Research Faculty

Ferguson specializes in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century France and early modern Europe more broadly, focusing on gender, sexuality, and queer studies, women's writing, and the history of religion. His latest book examines a group of mostly Iberian men executed in Rome in 1578 for reportedly celebrating same-sex weddings, and his earlier work brought the history of sexuality and queer theory to bear on French Renaissance texts. He has also published extensively on women writers such as Marguerite de Navarre and Anne de Marquets.

• Sixteenth-century French literature
• History of sexuality and queer studies
• Early modern women's writing
• History of religion
• Marguerite de Navarre

Fowler is a literary scholar and architect whose Poetry and the Built Environment (2024) argues that poems and other artifacts are best described by how they invite us to use them and so reshape our sensory, emotional, and ideational experience. Her work treats language as one cultural practice among others, with an abiding interest in what people do with ritual language, especially poems, in real places. She is a General Editor of the Oxford Collected Works of Edmund Spenser.

• Medieval and early modern English poetry
• Literature and architecture
• Material culture and devotional poetics
• Chaucer and Spenser
• Phenomenology and spatiality

Gordon is a music historian who works across disciplines and creative practices and has published widely on early modern music and gender and on early American sound. Her books include Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano and other strange sounds (2023) and Monteverdi’s Unruly Women (2004), and she is currently writing a new book on sound in early America.

• Early modern Italian music
• Gender and sexuality
• Castrati and voice
• History of science
• Early American sound

Holsinger specializes in the literature and culture of the medieval world, with additional interests in historical fiction, modern and contemporary theory, the history of the book, and premodern religious cultures. His work on the parchment record of the premodern world draws on environmental history, theology, and historical genetics, including collaboration in the emerging field of biocodicology, the biomolecular analysis of written objects. Earlier books explored the shaping role of the medieval in modern critical thought and political discourse.

• Medieval English literature
• History of the book and parchment
• Biocodicology
• Medievalism and critical theory
• Medieval music and liturgy

A scholar of early medieval language and literature, Hopkins specializes in translations and adaptations of religious literature from Latin into the vernaculars of the North Sea: Old English, Old Norse, Middle Welsh and Old Irish. His interests include the reception, transmission and transformation of Christian apocryphal literature, heroic and epic adaptations of scriptural narratives, and syncretic literary moments from Late Antiquity onward. His dissertation examined how translations of apocryphal narratives about hell let early medieval North Sea Christians localize and customize their beliefs.

• Old English literature
• Old Norse, Middle Welsh and Old Irish
• Christian apocrypha
• Vernacular theology
• Medieval translation and adaptation

Kershaw works on North-Western Europe and the Mediterranean world in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, concentrating on c. CE 700-950. His specialties include Carolingian Europe, post-Roman Britain, the Viking world and early medieval diasporas, along with political thought and practice, historiography, and travel, cross-cultural communication and diplomacy.

• Carolingian Europe
• Post-Roman Britain
• Viking world
• Early medieval political thought
• Diplomacy and cross-cultural communication

Kinney's listed specialties are 16th- and 17th-century British literature, genre studies, medieval and Renaissance literature. Her book and articles cover poetic narrative from Chaucer to Spenser and Milton, romance, and the work of Mary Wroth and the Sidneys.

• Chaucer and Middle English poetry
• Renaissance romance
• Mary Wroth and the Sidneys
• Spenser
• Genre studies

Love is an art historian, educator and museum curator who has led the education department at The Fralin Museum of Art since 2012, with the aim of making art accessible to diverse audiences. She earned a doctorate in art history from Columbia University with dissertation research on medieval art and architecture, and has also studied Oceanic art. Her work at the Fralin includes curricular partnerships across more than 40 university units and programs such as Clinician's Eye, which uses art analysis to train medical students' observational skills.

