressions of trauma, a trend that increased through the 14th century. Across the arc of the study, I explore the limitations of expression and performance as they are portrayed in the Philomela narrative and its medieval receptions.
Giovanni del Virgilio's Expositio of the Metamorphoses
I have begun work on the first critical edition of Giovanni del Virgilio’s prose paraphrase of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the early 14th century, known as the Expositio. As a Latin-language narrative paraphrase of the Metamorphoses, this work is unique in the Ovidian commentary tradition of the late Middle Ages. The absence of a critical edition of this text is notable, and such an edition would be useful to scholars of role of humanism in academia, the reception of Ovid’s work, and medieval commentary practices. An important aspect of this study will be to better understand the exchange between Giovanni del Virgilio’s scholarship and the French author Pierre Bersuire’s various projects, including the De formis figurisque deorum and the Ovidius moralizatus, and in turn the impact that this continental scholarship had on mythographic literary composition in 14th and 15th century England. The number of known extant copies of the Expositio is relatively small, collected in nine manuscripts in four countries
