Chelsea Parsons

I work with Middle English poetry, focusing on its reception and adaptation of philosophical disputations that circulated in the universities and monasteries, early vernacular literature, and culture of late medieval England. I am drawn to poetic moments of ambiguity and conflict, especially as they coincide with medieval questions of cognition. My work traces ideas across geographical, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries. 

My recent essays connect the liminal body-soul boundary in the anonymous English alliterative poem St. Erkenwald (c. 1400) with quodlibetal questions answered by Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) during common disputations in Paris, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (c. 1392) with his translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (c. 1380), and the C text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1390) with Aristotle’s Politics (c. 350 BC) and Augustine of Hippo’s De libero arbitrio voluntatis (c. 388). Using these and other Middle English texts, I have written about medieval debates that center on the relationship between the body and the soul: the active versus contemplative life, free will versus predestination, and the role of the will in subduing the passions. 

At the University of Michigan, I am a Rackham Merit Fellow pursuing a certificate in Medieval and Early Modern Studies alongside my degree in English Language and Literature. My work has been supported by the Diane Owen Hughes Scholarship, Radcliffe/Ramsdell Fellowship, and Rackham Graduate School.

During my graduate degree at Boston College, I served as member and program assistant of an interdisciplinary steering committee for the graduate student training, "An Introduction to Teaching the Global Middle Ages," that preceded the Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America hosted by Harvard University in 2025. 

During my undergraduate degree at Asbury University, I served as an invited member of the Liberal Arts Student Advisory Committee and completed summer tutorials in literature and philosophy at University of Oxford in 2022 on a Continuing Education Scholarship awarded by Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society. 

While completing my degrees, I gained over seven years of professional experience working full-time in higher education as admininstrative assistant at the department and senior levels. Prior to higher education, I was employed in the restaurant industry for nine years. My educational journey fosters a passion for student success and retention.