Hale Family Director of Women’s and Gender Studies; Professor of English
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.