Ann Killian, OP

Biography

Ann Killian teaches and writes about late medieval literature and devotional culture with particular interest in the history of spirituality and theological education. Her first book, Reforming Lyric: Poetry and Theology in England, 1380-1530, argues that the genre of religious lyric helped establish the English vernacular as a literary language capable of teaching scriptural hermeneutics in the fifteenth century. Her historicizing approach situates short verse within broader material culture and identifies a crucial place for lyric poetry in fifteenth and early sixteenth-century literary history. Killian is currently working on a second book project, Mystical Ecology, which explores ecological thought in medieval visionary writing and the ways in which the mystical tradition has influenced twentieth-century critiques of extractive capitalism.

 Killian has published articles in Speculum, Spiritus, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Yearbook of Langland Studies. She teaches courses on medieval lyric, early European drama, and medieval women’s writing. Before coming to Notre Dame, she was Assistant Professor of English at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, OH. Between 2021-23, she served as the inaugural Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute, Notre Dame. She has taught with the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program and the Moreau College Initiative. 

Sister Annie is a vowed member of the Dominican Sisters of Peace, a congregation of Catholic women religious. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Commonweal Magazine, Global Sisters Report, and Christian Century.