English Department Faculty
Holly Crocker
Hale Family Director of Women’s and Gender Studies; Professor of English
Biography
Holly A. Crocker is Hale Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English. Her work focuses on late medieval and early modern literatures, with particular emphasis on ethics, humanism, politics, and feminism. Her second book, The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the 2022 Jerome E. Singerman Prize for a meritorious second book (any field) from the Medieval Academy of America. In 2024 she edited a colloquium for Studies in the Age of Chaucer on “Reconsidering the Subject,” and co-edited a special issue of Exemplaria (with Carissa Harris), on “Theorizing Gender, Patriarchy, and Liberation: Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing and Medieval Studies.” She currently serves on the Editorial Board of PMLA, and in 2025 she became an editor of Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory. She is completing a book, Boundless Subjects in Late Medieval Literature, which investigates a formation of selfhood associated with women, but inhabited by all kinds of people, in in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, William Langland, John Lydgate, the Pearl-poet, as well as William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, between 1350-1600.
Books
- The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
- Winner, Medieval Academy of America, Jerome E. Singerman Prize, meritorious second book in any area of medieval studies, 2022.
- Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, Ed. with Glenn Burger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
- Ed., with D. Vance Smith, Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates. London: Routledge, 2014.
- Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- Ed., Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux. Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Journal Special Issue/Cluster
- Ed., Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 46 (2024). A colloqium on “Reconsidering the Subject.”
- Ed., with Carissa Harris, Exemplaria, 36.3 (2024). A special issue on “Theorizing Gender, Patriarchy, and Liberation: Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing and Medieval Studies.”
- Ed., with Kathryn Schwarz, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 4.4 (2013). A special issue on “Premodern Flesh.”
Journal Articles
- “Where Now with Women Writers? Feminism for the Next Fifty Years,” Speculum, forthcoming (with Laura Saetveit Miles).
- “Dorigen’s Boundless Subjectivity in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” PMLA, 140.2 (2025): 217-31. (with Robyn Bartlett).
- “Since March…Rethinking Vulnerability, Taylor Swift’s Pandemic Records, and Piers Plowman’s Women,” New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 2 (2021): 50-62.
- “Feminism Without Gender: Piers Plowman, ‘Mede the Mayde,’ and Late Medieval Literary Studies,” Exemplaria, 31 (2019): 93-104.
- “W(h)ither Feminism? Gender, Subjectivity, and the Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review, 54 (2019): 352-70.
- “Medieval Affects Now,” Exemplaria, 29.1 (2017): 82-98.
- “The Problem of the Premodern,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 16.1 (2016): 146-52.
- “John Foxe’s Chaucer: Affecting Form in Post-Historicist Criticism,” New Medieval Literatures, 15 (2015 for 2013): 96-118.
Book Chapters
- “Medieval Affect, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Medical Treatments of the Embodied Soul,” Medicine and Literature, Ed. Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Anna Elsner, Cambridge Critical Concepts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 39-52.
- “Virtus, Vertues, and Gender: Cultivating a Chivalric Habitus in Thomas Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth,” Arthurian Ethics, Ed. Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2023. 245-70.
- “Sticky Affect and Shifting Gender in Late Medieval England: The Making of the Shrew,” The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, Ed. Todd W. Reeser. London: Routledge, 2022. 431-40.
- “Vertu,” A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer, Ed. Stephanie Batkie, Matthew Irvin, and Lynn Shutters. ARC Humanities Press, 2021. 171-85.
- “Griselda and the Problem of the Human,” Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. Ed. Frank Grady, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 136-50.
- “Engendering Masculinity in Hoccleve’s Series,” Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion. Ed. Holly A. Crocker and Glenn Burger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 70-89.