Kara L. McShane is Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus
College, where she specializes in medieval literature and digital
humanities. She received her Ph.D. from the
University of Rochester in 2014. Her research
interests include Middle English romance and dream vision, travel writing,
cultural translation, and digital pedagogy; she is especially interested in the intersections between writing and the vernacular in medieval
English culture.
Her work has appeared in the South
Atlantic Review, The Once and Future
Classroom, and Studies in Medievalism. She is presently at work on her first book, tentatively
titled Exotic Documents and Vernacular
Anxieties in Late Medieval England.
In it, she examines instances of non-English writing across a range of
Middle English narratives, arguing that these moments of writing create space
for authors to express anxieties about writing as a means of memorialization
and about the vernacular as a medium.
The fascination with writing within Middle English literature, she
argues, is central to understanding the relationship between language and
national identity.
Kara’s interest in the development of English
identity in the Middle Ages has led very naturally to an interest in
medievalism, particularly how “the medieval” is deployed to address
contemporary social and political issues.
She is the general editor of Visualizing
Chaucer, a Robbins Library Digital Project, and has contributed to The Camelot Project. She also serves as an assistant editor
for medievally speaking, an
open-access review journal supported by the International Society for the Study
of Medievalism.
As “the medievalist” of her department, Kara teaches
on all manner of medieval topics. Recent
offerings have included courses on medieval & early modern travel writing,
medieval women, and medieval romance. She also teaches a course called
Structure of the English Language, which combines advanced grammar and history
of English and is quite a lot of fun.
Kara shares her home and her fascination with all things
medieval with her wife Karen, three chinchillas, and a grumpy but very handsome
cat named Severus.
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| Kara with Gower. |
