I am currently an English PhD candidate at The University of Iowa studying Old and Middle English literature, hagiography, racial world-making, and women-of-color feminism.

My dissertation project “Shades of Sanctity: Race in the Medieval Hagiographic Imagination” investigates the real and imagined presence of black and brown women in medieval England through an analysis of saints’ lives. I argue that alongside its explicit concern with white and virginal holy figures, medieval hagiography functions as a crucial site for the circulation of emerging discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. Although scholars of medieval race have generated important analyses of genres like chronicles, travel narratives, and romances, hagiography remains understudied. And while medievalists working in feminist, trans, and genderqueer studies offer valuable readings of saints’ lives, the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality still urges investigation. I address such blind spots to unearth how medieval hagiography provided English authors and audiences a space to negotiate imperial, racial, religious, and colonial desires. Shades of Sanctity tracks how, with varying degrees of success, tales of conversion endeavor to subsume women of color into a Christian social body through religious conversion, cultural assimilation, and erasure. I analyze figures including Mary of Egypt, a black hypersexual woman who transforms into a venerated saint; the alternately Muslim and Jewish mothers attributed to St. Thomas Becket in legendary accounts; and the othered mothers in Chaucer’s secular saint’s life, “The Man of Law’s Tale.” Through its examination of black, Muslim, and Jewish women, this study also calls for movement across representational and historical archives.

This dissertation is indebted to the activism, scholarship, and mentorship of medievalists of color who have laid the foundation for the study of premodern race: Geraldine Heng, Dorothy Kim, Wan-Chuan Kao, Cord Whitaker, Sierra Lomuto, Jonathan Hsy, Carissa Harris, and many more (See: Premodern Critical Race Studies Selected Bibliography). Building on this work, my project puts the medieval English archive in critical dialogue with Black feminism, queer-of-color critique, and postcolonial studies to consider new ways to understand the medieval past and in turn, how it illuminates the ruptures, continuities, and contradictions of the production of human difference in modern contexts. My main interlocutors are critics like Hortense Spillers, Jennifer C. Nash, and Edward Said, whose scholarship offers a conceptual vocabulary to analyze issues of power, inequality, racism, and misogyny in medieval literature and culture. For example, my analysis of the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt engages Spillers’ theory of representation, the pornotrope, and reveals the recursive patterns that bind representations of black female sexuality across different temporalities. Medieval religion, I suggest, is not separate from later racial assemblages centered on flesh and bodies – a point I will develop in my first book project. 

Sensual Mobilities: The Life of St. Mary of Egypt from Byzantine to the British Isles explores the intercontinental tradition of St. Mary of Egypt in the medieval North Atlantic. This holy narrative survives in various languages including Greek, Latin, Ge’ez, Old English, Old Norse, French, Welsh, Spanish, and Portuguese. The narrative is not static; some translations emphasize, emend, and erase certain aspects about the black female saint. Using Mary the Egyptian as an entry point, this project aims to deepen our understanding on how white Christian subjectivity is produced in contrast to black female excess in the premodern world – a representational practice that informs the disciplining and occlusion of black bodies across histories, archives, and geographies. Because the geographical and cultural scope of this project is wide, this book will be organized in a series of case studies beginning with a chapter on the original Greek text and its transmission to England in the seventh century. The final chapter ends in eighteenth-century colonial Brazil with the formerly enslaved writer and religious mystic Rosa Maria Egipcíaca of Vera Cruz. Sensual Mobilities participates in scholarly conversations on the possibilities of a comparative approach to medieval studies, and shows how we can attend to the premodern English archive as a contact point within a global network. Medieval European texts, Adam Miyashiro writes, were “neither produced nor circulated within silos of national language boundaries. If medieval literature offers a broad topography for the study of race, it is a multilingual, ‘transnational’ site” (“Race, Medieval Studies, and Disciplinary Boundaries”). My book project on the saint offers a new perspective on how movement across disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural boundaries can change how we study medieval England.