Kathy Lavezzo
I regularly teach the 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 University Press), 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 (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 new book is forthcoming in Fall 2025 with Fordham University Press. Entitled Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem, this book takes as its starting point my discovery that Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall initially planned on becoming a medievalist but was dissuaded from that path by none other than J.R.R. Tolkien. 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.
Research Areas:
Medieval and Early Modern
African American Literature
Gender and Sexuality
Transnational and Postcolonial Literature
