Karen Gross

Assistant Professor of English

office: Miller 408
phone: 503-768-7406
e-mail: kegross@lclark.edu

Karen joined the Lewis & Clark English department in 2005. She studies and teaches the European Middle Ages with an emphasis on England and Italy in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in the reception of classical texts, medieval literary theory and education, medieval biography, humanism, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Fulbright program, the last of which made possible her study at Cambridge University. She has presented her work at several conferences, including the Modern Language Association, the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo and the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. Currently she is working on a book re-evaluating Chaucer and his Italian sources.

Courses:
English 205 Major Periods and Issues in British Literature
English 279 Classical Backgrounds
English 280 Medieval World (Dante’s Divine Comedy—Spring 2007)
English 298 Medieval and Renaissance Women Writers
English 310 Middle English Literature
English 315 The Victorians
English 330 Chaucer
English 450 Senior Seminar (The Reformation and English Literature—Fall 2006)

Publications:
“Virgilian Hauntings in Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 31 (2005): 15-40.
“Chaucer, Mary Magdalene, and the Consolation of Love,” Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 1-37.
“Hunting, Heraldry, and the Fall in the Boke of St. Albans,” forthcoming in Viator.

In Progress:
“Scholar Saints and Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante” (scholarly article—working title)
“Giotto, Petrarch and Temples of Virtue” (scholarly article—working title)