I am Director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. I teach a range of introductory courses, including the British literature surveys, introduction to women’s and gender studies, and history of the English language. At the upper-division and master’s level, I offer special topics courses in medieval and early modern British and European literature, gender and sexuality, and the global Middle Ages.
On this website, you will find a few resources for medievalists, including a page on teaching with material culture, one on teaching a multilingual early British survey course, and a series of pages featuring two digital facsimiles of medieval manuscript rolls. In 2024, I received the University of Virginia Rare Book School’s two-year M. C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching, which is allowing me to further develop the book historical aspects of my courses and to promote a book-historical culture on the NSU campus by acquiring a printing press, wooden type in English letters, and metal type in the Cherokee syllabary.
Based on primary manuscript research at the British Library, Bodleian Library, National Library of Wales, and special collections libraries in the U.S., my publications focus on book history and material culture, religious literature, and gender studies. My articles have appeared in New Medieval Literatures, the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Medieval Feminist Forum, Medieval Sermon Studies, Notes & Queries, and Pedagogy. I have a chapter on Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose (ed. Emily Steiner and Sebastian Sobecki). My current book-length project is a critical edition of and comprehensive introduction to a previously unstudied set of four English manuscripts of medieval female saints’ lives compiled by Catholic scribes in the seventeenth century. My proposal for An Early Modern English Catholic Collection of Medieval Female Saints: A Critical Edition of Four Manuscripts has been accepted by the editorial board of the Brepols series Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts.
I have completed or am in the process of finishing four editorial projects related to medieval literature, gender, sexuality, and religion. With Michelle M. Sauer, I edited Sexuality in the Medieval West (Arc Humanities Press, 2025), which should become one of the standard volumes on gender and sexuality in the premodern world. We co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Early Middle English (3.1, Spring 2021) on reclusion and materiality, which was published as The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion (Oct. 2021), the first in Arc Humanities Press’s new Early Middle English Books series. I was also an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages (forthcoming 2026), where I commissioned and edited 20 entries. Dr. Sauer and I are currently editing 80 essays for a 250,000-word Routledge Handbook to Medieval European Women and Christianity.
Within medieval studies, I have organized many conference sessions and several conferences, including the 2018 meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at Emory and the 2012 conference “Preaching the Saints” at Harvard University. I previously served as an elected member of the advisory board for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, and I am currently an elective executive council member of the Southeastern Medieval Association. Outside of medieval studies, I am an advocate for higher education issues. Addressing the (ultimately defeated) graduate student tax proposal, I published op-eds in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and MLAgrads (the website of Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession), and I was featured in The New York Times. U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga) entered my Atlanta Journal-Constitution column into the Congressional record on November 16, 2017, as the House debated the proposed bill.
During 2018-2019, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Agnes Scott College. I received my PhD in English from Emory University. Before coming to Emory for my PhD, I earned a master’s degree in Religion, Literature, and Culture from Harvard University, and I studied English Literature and Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contact Information
jennycbledsoe@gmail.com
Academia.edu
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