Karen Gross

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 through fifteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in the reception of classical texts, Dante, medieval literary theory and education, the history of the book, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her research has been supported by grants from the New York Public Library, the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Fulbright program. In 2008 she received the Graves Award, sponsored by the ACLS, for her efforts as a teacher. Currently, she is researching illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts.

Specialty

Academic Credentials

PhD 2005 Stanford University

M.Phil. 1998 Cambridge University

BA 1997 University of Southern California

Teaching

CORE 120

ENG 100 – King Arthur

ENG 241 – Text & Image

ENG 281 – Working with Medieval Manuscripts

ENG 310 – Medieval Literature (topics vary, but have included Dante’s Commedia, Medieval Mysticism and Devotional Life, Global Middle Ages, the Gawain-Poet)

ENG 330 – Chaucer

ENG 450 – Medieval Dream Visions (Fall 2018)

Research

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

“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

Teacher of the Year (2018)

London Humanities Overseas Program (2017)

Siena Overseas Program (2011)