Emily Steiner is the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale. She is the author of three single-authored books, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Reading 'Piers Plowman'  (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400 ( Oxford University Press, 2021).  She has co-edited several collection of essays, The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002), with Candace Barrington, Thinking Historically About Historicism (Chaucer Review, 2014), with Lynn Ransom, Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts 2015), and with Jennifer Jahner and Elizabeth Tyler, The Cambridge History of History Writing: England and Britain, 500-1500 (2019).  Her articles have appeared in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Representations, New Literary History, and Exemplaria, among many other journals.

She is presently writing a book on animals in premodern literature and culture (Reaktion Books), editing a volume on medieval English prose for Oxford University Press (with Sebastian Sobecki), and editing several volumes on medieval Jews and Judaism (with Samantha Seal). With Tekla Bude and Michael Calabrese she is working on a translation of Piers Plowman. Her research interests extend to natural history and the history of information, law and literature, drama and ritual performance, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. Her teaching interests include Old English literature, Chaucer, Arthurian literature, alliterative poetry, and poetry of all periods.