Expertise

Medieval, Chaucer, Gender, Sexuality, Consent, Obscenity, Sexual Violence, Reproductive Justice

Biography

**Professor Harris is on research leave until August 2025**

Professor Harris’s research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality in medieval England and Scotland. She is particularly interested in histories of sexual violation, consent, and reproductive justice. She earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2016, she won Temple’s CLA Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Her first book, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell University Press, 2018), analyzes sexual education, consent, and rape culture from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the Access Hollywood tape. Obscene Pedagogies won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s 2020 biennial prize for Best First Book of Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Her current book projects are titled The Poetics of Rage: Women’s Anger, Misogyny, and Political Power in Premodern Britain and Medieval Reproductive Justice. She is co-editor, with Sarah Baechle and Elizaveta Strakhov, of a volume of essays and medieval poems titled Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (Penn State University Press, 2022). Her contributions to the volume include an edition of sixteen medieval pastourelles and rape songs specifically tailored for the undergraduate classroom as well as an essay about intersectionality and survival.

She is lead editor for the journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory and as well as an editorial board member for Medieval Institute Publications’ Premodern Transgressive Literatures series and The Chaucer Review. In addition, she is currently a trustee of the

New Chaucer Society. Recent publications include essays on Hagar and reproductive injustice; obscene medieval sermon stories; feminism, race, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue; and feminist poetic encounter and maternal mortality in Philadelphia poet (and Temple faculty member!) Pattie McCarthy’s margerykempething and The Book of Margery Kempe, in addition to a co-edited special issue (with Holly Crocker) on gender, liberation, and medievalist engagements with Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing. She also writes public-facing essays on topics such as medieval rape culture, the history of “Teen Mom” entertainment programming, medieval drug-facilitated sexual assault, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, medieval impotence trials, and the history of the word “wench” for outlets including Avidly, Slate, Vox, Electric Literature, The Washington Post, Narratively, and others.

Selected Publications

• “The Ends of Fellowship: Felawe Masculinity, Obscenity, and Gendered Vulnerability in The Manciple’s Prologue and Tale.” The Chaucer Review 60.2 (April 2025): 141-61.
• “Ancillary Histories: Hagar, Ancilla, and Reproductive (In)justice in Late Medieval England.” Medieval Perspectives 37 (2024 for 2023):1-32. 
• “Feminist Poetic Encounter in Pattie McCarthy’s margerykempething.” In Women’s Restorative Medievalisms: Forgotten Pasts and Unimagined Futures, ed. Suzanne M. Edwards and Matthew X. Vernon (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2024), 165-79.
• “Feminism.” In The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer, ed. Craig E. Bertolet and Susan Nakley (New York: Routledge, 2024), 242-53.

Courses Taught

• ENG 2114: Social Justice and Literature: MeToo in Context
• ENG 2501: Survey of British Literature: Writing Perspective in Medieval Britain
• ENG 2601: Wenches: Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Race
• ENG 3212: Medieval Sexualities
• ENG 3213: Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
• ENG 3097/GSWS 3097: Feminist Theory Now 
• ENG 4397: Wine, Women, and wicked Words: Medieval Alehouse Literature
• ENG 8101: Why Medieval Lyric?
• ENG 5011: Rape and Consent in Late Medieval English Literature