Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture, Later Medieval Literature, Gender and Sexuality, Poetry and Poetics

Professor Klein has written articles on Old English poetry, early medieval biblical translation, and Anglo-Saxon femininity. She most recently published Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2006), which explores how legendary women of extreme social privilege functioned as imaginative figures in early medieval literature and culture. Her current research interests include Anglo-Saxon literature and religious iconography, medieval hagiography, the history of sexuality, feminist theory and criticism, and medieval social reforms and institutions that emphasize the maintenance of hierarchy.

• Old English Language and Literature I: the Shorter Poems
• Old English Language and Literature II: Beowulf
• Old English Language and Literature II: Anglo-Saxon Hagiography
• Seminar: Humanity and the Beowulf Manuscript
• Seminar: Representing Change in Anglo-Saxon England
• Seminar: Medieval Family Dramas
• Seminar: Sanctity and the Self in Medieval Literature
• Medieval Court Literature
• Chaucer
• Principles of Literary Study for Majors: Poetry
• Textual Representation and the Female Body (First-Year Byrne Seminar)

• Medieval Autobiography and Life Stories
• Medieval Poetry and Poetics
• Theorizing Gender Before 1500 (cross-listed in Women's and Gender Studies)
• Feminist Perspectives, Medieval Interventions (cross-listed in Women's and Gender Studies)
• Medieval Methodologies
• Sexual Difference in Medieval Literature

• Solmsen Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012-13
• International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Biennial Publication Prize in 2005 for "Reading Queenship in Cynewulf's Elene"
• Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2005-06
• Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, American Council of Learned Societies, 2005-06
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2001-02
• Outstanding Faculty Recognition Award, Sigma Phi Epsilon, Rutgers University, 2000-01
• Visiting Scholar, Harvard University, 2001-03
• NEH Fellowship for seminar "Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Texts," British Library, London, Summer 2001

• The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons, co-edited with William Schipper and Shannon Lewis-Simpson, forthcoming from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013
• "Navigating the Anglo-Saxon Seas," in The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons (forthcoming)
• Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination, co-edited with John Niles and Jonathan Wilcox, forthcoming from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014
• "Anglo-Saxon Pedagogy and the Circle of Shame," forthcoming in a special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, ed. Heide Estes and Haruko Momma
• "Gender," in A Handbook to Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling, Wiley-Blackwell Critical Theory Handbooks (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 39-54
• "Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Elegies," in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (Pennsylvania State UP, 2006), 113-31
• "Centralizing Feminism in Anglo-Saxon Literary Studies," in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 149-65
• "Beauty and the Banquet: Queenship and Social Reform in Ælfric's Esther," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103 (2004): 77-105
• "Reading Queenship in Cynewulf's Elene," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33(2003): 47-89 (Winner of International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Biennial Publication Prize for Best Essay on an Anglo-Saxon Topic, 2005)

• Executive Director, International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, 2007-2011
• Executive Committee, MLA Division of Old English Language and Literature, 2009-2014
• Founding Member, Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium (ASSC), 2004-
• Advisory Board, Old English Newsletter Subsidia
• Alumni Advisory Board, Department of English, Ohio State University, 2009-

PhD, Ohio State University
MA, University of Sussex
BA, Dartmouth College