faculty
Kathryn McKinley is Associate Professor of English. She received her bachelor’s degree from Pennsylvania State University (English honors with studies in Classics), her M. A. (Classics) from the University of Toronto, and her Ph. D. (English) from the University of Delaware. Her teaching and research interests concern the intersections between classical and medieval literary cultures; late medieval English religious cultures; medieval uses and understandings of history; and medieval iconography. She also has a continuing interest in Middle English uses of mythological narrative, especially in political contexts. Her book, Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries 1100-1618 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), traced clerical readings of Ovid's constructions of the feminine, especially in continental school texts. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on the medieval reception of Ovid, as well as continuing work on Chaucer's engagements with classical antiquity.
Representative publications include "Lessons for a King from Confessio Amantis 5" in Metamorphosis: the Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Keith and Rupp, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007); "Manuscripts of Ovid in England 1100-1500," English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 7 (1998): 41-85; and "Revisiting Gower, 1381, and Vox Clamantis Book 1" (forthcoming). She organized several sessions on manuscript readership at the 2005 annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America and has frequently participated in such conferences as the Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the New Chaucer Society. She has been a recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Kathryn McKinley has taught such courses as Chaucer, Arthurian Literature, Medieval Dreams and Visions; British Literature to 1660; introductory Latin; Women, Literature, and Reform; medieval literature surveys; Renaissance Literature; Classical Myth; and Ovid in Translation.
