WKU News

On Thursday, October 20 at 7:00 pm in CH 125, the Department of English and the Gender & Women’s Studies program are proud to present the 2022 Gail Martin Lecture by medieval literature scholar Dr. Carissa Harris (Temple University). Her talk is titled “Sexual Consent, Vulnerability, and Pleasure in Medieval England and Scotland.” Dr. Harris’s first book, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain, analyzes sexual education, consent, and rape culture from the Canterbury Tales to the Access Hollywood tape. She is co-editor, with Sarah Baechle and Elizaveta Strakhov, of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, a volume of essays and medieval poems about consent prepared specifically for the undergraduate classroom, published in June 2022. She also writes public-facing essays on topics such as medieval rape culture, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, medieval impotence trials, and the history of the word “wench” for outlets including Slate, Vox, Electric Literature, The Washington Post, and others. Her current book project is titled The Poetics of Rage: Women’s Anger, Misogyny, and Political Power in Premodern Britain.