Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
The Notre Dame Professor of English
Specialty: Middle English literature and medieval intellectual history, including Latin political and religious writings, text-image relations and manuscript studies. Also, dance history and contemporary criticism, seventeenth-century to the present.
Degrees: Hon. B.A., B.Ed., York University, Toronto; D. Phil., University of York, U.K.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has written several books and articles about late medieval poets, artists and religious writers, on topics ranging from Manuscript Studies, reception history and text-image relations, to religious visionaries and apocalypticism. Her books include Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (winner of the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America in 1994) and Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (winner of the 2007 Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, as well as the Medieval Academy of America Haskins Gold Medal in 2010). With Denise Despres, she wrote Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Her edited collections include Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship, with Steven Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); The Medieval Reader, with Maidie Hilmo, a special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, vol. 1, Third Series, (2002); 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); Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. with Linda Olson (Notre Press: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2009). Currently in press is “Something Fearful”: Dialogues and Essays on the “Religious Turn” in Literary Criticism, a special issue of Religion and Literature, co-edited by with Jonathan Juilfs (2010).
She has also published several essays on dance history and criticism in The International Dictionary of Ballet (London: St. James Press, 1993), and in Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, ed. Martha Bremser (London: Routledge, 1999).
Kerby-Fulton is currently working on three projects: a textbook entitled Opening Up Middle English Manuscript Studies: Literary and Visual Approaches, co-authored with Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson, for Cornell University Press; and The Clerical Proletariat and the Rise of English Literature, research supported by the Guggenheim Foundation; and Visionary Interventions: Hildegard of Bingen and Allegories of History (containing revised and reprinted essays, and three new essays in progress for University of Pennsylvania Press).
Recent Articles
- “Authority, Constraint and the Writing of the Medieval Self” for the Oxford Handbook of Medieval English Literature, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 413-433.
- “’The Place of the Apocalyptic View of History in the Later Middle Ages’ and the Legacy of Morton Bloomfield,” in The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures on Medieval English Literature, ed. Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson and Nicholas Watson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2010).
- “Hildegard of Bingen” for the Medieval Holy Women, ed. Rosalynn Voaden and Alastair Minnis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 343-368.
- “Skepticism, Agnosticism and Belief: The Spectrum of Attitudes Toward Vision in Late Medieval England” in Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis (Victoria: English Literary Series, University of Victoria, 2009), 1- 18, and Preface to volume vii – xi.
- “English Joachite Manuscripts and Medieval Optimism about the Role of the Jews in History: A List for Future Studies,” for Essays in Honour of Sheila Delaney, special issue of Florilegium: The Journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists 23 (2008) 1- 48.
- “Response: Books under Suspicion and Beyond” to “Roundtable On Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England” in Journal of British Studies 46 (2007) pp. 766-774. Contributors: Ruth Mazo Karras, John Arnold, Dyan Elliott, Anne Hudson, Scott Lucas (pp. 746-755)
- “When Women Preached: An Introduction to Female Homiletic, Sacramental, and Liturgical Roles in the Later Middle Ages” and “Eciam Lollardi: Some Further Thoughts on Fiona Somerset’s ‘Eciam Mulier: Women in Lollardy and the Problem of Sources.’ In Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. with Linda Olson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) 31-55 and 261-78.
- "The English Illustrated Book and Medieval Ways of Reading: an Archaeology of Images at Work." Foreword to Medieval Icons, Images and English Literary Texts: A Study of Illustrated Works from the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer, by Maidie Hilmo, xix-xxv. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004.
- “Pseudo-Hildegardian Prophecy and Antimendicant Propaganda in Late Medieval England: An Edition of the Most Popular Insular Text of ‘Insurgent gentes’," co-written and co-edited with Magda Hayton and Kenna Olsen, for Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom. Harlaxton Medieval Studies, vol. XII, ed. Nigel Morgan (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004), 160 -193.
Recent Honors and Awards
- Medieval Academy of America Charles Homer Haskins Gold Medal in 2010 and 2007 John Ben Snow Prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies for Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England
- John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 2008
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (various awards up to 2003)
- 1999 - 2000 Visiting Scholar, Department of English, Princeton University, Princeton
- 2000 - 2001 Visiting Professor of Religion and Literature, Institute for Sacred Music (cross-appointed English Dept.), Yale University
- Fall 2002 Visiting Professor, Dept. of English, Harvard University
- School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Member, Jan. - Aug. 1996; Visiting Member, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Sept. - Dec. 1998, and 1999-2000
- University of Victoria Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1996
Contact Information
331 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
(574) 631-7372
kkerby@nd.edu
Postal address
Department of English
356 O’Shaughnessy
Notre Dame, IN 46556
