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Karen Gross

Associate Professor of English

  • Copyright, Steve Hambuchen

Miller Hall

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, medieval literary theory and education, humanism, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her research has been supported by grants from 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 working on a project involving illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts as well as a study on generosity in the Middle Ages.

 

Specialty

Medieval Literature (on sabbatical 2019-2020)

Teaching

CORE 106

ENG 100 – King Arthur

ENG 241 – Text & Image

ENG 281 – Working with Medieval Manuscripts

ENG 310 – Medieval Literature (topics vary)

ENG 330 – Chaucer

ENG 450 – Medieval Dream Visions (Fall 2018)

Professional Experience

London Humanities Overseas Program (2017)

Siena Overseas Program (2011)

Research

“‘And every creature heard I say Glory’ (Rev 5:13): Avianus and the Apocalypse in Paris, MS NAL 1132,” in After the Carolingians, eds. Beatrice E. Kitzinger and Joshua O’Driscoll, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter) – forthcoming winter 2018

“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.

Academic Credentials

Ph.D. 2005 Stanford University

M.Phil. 1998 Cambridge University

B.A. 1997 University of Southern California