Christopher M. Roman

Professor Christopher Michael Roman offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including  Medieval literature, Chaucer, J.R.R Tolkien, medieval mysticism, as well as, courses on gender, sexuality and queer studies as they intersect with the Middle Ages. His various publications, lectures, and presentations investigate the entangled themes of queer theory and queer theology in medieval vernacular religion, gender and sexuality in the life of anchorites and hermits, animal studies and ecology in medieval literature, and the emergent field of sound studies and the sound of the Middle Ages. His first book, Domestic Mysticism in Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (2005) interrogates queer family formation in medieval mystical texts. His new book, Queering Richard Rolle (2017), investigates the queer identity of the medieval hermit, Richard Rolle. His new work investigates the use of sound in the imagined places of medieval literature. His forthcoming co-edited collection, Queerly, Clearly: Defining the Borders of the Medieval Queer (2019) explores new theoretical directions for queer identity in the Middle Ages. He is the recipient of a Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Visiting Research Fellowship and an Erika and Kenneth Riley Fellowship at the Huntington Library in California for work on a new edition of Richard Rolle’s Middle English works to be published by the Medieval English Text Series (METS). He is the co-editor of the book series, New Queer Medievalism (MIPS). He also serves as the associate editor of The Chaucer Review.