Catherine Brown

Languages: Spanish, French, Latin, Catalan

Affiliations: Residential College

Teaching interests: I teach what I love and love what I teach. Thematically, that most often means courses on writing and media technologies past and present. I'm very much alive in this present moment, but am also committed to the radical implications of the differences between past and present. That means that my classes are usually a mix of the very old and the pretty new. I will occasionally dive deep into my research home: the early European Middle Ages.

Recent courses:

• Comp Lit 750. Media: History, Theory, Materiality. Whatever the long-term epistemological effect of the “Digital Revolution,” this much is clear: now print is not the, but rather a medium for written language, and with print’s demotion comes a heightened awareness in world textual communities of the relation between language and its technological supports and, by extension, between language and materiality. This seminar aims to direct that heightened awareness of language with materiality into a shared investigation of media theory and the history of the western book. 
• Comp Lit 422: Lettered Worlds & Literary Imagination. This class will study what carefully crafted works of written language across time and around the world have to say about the letters that make them. Even as we critique the default association of “literature” with writing, these works will help us think about big issues: about orality and literacy as knowledge systems, about power and oppression, about religious revelation. We might call this (with a bow of appreciation of art historian and theorist Johanna Drucker) “letters in history and imagination.” 
• Comp Lit 376/RCHUMS 304: It’s About Time: Lived Experience in a Time of Crisis. All of our lives have been upended by the events of the past two years. What we used to call our “normal” ways of doing things are distant memories. When “normal” suddenly becomes impossible, we can see it with new eyes. This class will help us do that by putting us in dialogue with religious thinkers, philosophers, artists, and storytellers who have engaged with time—not as an abstraction, but as a lived experience. Like us, they struggled through their own lived experience to understand what it means to be a finite being in a world that goes on after they’re gone. A world in which days and years roll by in regular cycles. A world in which events may not repeat, but certainly rhyme (Black Death of 1348::Pandemic of 1918::COVID19, for starters). 
• Comp Lit 222 Don Quixote in World Literature. Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and was so successful it spawned a fake sequel—and then a real one, by Cervantes, in 1615. And it’s been inspiring people ever since (google “quixotic” and start counting the hits, if you have the time!). In this class, we’ll see what the fuss is about. We’ll read the whole novel and read sample just some of Quixote’s progeny—novels, films, and comics from around the world.

Research interests:  I am a scholar of medieval Europe with voracious curiosity and porous disciplinary boundaries. I study the cultures that grew up around books and teaching in what is now France and Spain from the 9th to the 14th century. More specifically, I study manuscript culture: that is, the ways of understanding writing, reading, and knowledge particular to an exclusively handmade media ecology. When we encounter medieval works in printed editions, we are inclined by habit to approach them as if they were ruled by the same interpretive conventions as modern printed books. But if we try to read a medieval manuscript in this familiar way, it’s immediately clear that this is not possible. The medieval manuscript isn’t a failed attempt at a modern book; it’s something else altogether. It is a world both familiar (words on a page, pages stacked and bound) and deeply strange (peculiar letterforms, marginalia both relevant and random, the vaguely animal smell of parchment).

Book publications:  

• Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford UP 1999). 
• Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia (Fordham UP 2023)  Freely available online via Open Acess, link here.

Other publications:

• “A Manuscript Present: Translation and Remediation in Early Medieval Latin Iberia” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 14:1 (2022): 28-40. 
• “Scratching the Surface”, Exemplaria 26: 2-3 (2014) : 199-214 
• “Manuscript Thinking” postmedieval 2.3 (Special issue: “New Critical Modes”) (2011): 350–368. 
• “Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain” Word and Image 27.3 (2011): 262-278. 
• “Love Letters from Beatus of Liébana to Modern Philologists” Modern Philology 106.4 (2009): 579-600.
•  “In the Middle” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 547-573.