Kathryn McKinley

Kathryn McKinley in greyscale, wearing a light colored shirt in front of a dark door

Areas of Interest: Medieval Literature, Chaucer, Ovid, Boccaccio

Contact Information

Email: kmckinle@umbc.edu

Office location: PAHB 408

Office phone: 410-455-2006

Education

Ph.D. in English, University of Delaware

M.A. in Classics, University of Toronto

B. Phil. in English/Classics, Pennsylvania State University

Biography

Kathryn McKinley, Professor of English, has been a recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. She is also the founder of the interdepartmental minor in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) at UMBC, and has been appointed UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor for 2021-2024.

Her research and teaching interests include Chaucer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and manuscript studies.  Currently, she focuses on the social vision and aesthetics of emerging late medieval vernacularity. She has published in such journals as The Chaucer Review, English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Viator, and Le Tre Corone: Rivista internazionale di studi su Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio.  Her publications include Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries 1100-1618 (Leiden, 2001); Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011; coedited with Frank T. Coulson and James G. Clark); and Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto, 2016).

Books

Cover for Boccaccian Intertexts: an image from the middle ages, cover stylized as if it were from Chaucer's work itself

Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Publications, 2016

This study considers how Chaucer’s House of Fame engages Boccaccio’s writings as much as Dante’s. McKinley thus addresses in new ways this broader triangular relationship between Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione gave Chaucer a viable model for a response to Dante’s theocentric poetics.

Ovid in the Middle Ages

Cambridge University Press, 2011

This volume presents a groundbreaking series of essays on Ovid’s reception across the Middle Ages. The collection includes contributions from distinguished Ovidians as well as leading specialists in medieval Latin and vernacular literature, clerical and extra-clerical culture and medieval art, and addresses questions of manuscript and textual transmission, translation, adaptation and imitation.

Ovid in the Middle Ages Cover: a greyscale painting from the middle ages, and white text in a latin-esque font against a blue banner

Cover for Reading the Ovidian Heroine: dark blue with a gate motif

Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries 1100-1618

Brill, 2001

This study investigates the reception of Ovid’s heroines in “Metamorphoses” commentaries written between 1100 and 1618. The Ovidian heroine offers a telling window onto medieval and early modern clerical constructions of gender and selfhood.