Medieval literature; literary theory; comparative literature.
About
Areas of research: Medieval Iberian Romance and Latin literatures, early medieval Iberian visual and textual cultures, and history of the book.
Languages: Spanish, Latin, French, Catalan
Catherine Brown received the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1992. She is the author of Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (1998). Additional publications include essays on reading practices in medieval studies, and monographic articles on topics in medieval Latin, Castilian, and French. She contributed translations of Federico García Lorca’s Libro de poemas and Diván del Tamarit to the definitive English collected works of Lorca (ed. Christopher Maurer, 1991, revised 2002). She received an NEH fellowship (2000-2001) and a Michigan Humanities Award (2011). Her current work focuses on the Early Middle Ages in Iberian and Carolingian cultures, with a special focus on manuscript bookmaking and theories and practices of embodied language. She is completing a book on metaphor and the crises of theory in Carolingian monasteries entitled In the Middle. Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on epistemological mystery stories (“The Puzzle, Desire and Meaning”), time and temporality (“Double Time”), and The Presence of the Past and graduate seminars on “Medieval Exegesis and Literary Theory” and “Reading in the Middle Ages.”
Recent and Selected Publications:
Recent and Selected Publications:
- “Manuscript Thinking” postmedieval 2.3 (Special issue: “New Critical Modes”)
- (2011): 350–368.
- “Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain” forthcoming 2011, Word and Image 27.3 (2011): 262-278.
- “Love Letters from Beatus of Liébana to Modern Philologists”
- Modern Philology 106.4 (2009): 579-600.
- “Dead Letters” in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken. (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2007), 96-105.
- “In the Middle” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 547-573.
Affiliation(s)
- Comparative Literature
- Romance Languages
