Michelle Karnes
Professor
Professor of History and Philosophy of Science; Affiliated Faculty in Italian Studies
Areas of study
- Medieval
- Religion and Literature
Education
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
M. A., University of Pennsylvania
B. A., University of California, Berkeley
Research and teaching interests
Medieval literature, philosophy, and religion written in Arabic, Latin, English, French, Castilian, and Italian; religion and literature; comparative literature; history of science; animal studies; history of imagination
Biography
Michelle Karnes studies late medieval literature in its philosophical and religious context. Her most recent book, Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World (University of Chicago, 2022), investigates marvels like the evil eye and enchanted rings in both philosophy and literature, in both the Latin West and Arabic-speaking world. It argues against the common notion that marvels are objects of belief, credulously accepted by a simple-minded people, and proposes instead that they are near impossibilities that demand scrutiny and investigation. They rely on the faculty of imagination, which is unrestricted by the distinction between the real and unreal, the true and the false. In her reading, the faculty gives marvels their indeterminacy and significance. Her first book, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2011), explores the role of imagination in medieval religious meditations and theories of cognition to show how the intellectual force of imagination contributes to its narrative power. Her current project focuses on the representation of seas and sea life in medieval literature and philosophy, again drawing on Arabic sources as well as ones from the Latin West. Along with Misty Schieberle, she is also editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
She has held year-long fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Huntington Library in San Marino, and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She teaches courses on Chaucer, romance, travel literature, representations of the Middle Ages, and medieval animal literature. She was awarded the Graduate Student Government’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor award in 2022.
Representative publications
- Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Reissued in paperback, 2017.
- “The Possibilities of Medieval Fiction,” New Literary History 51:1 (Winter 2020): 209-28.
- “Medieval Latin Rhetoric and the Internal Senses,” in Cambridge History of Rhetoric Vol. 2: 350-1415, ed. Jill Ross and Frédérique Woerther. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (forthcoming)
- “Marvels in the Medieval Imagination,” Speculum 90:2 (Spring 2015): 327-65.
