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A.V. Aylin Malcolm

(they/them/theirs)

2023 Ph.D. Graduate
Dissertation Advisor(s): David Wallace
"Every Living Soul: Literature and Zoology in England, 1100–1400"

Assistant Professor of English, University of Guelph
https://aylinmalcolm.com/

I am a researcher with interests in premodern poetry, environmental theory, the history of science, and digital manuscript studies. My Ph.D. dissertation considered literature and zoology in later medieval England, approaching these as intertwined projects shaped by historical environmental changes.

Before coming to Penn, I earned a Master's in English (The Ohio State University) and a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Environment (McGill University). I have also held graduate fellowships at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Off campus, I am a multi-instrumentalist and occasional podcaster.

More recent information about my writing and digital projects is available on my website. For a quick read that summarizes some of my interests in the history of knowledge, you might look at my piece on narwhals in Environmental History Now.

Articles and Book Chapters

"Animals" The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (2024)
"Birds, Blood, and Nonbinary Bodies in Marie de France’s 'Yonec'" Medieval Ecocriticisms (2024)
"What the Mole Knows: Experience, Exempla, and Interspecies Dialogue in Albert the Great’s De animalibus" New Medieval Literatures (2022)
"Of Monks and Movable Beasts: Animals as Fellow Travelers in the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis" Viator (2021)
"In the Orbit of the Sphere: Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi in UPenn MS Codex 1881" Manuscript Studies (2020)

Awards

2023 Diane Hunter Dissertation Prize
2021 Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Summer Research Award in the Digital Humanities
2021 SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (DCF)
2020 Penfield, Teece, and SAS Dissertation Research Fellowships (DRF)

News & Events

2024/09/27
CETLI Workshop: Teaching At…
2024/04/25
Premodern Literature and Global Histories
2023/03/17
Dissertation Defense: Aylin Malcolm
2022/11/03
Early Modern Trans Studies II Conference at Bryn Mawr
2022/02/14
Aylin Malcolm (Penn): "Revolutionary Science: Movable Books and the Medieval Universe"
2021/03/10
Aylin Malcolm (University of Pennsylvania)
2020/10/15
Penn English Ph.D. student Aylin Malcolm featured in SAS "Big Ideas For Strange Times"
2020/04/02
Doctoral candidate Aylin Malcolm featured in OMNIA magazine: Science/Fiction
2019/04/29
Aylin Malcolm, "'Le Diable qui parle par ta bouche': Vulgar Language from Mankind to Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs"
2019/02/22
11th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference
2018/11/05
Emily Steiner and Aylin Malcolm featured in Omnia
2018/03/17
Vulnerability: 10th Annual M@P Conference
2017/04/24
George Eliot and the Science of Description

Courses Taught

spring 2021

ENGL 031.401 Shakespeare's Rivals, Collaborators, and Contemporaries  

fall 2020

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  

spring 2020

ENGL 200.301 Science/Fiction  

spring 2018

ENGL 101.004 Shakespeare  

fall 2017

ENGL 0025.001 Chaucer: Medieval Poetry and Modern Performance