Elizabeth Harper

Academic Degrees: University of Virginia, Ph.D, University of North Carolina, B.A.

Research Interests: 13th-, 14th-, and 15th-century French Literature and Culture; Historical Poetics; History of the Book; Sound Studies; Gender Studies; Ecofeminism; Vulnerability Studies; Care Studies

I specialize in late medieval French literature and culture, with particular interest in the relationship between poetry and premodern concepts of vulnerability and care. My current research is focused on revising my dissertation for publication as a book. This new monograph project, tentatively titled The Carelessness of Orpheus: Lyric and Care in Late Medieval France, proposes a historical approach to the modern feminist concept of “care” – a ubiquitous yet enigmatic term that touches, according to political theorist Joan Tronto, “all aspects of living” (1993). Whereas recent scholarship identifies “caring lit.” as a phenomenon specific to 20^th- and 21^st-century narrative literature, I argue that lyric poetry in 14^th- and 15^th-century France became a vital form of care. By “form of care” I refer to the caring capacities of particular forms ofFrench lyric – their sonorous, rhythmic, and material qualities – that came into being amid a late medieval “crise de vers” – to borrow Mallarmé’s term – that was also a “crise de care” amid the turmoil of epidemics, famine, civil wars, and the Hundred Years’ War.

I was previously a Jefferson Scholars Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia where I taught within a cluster of courses on “Exploring Global Medieval Worlds.” I received a B.A. in French from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2015 and a Ph.D. in French from the University of Virginia in 2024 with an emphasis in Medieval Studies.