Director, Institute for the Humanities, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities
she/her
1127 S. Thayer Building
phone: 734-936-3518
About
Contact: humin-director@umich.edu
Peggy McCracken is the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of Humanities and Professor of French, Women's and Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on medieval France and is situated at the intersection of literature, history, and theory. Her most recent book, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France, explores relations of dominion and mastery as represented through human-animal interactions. Earlier books study medieval theories and practices of queenship in relation to romances about adulterous queens (The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Medieval France) and the gendered cultural values of blood as represented medieval literary texts (The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature). She has collaborated with colleagues to write books on a twelfth-century author of romances (Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes); on one of the earliest known women authors in France (A Critical Companion to Marie de France); and on a widely circulating medieval saint's life based on the life of the Buddha (In Search of the Christian Buddha). Her current research investigates ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the persistence and precarity of human beings in adaptations and rewritings of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Affiliation(s)
Comparative Literature, Romance Languages & Literatures and Women Studies
Field(s) of Study
Medieval French literature and culture
Gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages
Feminist and Posthumanist Theory
