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Ruth Evans, Ph.D.

Dorothy McBride Orthwein Professor

Education

Ph.D., University of Leeds
M.A. in English, University of Manchester
B.A. in English, University of Manchester

Research Interests

  • Middle English literature of the period 1300-1580, with focuses on gender, sexuality, and memory.
  • Feminist theory and criticism, lollardy, translation theory and practice, the history of the book, and editing.

Publications and Media Placements

  • Editorial board member of the Manchester University Press Medieval Literature Series, and Punctum Books.
  • Co-editor, with Helen Fulton, of the University of Wales Press New Century Chaucer series
  • Working on a monograph, provisionally entitled Chaucerian Fictions of Memory.
  • Working on a long-term research project on the politics of the textual transmission of versions of a Middle English Ten Commandments commentary.

Evans' last publication was an edited volume, with Valerie Allen, Roadworks, Medieval Roads (MUP, 2016). She contributed a co-edited chapter (with Valerie Allen) "Introduction: Roads and Writing" and a chapter of her own "Getting There: Wayfinding in the Middle Ages."

Other recent publications include A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages, Volume 2 of Berg's Cultural History of Sexuality series, Oxford: Berg, 2011: http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=14883.

She has published articles on a wide variety of medieval literary and theoretical topics, including Troilus and Criseyde;Sir Orfeo and "bare life""; the Book of Margery Kempe; memory, history and Chaucer's Criseyde; Chaucer in cyberspace; gender, sexuality, and space in York and the York Cycle; the production of space in Chaucer's London, and medieval virginities.

Her short essay "Our Cyborg Past: Medieval Artificial Memory as Mindware Upgrade" appears in the first issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1/2 Special Issue: When Did We Become Post/human? (2010):64-71, http://www.palgrave.com.

Books

  • (co-edited with Lesley Johnson) Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (Routledge, 1994)
  • (co-edited with Roger Ellis)The Medieval Translator Vol. 4 (Exeter University Press and Medieval and Renaissance Texts Series, 1994)
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester University Press, 1998, reprinted 2013)
  • (co-edited with Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson and Andrew Taylor) The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1530 (1999
  • (co-edited with Sarah Salih and Anke Bernau) Medieval Virginities (University of Wales Press and University of Toronto Press, 2003)
  • (co-edited with Terence Hughes and Georges Letissier) Secrets, Mysteries and Silences (Université de Nantes aux Editions du CRINI, 2006)
  • (co-edited with Helen Fulton and David Matthews) Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight.
  • Guest editor (with Radhika Mohanram) of Social Semiotics 14:1: Special Issue: A Special Symposium on Sexualities (2004) and (with Joseph Bray) of Textual Cultures 2.2: Special Issue: Definitions of Textual Culture (2007)

Professional Organizations and Associations

  • Executive Director of the New Chaucer Society
  • Trustee of the New Chaucer Society from 2008 until 2012
  • Chair of the Executive Program Committee for the 16th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society in 2008
  • Fellow of the UK English Association