Faculty
Elizabeth Schirmer
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Email:
eschirme@nmsu.edu
Office Address:
New Mexico State University
Department of English
P.O. Box 30001, MSC 3E
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Phone:
(575) 646-1733
Fax:
(575) 646-7725
Biographical Statement
I received my PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, and my AB in English and French Literatures from Stanford University in 1993. I joined the NMSU English department in 2001. I enjoy teaching in the Honors College and the Women's Studies Program as well as in English.
Research Interests
Late-medieval English literary and religious writing; vernacular cultures of reading, c. 1400; Lollardy; the Pearl-Poet; rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages; gender/gender/narrative theory and medieval texts.
Courses Recently Taught
- ENGL 271: Survey of British Literature I (Beowulf through the 18th c.)
- ENGL 239: Medieval Understandings
- ENGL 405: Chaucer
- ENGL 525, WS 550: Medieval Women Reading the Bible
- ENGL 4/522, WS 4/550: Dying for Love: Sex and the Spirit of Early English Poetry
- ENGL 4/517: Queer Theory
- ENGL 4/593: Middle English Textual Cultures
- ENGL 5/690: Medieval Rhetoric
Departmental Projects
After three years advising our undergraduate majors, I am currently serving as Director of Graduate Studies, working with students and faculty in our MA, MFA, and PhD programs. I also serve on the Personnel Committee, and I help craft the curriculum through the work of the Literature Area Group. I helped develop the Minor in Medieval and Early Modern Studies as well as the Major in Women's Studies, and I have served as faculty advisor for two student groups: Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Friends (currently the Stonewall Coalition) and Feminists Reinventing Equality Everywhere (FREE).
Selected Publications
"William Thorpe's Narrative Theology". Studies in the Age of Chaucer. 31 (2009).
"Canon Wars and Outlier Manuscripts: Gospel Harmony in the Lollard Controversy." Forthcoming, Huntington Library Quarterly. 73 (2010).
"'Trewe Men': Pastoral Masculinity in Lollard Polemic." In Masculinities and Femininities, ed. Fred Kiefer (Brepols, 2009).
"Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey: The Myroure of Oure Ladye and the Mandates of Vernacular Theology." In Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (U of Notre Dame P, 2005).
"Orthodoxy, Textuality, and the 'Tretys' of Margery Kempe." Journal x. 1.1 (1996).
Professional Statement
My teaching and research alike are motivated by a fascination with models of reading and how they are taught and learned. Rather than literacy in the narrow sense, I am interested in reading as a basic means of comprehending, organizing, and manipulating experience. In my research and in the classroom, I ask how particular ways of engaging with texts shape the intellectual, ethical, political, and spiritual lives of readers medieval and modern.