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 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

Animacy/Agency/Ecology

Ovid's Metamorphoses in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (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