Karen Gross

Professor of English

Miller 408, MSC: 58
Office Hours:

Spring 2024: Tuesdays 1-3 and by appointment. 

Please sign up via Google Appointment calendar.

Karen Gross joined the Lewis & Clark English department in 2005. She studies and teaches the European Middle Ages with an emphasis on England and Italy in the thirteenth throug

Specialty

Medieval Literature, History of the Book

Academic Credentials

PhD 2005 Stanford University

M.Phil. 1998 Cambridge University

BA 1997 University of Southern California

Teaching

Spring 2024:

CORE 120: Words

ENG 281: Medieval Manuscripts

Research

“Stephan Batman Reading Anglo Norman: The Annotations in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Selden Supra 38,” The Library (forthcoming)

“Sir Cleges and the Magic of Generosity: Medieval Ethical Codes and the Nature of Giving,” New Medieval Literatures 23 (forthcoming)

“The Solitudes of Robert Southell: Conscience, Confinement, and the Anglo-Norman Metrical Apocalypse,” Romanic Review (2023)

“Illuminating Redcrosse’s Way: Medieval Apocalypse Manuscripts as Sources for Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology 119.4 (2022): 654-704.

“Thoughts from the Corner: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner that Held Them (1948) and the Liberal Arts College,” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art & Architecture 7 (2021): 269-80.

“The Unexpected Correspondences among Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.1.1; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 38; and Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 5214,” Manuscripta 64.2 (2020): 231-56.

“Retrofitting the Apocalypse: Identifying the Image Cycle in London, British Library, Additional MS 17399,” Manuscripta 64.1 (2020): 73-116

“‘Avianus and the Apocalypse in Paris, BnF, MS n.a.l. 1132,” in After the Carolingians: Re-defining Manuscript Illumination in the 10th and 11th Centuries, eds. Beatrice E. Kitzinger and Joshua O’Driscoll, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 336-74.

“Lady Poverty’s Overthrow of Dame Largesse: The Uneasy Place of Generosity in St. Francis’s Virtues,” The World of St. Francis (Siena: Betti Editrice, 2016).

“In the Presence of the Past and the Shadows of Futurity: Petrarch, Vernacular Art Criticism, and the Anticipation of the Connoisseur,” Mediaevalia 36/37 (2015/16): 147-86.

“Seeing John: A Commentary on the Link Word of Pearl Fitt XVII,” Glossator 9 (2015): 326-54.

“Chaucer’s Silent Italy,” Studies in Philology 109 (2012): 19-44.

“Scholar Saints and Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante,” MLN 124 (2009): 66-85.

“Hunting, Heraldry, and the Fall in the Boke of St. Albans,” Viator 38 (2007): 191-215

“Chaucer, Mary Magdalene, and the Consolation of Love,” Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 1-37.

“Virgilian Hauntings in Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 31 (2005): 15-40.

Professional Experience

M. C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Book History, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources, Rare Book School, University of Virginia (2023-24)

NEH Summer Institute Participant, “Law & Culture in Medieval England” (2021)

Lorry Lokey Faculty Excellence Award, Lewis & Clark College (2021)

Teacher of the Year (2018)

London Humanities Overseas Program (2017)

Siena Overseas Program (2011)

Location: Miller Hall