Faculty
Elizabeth Schirmer
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Email:
eschirme@nmsu.edu
Office Address:
New Mexico State University
Department of English
P.O. Box 30001, MSC 3E
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Phone:
(575) 646-1733
Fax:
(575) 646-7725
Biographical Statement
I received my PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, and my AB in English and French Literatures from Stanford University in 1993. I joined the NMSU English department in 2001. I enjoy teaching in the Honors College and the Women's Studies Program as well as in English.
Research Interests
Late-medieval English literary and religious writing; vernacular cultures of reading, c. 1400; Lollardy; the Pearl-Poet; rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages; gender/gender/narrative theory and medieval texts.
Courses Recently Taught
- ENGL 271: Survey of British Literature I (Beowulf through the 18th c.)
- ENGL 239: Medieval Understandings
- ENGL 405: Chaucer
- ENGL 525, WS 550: Medieval Women Reading the Bible
- ENGL 4/522, WS 4/550: Dying for Love: Sex and the Spirit of Early English Poetry
- ENGL 4/517: Queer Theory
- ENGL 4/593: Middle English Textual Cultures
- ENGL 5/690: Medieval Rhetoric
Departmental Projects
After three years advising our undergraduate majors, I am currently serving as Director of Graduate Studies, working with students and faculty in our MA, MFA, and PhD programs. I also serve on the Personnel Committee, and I help craft the curriculum through the work of the Literature Area Group. I helped develop the Minor in Medieval and Early Modern Studies as well as the Major in Women's Studies, and I have served as faculty advisor for two student groups: Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Friends (currently the Stonewall Coalition) and Feminists Reinventing Equality Everywhere (FREE).
Selected Publications
"Canon Wars and Outlier Manuscripts: Gospel Harmony in the Lollard Controversy." Huntington Library Quarterly. 73 (2010). pp. 1-36.
"William Thorpe's Narrative Theology". Studies in the Age of Chaucer. 31 (2009). pp. 267-99.
"'Trewe Men': Pastoral Masculinity in Lollard Polemic." In Masculinities and Femininities, ed. Fred Kiefer (Brepols, 2009). pp. 117-30.
"Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey: The Myroure of Oure Ladye and the Mandates of Vernacular Theology." In Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (U of Notre Dame P, 2005). pp. 345-76.
"Orthodoxy, Textuality, and the 'Tretys' of Margery Kempe." Journal x. 1.1 (1996). pp. 31.56.
Professional Statement
My teaching and research alike are motivated by a fascination with models of reading and how they are taught and learned. Rather than literacy in the narrow sense, I am interested in reading as a basic means of comprehending, organizing, and manipulating experience. In my research and in the classroom, I ask how particular ways of engaging with texts shape the intellectual, ethical, political, and spiritual lives of readers medieval and modern.