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
Vernacular cultures of reading, c. 1400; late-medieval English Poetry, including Chaucer; Lollardy and vernacular theology; rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages; gender/genre/narrative theories.
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 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
"Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey: The Myroure of Oure Ladye and the Mandates of Vernacular Theology." Olson and Kerby-Fulton, eds., Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame UP, 2005), 345-76.
"Orthodoxy, Textuality, and the Tretise of Margery Kempe." Journal x 1.1 (Fall 2006): 31-56.
"'Trewe Men': Pastoral Masculinity in Lollard Polemic." Fred Kiefer, ed., Masculinities and Feminities (Brepols, forthcoming, 2009).
Work in Progress
Canonizing Narratives: Inventing English Textuality from Arundel to Pecock (book manuscript)
"William Thorpe's Narrative Theology." Provisionally accepted for publication in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009).
"Material Theologies: Cleanness, 'Craft', and Lollardy at Court" (article)
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.