Kathy Lavezzo
I teach the introductory lecture course, Foundations of the English Major, along with courses in Critical Race Theory, Arthurian Romance, premodern images of Jews and Muslims, The Book of Margery Kempe, the Pearl-poet, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other topics pertaining to the Middle Ages and theories of identity formation. I have authored or co-edited five books on topics that include early forms of English nationhood, English mapmaking, and early English antisemitisms.
My latest book, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem, will appear in fall 2025 with Fordham University Press. The book demonstrates how the medieval-modern divide is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. Linking the imaginary division of “then” from “now” to the division of whiteness from those deemed irrevocably other, I advocate a “bad”—that is, depressing and disturbing, even nauseating—historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness and periodicity. Teasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall, Karl Marx, Johan Huizinga, J. R. R. Tolkien, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Carolyn Bynum, and Sylvia Wynter, Bad Medievalism demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the “medieval” and the “modern” has mobilized intense emotional and political responses.
My commitment to analyzing questions of race and ethnicity goes back to my 1999 article on whiteness and the Old English sermons of Ælfric of Eynsham. Most recently, that commitment manifests in a 2021 essay in postmedieval on whiteness, Tolkien and Stuart Hall; a 2022 review of The Rings of Power Amazon series in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bad Medievalism (which features a contextualization of the moment in the 1950s when Tolkien dissuaded cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall from becoming a medievalist). In the last six years, I have worked to decolonize my classes by acknowledging indigenous history and prison-labor, by expanding the geographic reach of primary texts, and by featuring works by historically marginalized groups.
Research Areas:
Medieval and Early Modern
African American Literature
Gender and Sexuality
Transnational and Postcolonial Literature
