Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

University of Victoria, Affiliate

University of Notre Dame, Professor Emerita

Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton recently retired from an endowed chair at the University of Notre Dame.  Her books include Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 1990), awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize by Medieval Academy of America; Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, with Denise Despres (Minnesota, 1999); Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, 2006), awarded the Haskins Gold Medal from the Medieval Academy; and Opening Medieval English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, with Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson (Cornell, 2012), given a 2013 Choice Award from the American Library Association. The Clerical Proletariat and the Rise of Medieval English Literature are forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Areas of Interest and Publication: Middle English literature and medieval Latin intellectual history, including religious and political censorship, apocalyptic thought, visionary writing and women’s mysticism. Also, material culture, including Manuscript Studies of England and Anglo-Ireland, history of the book and medieval literary theory, especially glossing, text-image relations, and reading practices before print. In addition, dance history (seventeenth-century to the present), and contemporary dance criticism.

Current Projects: A digital supplement to Opening Up Medieval English Manuscripts (hosted by Cornell), and a new Early Middle English companion, Between the Lines and Margins: Recovering Multidimensional Reading Practices (for Cornell), with Hannah Zdansky, Marjorie Harrington, Amanda Bohne, and Karrie Fuller.  In press is Women Intellectuals and Leaders of the Middle Ages (forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer), co-edited John Van Engen and Katie Bugyis. Also in preparation with support from the ACLS is Medieval Interiorities and Modern Readers: Recovering Medieval Reading Practices for Understanding the Self. Additionally, an introduction (with Doreen Kerby) to William Archibald Robertson’s unpublished 19^th-century diary of B.C. coastal explorations (text co-edited with Andrew Klein). 

Education: Hon. B.A., and B.Ed., York University, Toronto; Oxford University, U.K., M.Phil. (coursework); D.Phil., University of York, U.K.

Fellowships: SSHRCC, Centre for Study of Religion and Society (U. of Victoria), Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Guggenheim, National Endowment for Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies

Edited Collections: Include Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship, ed. with Steven Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe and Gower, ed. with Maidie Hilmo (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2001); and Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. with Linda Olson (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, (English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2009); “Something Fearful”: Dialogues and Essays on the “Religious Turn” in Literary Criticism, ed. with Jonathan Juilfs, Religion and Literature, 42.1-2 (2010); and New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. with John Thompson and Sarah Baechle (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).

Recent Articles:

• “The Pedagogy of an Oppressed Text: The C Version of Piers Plowman,” ed. Thomas Goodman, Approaches to Teaching Piers Plowman (Publications of the MLA, 2019) 217 -222.
• “Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise-en-page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity,” with Andrew Klein for The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form, ed. Robert Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018) 87-118.
• “Foreword” to Kane from Canada: The Memoirs of George Kane, Mary Kane and Jane Roberts, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Occasional Publications Volume 7 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2016) xxviii – xxxviii.
• "Oxford," Chapter 12 of Regeneration: a Literary History of Europe: 1348-1418, vol. 1, ed. David Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 208 -226.
• “Competing Archives, Competing Languages: Office Vernaculars, Civil Servant Raconteurs, and the Porous Nature of French during Ireland’s Rise of English” Speculum 90/ 3 (2015) pp. 674-700.
• “Afterword: Social History of the Book and Beyond: Originalia, Medieval Literary Theory and the Aesthetics of Paleography” in Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen, eds. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 243-254.