I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. I teach a range of introductory courses, including the British literature surveys, introduction to women’s and gender studies, and history of the English language. At the upper-division and master’s level, I offer special topics courses in medieval and early modern British and European literature, gender and sexuality, and the global Middle Ages. On this website, you will find pages about my teaching and research, including courses I have designed, my materially-engaged pedagogy, my work on several digital editions of medieval manuscript rolls, and announcements about upcoming conference sessions and other news.
Based on primary manuscript research at the British Library, Bodleian Library, National Library of Wales, and special collections libraries in the U.S., my publications focus on book history and material culture, religious literature, and gender studies. My articles have appeared in New Medieval Literatures, the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Medieval Feminist Forum, Medieval Sermon Studies, Notes & Queries, and Pedagogy. My dissertation research focused on Early Middle English religious literature (the Katherine Group), manuscripts, and the group’s reception history up to the present, including the influence of Sir Robert Cotton’s antiquarianism and J. R. R. Tolkien’s early scholarship. I recently wrote the chapter on Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group for the Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose (ed. Emily Steiner and Sebastian Sobecki). My current book-length project is a critical edition of and comprehensive introduction to a previously unstudied English manuscript of medieval female saints’ lives compiled by a Catholic scribe in the seventeenth century, perhaps by an English nun living on the Continent. My proposal for An Early Modern English Catholic Collection of Medieval Female Saints: A Critical Edition of Folger MS V.b.334 has been accepted by the editorial board of the Brepols series Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts.
I have completed or am at work on several editorial projects related to medieval literature, gender, sexuality, and religion. With Michelle M. Sauer, I am editing a new Companion to Sexuality in the Medieval West (Arc Humanities Press, expected 2024), which should become one of the standard volumes on gender and sexuality in the premodern world. We co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Early Middle English (3.1, Spring 2021) on reclusion and materiality, which was published as The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion (Oct. 2021), the first in Arc Humanities Press’s new Early Middle English Books series. Dr. Sauer and I are now in the process of commissioning 71 essays for a 250,000-word Routledge Handbook to Medieval European Women and Christianity. I am also an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages, where I have commissioned and am currently editing eight entries.
Within medieval studies, I have organized many conference sessions and several conferences, including the 2018 meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at Emory and the 2012 conference “Preaching the Saints” at Harvard University. I previously served as an elected member of the advisory board for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Outside of medieval studies, I am an advocate for higher education issues. Addressing the (ultimately defeated) graduate student tax proposal, I published op-eds in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and MLAgrads (the website of Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession), and I was featured in The New York Times. U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga) entered my Atlanta Journal-Constitution column into the Congressional record on November 16, 2017, as the House debated the proposed bill.
During 2018-2019, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Agnes Scott College. I received my PhD in English from Emory University. Before coming to Emory for my PhD, I earned a master’s degree in Religion, Literature, and Culture from Harvard University, and I studied English Literature and Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contact Information
jennycbledsoe@gmail.com
Academia.edu
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