Areas of Interest: Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Contact Information
Email: ltracy1@umbc.edu
Office: PAHB 306
Biography
LARISSA “KAT” TRACY is Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work focuses on thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century English literature that looks back to the pre-Conquest period in England and the Viking Age, with cross-cultural contacts in medieval French, Irish, Norse, and Welsh and a specific focus on social justice, law, medicine, and judicial punishment. She also specializes in medieval sex, sexuality, obscenity, and comedy. She has published ten books including Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2012) and the edited collections Medieval and Early Modern Murder (Boydell, 2018), Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame (Brill 2019), and numerous articles on violence, fabliaux, comedy, Norse sagas, romance, gender, hagiography, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She is also the series editor for Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill). In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Oxford. She currently serves as the Vice President of MEARCSTAPA, a professional society dedicated to the study of medieval monstrosity. She has appeared on Great Courses’ series Sex in the Middle Ages and in several National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and History Channel documentaries including Dark Marvels and The Unbelievable! hosted by Dan Aykroyd. Her video podcast Medieval Mischief and Mayhem is available on YouTube, SubStack, and Patreon.