What Is Reading?

Professor emerita of German at Duke University, serving on the Advisory Committee for Duke's Graduate Liberal Studies Program, and co-founder, with Clayton Koelb, of the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies (2008). I received my BA from the University of Oregon and PhD from Yale  University, both in the field of Germanic Languages and Literatures. From 2015 to 2024 I was the Rgt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), where I also was PI for a large SSHRC Insight Grant, "Medieval Badges: Visual Communication and Identity Formation." Trained as a literary scholar, I have published extensively in the field of medieval gender studies, including masculinity studies. For the past ten years my research has focussed on medieval material cuture, visual studies, and art history.