• Medieval art and architecture
• Museum education
• Curatorial practice
• Oceanic art

Mathewes trained as a specialist in Christian theology, religious ethics, and modern philosophical ethics and philosophy of religion, and he continues to work in those areas. He is also interested in religion, society, culture and politics. Since coming to UVA he has turned increasingly to comparative religion, especially comparative religious ethics, and to the theory of religion and the practice of religious studies.

• Christian theology
• Religious ethics
• Augustinian tradition
• Comparative religious ethics
• Religion and public life

McDonald has taught German language and literature at UVA since 1975, teaching graduate courses on the Middle Ages (especially Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan) and undergraduate courses on Arthurian literature. Much of his scholarship concerns interactions between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, showing that influence was reciprocal and tracing how educated Christians promoted anti-Jewish tropes.

• Medieval German literature
• Jewish-Christian relations
• Anti-Jewish polemic
• Arthurian literature
• Michel Beheim

Deborah McGrady specializes in late-medieval French literature and culture. Her most recent book traces the long cultural legacy of Joan of Arc, from the heroine's first public appearance to the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Her earlier work examines reading, authorship and patronage in late medieval culture, including studies of Guillaume de Machaut's audience and the literary economy of late medieval France.

• Late-medieval French literature
• Joan of Arc and cultural memory
• Authorship, reading and patronage
• Guillaume de Machaut and Christine de Pizan
• Manuscript studies

Ogden's research focuses on medieval French hagiography and new technologies. She studies French saints' Lives as texts that are at once literary and historical, spiritual and secular, and whose variation across manuscript copies shows the instability of medieval texts. She uses digital tools to represent the variable, interactive nature of hagiography and to give access to the materials needed to study the genre.

• Medieval French hagiography
• Saints' Lives
• Manuscript variation
• Digital humanities

• Medieval drama
• Renaissance drama
• Shakespeare and Marlowe
• Secularization and religion on stage

Eric Ramirez-Weaver studies the theological, philosophical, and scientific ideas that informed the creative decisions of artists in eastern and western medieval cultures from the third to fifteenth centuries. His work explores the intersection of art and science in astronomical and philosophical illuminated manuscripts, with primary interests in Carolingian manuscript illumination and late-Gothic painting at the Bohemian court in Prague.

• Carolingian manuscript illumination
• Astronomical manuscripts
• Art and science
• Late-Gothic painting in Prague

Lisa Reilly's chief research interest is medieval visual culture; her most recent book establishes a new interpretive paradigm for eleventh- and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. She is a leading early user of digital humanities technology, having investigated the medieval design process through digital analysis, and is currently writing a Corpus Vitrearum volume on the stained glass of St. Michael le Belfrey.

• Medieval visual culture
• Norman art and architecture
• Medieval stained glass
• Digital humanities
• Architectural history

Fernando Riva investigates the appropriation and absorption of Arabic and Jewish knowledge in vernacular Iberian literatures of the Middle Ages, both as a tense reaction to twelfth- and thirteenth-century change in cuaderna vía poetry and as a conscious reinterpretation serving imperial projects such as that of Alfonso the Wise. His first book (2019) analyzes the concept of knowledge and intellectual curiosity in the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre.

• Medieval Iberian literature
• Libro de Alexandre and cuaderna vía
• Arabic and Jewish knowledge transmission
• Alfonso X and magic/astrology
• Mediterranean studies

Omar Velázquez-Mendoza specializes in the history of Iberian Romance and the acquisition of advanced literacy in first and second languages. His recent publications address linguistic variation in Late Latin and Early Romance (Castilian, Astur-Leonese, Portuguese), the consolidation of verb-object order in Hispano-Romance, the role of analogy in language change, and the sociolinguistic setting of Iberian notarial writing in the eighth to thirteenth centuries. His books examine eighth-century Ibero-Romance word order and the historical development of direct object marking.

• Historical Hispanic linguistics
• Late Latin and Early Romance
• Ibero-Romance syntax
• Medieval Iberian notarial writing
• Advanced literacy acquisition

• Medieval Italy
• Speech and violence
• Law, inquisition and peace-making
• Medieval Bologna