Peggy McCracken

My teaching and research interests are, broadly defined, in the intersections of medieval literature, history, and theory. My 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. In earlier projects I have studied the intersections of medieval theories and practices of queenship with romances about adulterous queens, and the ways in which gendered cultural values are mapped onto representations of blood. I have also collaborated with colleagues to write books on Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France. Other books focus on Barlaam and Josaphat, a widely circulating medieval saint's life based on the life of the Buddha, and I am currently at work on Ecologies of the Human, a book that explores ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the persistence and precarity of human being in adaptations and rewritings of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Recent and Selected Publications 

Co-editor, with Valerie Traub and Patricia Badir, Ovidian Transversions: 'Ipis and Ianthe,' 1300-1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Co-author, with Donald S. Lopez, Jr., In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Christian Saint (NY: Norton, 2014).

Translator, Gui de Cambrai, Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha(NY: Penguin Classics, 2014).

Co-editor, with E. Jane Burns, From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).

“Skin and Sovereignty in Guillaume de Palerne,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistiques 24 (2012): 361-75.

Co-author, with Sharon Kinoshita, Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Boydell and Brewer, 2012).

Recent graduate seminars taught:

Theory, Criticism, and the Romance of the Rose

Feminist Theory

Feminism and Posthumanism

Gender and Sexuality and Medieval France

Feminism, the Humanities, and Posthumanism

Sovereignty, Animality, and Intimacy in Medieval French Literature

Animal, Human, Woman: Medieval, Early Modern, Postmodern (co-taught with Professor Valerie Traub)

Recent undergraduate courses taught: 

Global Metamorphoses: Becoming Animal

The Natural and the Supernatural in Medieval France

Varieties of Translation in Medieval France

France and the Crusades

Introduction to Medieval Literature

Research Areas(s)

• Medieval French Literature, Medieval Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Women's Studies

Affiliation(s)

• Comparative Literature, Romance Languages & Literatures, Women's Studies, Institute for the Humanities