Teaching Associate Professor of English, Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program,
Director of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium
B.A., Northwestern University; M.A. University of Michigan; Ph.D., University of Michigan
slbatkie@sewanee.edu
Dr. Stephanie L. Batkie holds degrees from Northwestern University (B.A. in Comparative Literary Studies) and the University of Michigan (M.A. in English, Ph.D. in English, and a Certificate in Medieval and Early Modern Studies). Her work focuses on the late medieval period, and she has published on literature written in Middle English, Medieval Latin, and Anglo-Norman.
Her current book project, entitled The Ethics of Attention in Anglo-Latin England: Towards a Medieval Political Aesthetic, imagines the medieval origins of what it means to feel politically. This book discovers that the ethics of modern political power has its foundations in the poetics surfaces of Anglo-Latin writing in the later Middle Ages — writing often taken as a set of source texts rather than as literature in its own right. She returns to this corpus its profoundly literary status. Medieval authors use poetics and a set of literary forms to write of political events past or present, and they consciously shape readerly attention to show how to orient oneself in (or after) the wake of political crisis. By extension, they also create a range of available positions one might take take for events yet to come. How people read becomes how they sense becomes how they act. As a result, the forms these texts take establish an ethics, created out of affective, political aesthetics, that paves the way for the development of political forms in the centuries ahead.
Elsewhere, she has published on the work of William Langland, on Geoffrey Chaucer, on John Gower, and on medieval political lyric poetry. With Matthew Irvin and Lynn Shutters, she is the editor of A Companion to New Critical Thinking on Chaucer, from Arc Humanities Press. Also with Matthew Irvin, she is the co-editor and co-translator of an edition and publication of John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, forthcoming from TEAMS Medieval Publications.
Her teaching at Sewanee includes courses in writing instruction and pedagogy, classical literature in translation, medieval and Early Modern literature, and contemporary critical theory.
