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Sarah Wilma Watson

Curriculum Vitae

2018 Ph.D. Graduate
Dissertation Advisor(s): David Wallace
"Women, Reading, and Literary Culture: The Reception of Christine de Pizan in Fifteenth-Century England"

Communications Specialist, Strategic Planning and Internal Engagement, McKinsey & Co.

Sarah Wilma Watson received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2018. She has published essays on Anglo-French literary culture and on gender and reading. Her current book project, which grows out of a dissertation on the reception of Christine de Pizan in England, examines a transcontinental community of women readers in fifteenth-century France and England (provisional title: Cities of Ladies: Real and Imagined Communities of Women Readers in Late-Medieval France and England).

Sarah is invested in teaching courses that reach across time and space, exploring how early texts can speak to modern issues and placing English literature and history in a multilingual and multicultural context. She also enjoys teaching courses on women readers and writers.

Education: 

Ph.D. in English Literature, University of Pennsylvania (2018)

MA in Medieval Studies, Fordham Univeristy (2012)

BA in English and History, University of Rochester (2010), summa cum laude

Teaching and Research Interests:

Medieval English literature and culture, medieval and early modern women writers and readers, Chaucer, medieval drama and its modern revival, gender and sexuality studies, women's history, French literature in late medieval England, Anglo-French cultural and literary exchange.

Publications:

“Another Woman Reader of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307.” The Journal of the Early Book Society, vol.21 (forthcoming).

"Grace holds the 'cliket' to the heavenly 'wiket': Piers Plowman, the Roman de la Rose, and the Poetics of Penetration." The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Vol. 30 (2016), pp. 207-226 .

"Chaste Reading: Diana, Mary, and Christine de Pizan," Actes du IXe Colloque Christine de Pizan in Le Moyen Français (2016), pp. 297-309.

“Jacquetta of Luxembourg: A Female Reader of Christine de Pizan in England.” Posted February 27, 2017 on Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon (online). https://blogs.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwomen/2017/02/27/jacquetta-of-luxembourg-a-female-reader-of-christine-de-pizan-in-england/

Courses Taught

fall 2017

ENGL 020.301 Literature Before 1660  
ENGL 021.601 The Middle Ages and the Movies canceled  

summer 2017

ENGL 103.900 Chick Lit  

spring 2016

spring 2014

ENGL 101.404 Jane Austen and Adaption