Bio

Teaching Areas

• I teach courses that include the whole range of medieval writing in English (from Beowulf to Chaucer to fifteenth-century drama and poetry) and in the continental European languages. A particular interest in my teaching is medieval religious interaction (among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans), and I also teach the English Department’s courses on “the literature of the Bible.” I have, as well, longstanding teaching interest in the history of the English language, and in literary theory, especially feminist and queer theory.

Research Interests

• I am currently working on a new book about medieval conversion experience, tentatively titled Convert Orthodoxies, which will consider how and why medieval Jewish converts to Christianity – in a wide range of places and times, from 12th and 13th century France and England to 15th century Spain – became important and influential spokesmen for their adopted religion. I also continue to be interested in the literary genre of medieval dream vision, which was the subject of my earliest publications, and some recent articles connect to that interest. And I have recently published on how medieval material gets taken up on the Internet – specifically in the form of erotic stories addressed to an audience (primarily) made up of gay men.

Professional Activities

• Publications-Books
• The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Queering the Middle Ages. Ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
• Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
• AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science. Gender and Genre in Literature Series. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
• Dreaming in the Middle Ages. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 14. Cam¬bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. [Italian translation: Il sogno nel medioevo (Vita e Pensiero, 1996). Paperback, 2005]
• Articles:
• “Anti-Judaism/Anti-Semitism and the Structures of Chaucerian Thought.” In Oxford Handbook to Chaucer. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari. Oxford: Oxford UP. [forthcoming]
• “Dream Inheritance.” In Interpretation of Dreams/Dream Vision Poetics. Ed. Erin Felicia Labbie. [forthcoming]
• “Postcolonial/Queer: Teaching Gower Using Recent Critical Theory.” In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. R.F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle. New York: MLA. [forthcoming]
• “Medieval Jewish/Christian Debate and the Question of Gender: Gilbert Crispin’s Disputatio Iudei et Christiani.” In Intersections of Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Ed. Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 85-103.
• “Gay Internet Medievalism: Erotic Story Archives, the Middle Ages, and Contemporary Gay Identity.” American Literary History 22 (2010): 913-44. [with response: Scott Herring. “Erotic Uncreativity: A Response to Steven F. Kruger.” ALH 22 (2010): 945-50.]
• “Afterword” (co-written with Glenn Burger). In Queer Movie Medievalisms. Ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 237-43.
• “Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges.” In Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities. Ed. Frederick S. Roden. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 47-66.
• “Queer Middle Ages.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. Ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2009. 413-33.
• “Dialogue, Debate, and Dream.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Ed. Larry Scanlon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 71-82.
• “Gower’s Mediterranean.” In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. R.F. Yeager. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. 3-19.
• “A Series of Linked Assignments for the Undergraduate Course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” In Teaching Chaucer in the University. Ed. Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester. Teaching the New English Series. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
• “Camille, Michael”; “Chaucer, Geoffrey”; “Closet/s”; “Dreams and Eroticism, Dream Books”; “Foucault, Michel”; “Judaism, Gender, and Queering”; “Other, Constructing the”; “Queering, Queer Theory, and Medieval and Early Modern Culture.” In Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007.
• “Dreaming.” In A Concise Companion to Chaucer. Ed. Corinne Saunders. London: Blackwell, 2006. 71-89.
• “Queer Chaucer in the Classroom” (co-written with Glenn Burger). In Teaching Literature: A Handbook. Ed. Tanya Agathocleous and Ann Dean. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 31-40.
• “(De)Stabilized Identities in Medieval Jewish-Christian Disputations on the Talmud.” In Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel. Ed. Glenn Burger, Lesley B. Cormack, Jonathan Hart, and Natalia Pylipiuk. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2003. 63-85.
• “Medieval/Post-Modern: HIV/AIDS and the Temporality of Crisis.” In Queering the Middle Ages. Ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 252-83.
• “Introduction” (co-written with Glenn Burger). In Queering the Middle Ages. Ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. xi-xxiii.
• “Fetishism, 1927, 1614, 1461.” In The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 193-208.
• “Medical and Moral Authority in the Late Medieval Dream.” In Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Ed. Peter Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 51-83.
• “The Spectral Jew.” New Medieval Literatures 2 (Oxford University Press, 1998), 9-35.
• “Dream Space and Masculinity.” Word & Image 14 (1998), 11-16.
• “‘GET FAT: don't die!’: Eating and AIDS in Gay Men's Culture.” In Eating Culture. Ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. 36-59.
• “Identity and Conversion in Tony Kushner's Angels in America.” In Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 151-69.
• “Introduction” (co-written with Deborah R. Geis). In Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 1-10.
• “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories.” In Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Karma Lochrie, James Schultz, and Peggy McCracken. Min¬neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 158-79.
• “Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?” In Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. 21-41.
• “Medieval Christian (Dis)identifications: Muslims and Jews in Guibert of Nogent.” Special Medieval Issue. Ed. Michael Uebel and D. Vance Smith. New Literary History 28 (Spring 1997), 185-203.
• “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale.” Exemplaria 6 (1994), 115 39. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger (New York: G. K Hall & Co., 1998), 150-72.
• “Webster Street.” In Sister & Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together. Ed. Joan Nestle and John Preston. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994. 151 57.
• “Oppositions and Their Opposition in the Old English Exodus.” Neophilologus 78 (1994), 165 70.
• “Nicole Oresme.” In Medieval France: An Encyclopedia. Ed. William Kibler and Grover Zinn. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.
• “Medieval Studies.” In Rethinking the Disciplines: Literature. Ed. Dorothy O. Helly. The CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, 1994. 23 26. Reprinted in Women in the Curriculum: Literature, National Center for Curriculum Transformation Researches on Women (Baltimore: Towson University, 1997), 24-29.
• “Imagination and the Complex Movement of Chaucer's House of Fame.” Chaucer Review 28 (1993), 117 34.
• “Racial/Religious and Sexual Queerness in the Middle Ages.” Medieval Feminist Newsletter no. 16 (Fall 1993), 32 36.
• “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages.” In The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard. Ed. James Dean and Christian Zacher. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992. 301-23.
• “Mirrors and the Trajectory of Vision in Piers Plowman.” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 66 (1991), 74 95.
• “Passion and Order in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women.” Chaucer Review 23 (1989), 219 35.