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.