Katherine Churchill

Hi there! I'm a writer, researcher, and historian of late medieval English and French literature based in California. I hold a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Virginia. My essays on history and literature have appeared in outlets like Time, Defector, Oxford American Magazine, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Public Books, History News Network, and Avidly. My scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Studies in the Age of Chaucer and the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.

I love to hear from readers, students, scholars, editors, and history enthusiasts! You can reach me at: katherine.rose.churchill [at] gmail [dot] com

Image of a medieval manuscript of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis

Essays, Public Scholarship, and Other Writing

I write about medieval literature and history—everything from women’s authorship to monsters and library theft:

2025 “Screaming, Crying, Throwing Up: The Medieval Art of Fandom.” mixed feelings

2024 “An Early Case of Impostor Syndrome.” History News Network.

2024 “The 12th Century Library Thief Who Anticipated Today’s Hackers.” Time.

2023 “Archival Romance: On Finding Love in the Papers of an Obscure Medieval Poet.” Literary Hub.

2023 “An Extraordinarily Metal Way to Be: Authorship and Medieval Women.” Public Books.

2022 “Questing for the Past.” Oxford American Magazine.

2021 “The Monster in The Green Knight Should be Sexier.” Electric Literature.

Sometimes I dabble in recent history, from vaccination to local folklore:

2025 “When Good Housekeeping Meant Getting Vaccinated for Polio.” History News Network.

2024 “Birthing the Jersey Devil.” JSTOR Daily.

Occasionally I work on modern book culture and literature:

2025 “The Exclusive Men’s-Only Book Club, and the Woman Who Has A Key” Defector.

2021 “In Praise of Dog Books.” Avidly.

I have written exactly one joke:

2024 “Famous Literary Quotes About Love Rewritten by a Woman Whose Friends Are All Getting Married and Having Children While She is Taking an Introduction to Ceramics Class.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Peer-Reviewed Scholarship and Teaching

My scholarly research focuses on literature written in the late medieval period in England and France. I am especially interested in questions of cultural heritage, material culture, media studies, and how we remember the past. My book project, “Archival Entanglements,” explores how changes in English and French archives and libraries revolutionized the writing of poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Peer-reviewed Articles:

“Forgetting the Plague: Disease, Social Hierarchy, and the Limits of the Archive in Saint Erkenwald and the Liber Albus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol. 56, no. 3, special issue “Epistemologies of the Archive,” edited by Daniel Davies (forthcoming 2026)

““The Bokes Duelle’: John Gower’s Poetics of Futurity and the Development of the Late Medieval Archive,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Vol. 47 (2025).

“Relational Virginity and Nonbinary Gender: La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Vol. 50, Issue 2 (June 2024): 139-158.

I have taught a variety of courses, from first year writing to survey courses and medieval literature seminars. My full CV is available upon request.

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