Kathy Lavezzo
Office Hours
Monday 10:30 am - 12:30 pm and by appointment.
Get to know Kathy
I regularly teach the English Department’s large introductory lecture course, Foundations of the English Major, with an eye toward the centrality of narrative to the human experience and the capacity of literary texts to move readers and solicit passionate attachment. I was trained as a medievalist and offer courses on medieval romance, Arthurian lore, the author known alternately as the Pearl-poet or the Gawain-poet, The Book of Margery Kempe (the first autobiography in English), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales. Of late, my research has moved into more contemporary eras, a shift that has inspired me to teach classes about authors including Paule Marshall, Stuart Hall, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
I have authored, edited and co-edited five books. In 2006, I published Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and English Community, 1000-1534 (Cornell UP), which highlights the role of mappae mundi (that is, world maps) in emerging ideas of English national identity. My second book, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Cornell UP, 2018) was listed by Book Riot, the largest independent literary site in North America, in its list of 100 Must-Read Books about the Middle Ages and 50 Must-Read Books about Tudor England. My most recent book, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem (Fordham UP) takes as its starting point my discovery that Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall studied with J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford University during the 1950s. I argue that the surprising Hall-Tolkien connection enables a reassessment of received ideas of the medieval-modern divide, by revealing striking connections between the present and past.
My current project is called Hobbits and Hippies: Fantasy and the Long Sixties. This book-in-progress takes inspiration from both Stuart Hall’s work on hippies and the preponderance of fantasy right now from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the Amazon Rings of Power series and ideas of fake news. I argue that by tracing the diverse and global array of countercultural engagements with Tolkien’s epic fantasies during the long 1960s, we find a crucial means of assessing the uses and abuses of fantasy.
Research areas
- Medieval and Early Modern
- African American Literature
- Gender and Sexuality
- Transnational and Postcolonial Literature
