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Mary Dzon

Mary Dzon

Mary Dzon

Associate Professor

214 McClung Tower
mdzon@utk.edu
Website
UTK Medieval and Renaissance Studies in English

Biography

Professor Dzon teaches courses on early English literature and researches medieval devotional culture in late-medieval England. In addition to popular piety, her interests include medieval mysticism; medieval saints’ lives and romances; medieval conceptualizations of the lifecycle, gender and the body; animals studies; as well as visual and manuscript studies. Professor Dzon co-edited an essay collection and published a monograph on the medieval Christ Child. She has a forthcoming edition of Middle English poems on the childhood of Jesus, and continues to explore apocryphal traditions concerning Jesus and other figures connected with the Bible. She is currently working on an edition and translation of a Latin Life of the Virgin Mary and also a monograph on divine emotionality and Marian intercession in the later Middle Ages. An active participant in UTK’s interdisciplinary Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Professor Dzon is happy to work with graduate students in various medieval fields. At the undergraduate level she particularly enjoys teaching Premodern Beasts, Chaucer, and Medieval Women’s Literary Culture. In general, she loves discovering and discussing with others the myriad unusual and striking sources from the Middle Ages.

Education

  • PhD, University of Toronto

Publications

  • “Facing Jesus: Julian of Norwich, the Veronica in Rome and the Colors of Jesus’ Skin,” forthcoming in Materiality, Embodiment, and Enclosure in Medieval Religious Culture (1080 – 1530), ed. Michelle M. Sauer and Joshua S. Easterling (Boydell & Brewer, 2024). 
  • “Affective Piety,” in The Chaucer Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Newhauser et al. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023), I:22-25. 
  • Review of Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages, edited by Jane Beal (Brill, 2019), in Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 47 (2022): 107-12.
  • Review of Liz Herbert McAvoy, ed. and trans., A Revelation of Purgatory, Library of Medieval Women (D.S. Brewer, 2017), in The Medieval Review, 20.08.39.
  • “Manger, I. Christianity, Medieval Times,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 17 (Walter de Gruyter, 2019), cols. 733-45.
  • Review of Maureen Boulton, Sacred Fictions of Medieval France: Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin1150-1500. (D.S. Brewer, 2015), in The Medieval Review, 16.05.17.
  • The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, The Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
  • “Holy Family, I. Christianity,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 12 (Walter de Gruyter, 2016), cols. 121-26.
  • “Out of Egypt, Into England: Tales of the Good Thief for Medieval English Audiences,” in “Diuerse Imaginaciouns of Cristes Life”: Devotional Culture in England and Beyond, 1300-1560, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Brepols, 2014): 147-241.
  • “Wanton Boys in Middle English Texts and the Christ Child in Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, MS Z822 N81,” in Medieval Lifecycles: Continuity and Change, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (Brepols, 2013): 81-145.
  • “Jesus and the Birds in Medieval Abrahamic Traditions,” Traditio 66 (2011): 189-230.
  • “Boys Will Be Boys: The Physiology of Childhood and the Apocryphal Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 42.1 (2011): 179-225.
  • The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (University of Toronto Press, 2012; reprinted in paperback in 2015). 
  • Co-authored with Theresa Kenney, “The Infancy of Scholarship on the Medieval Christ Child,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture, pp. xiii-xxii.
  • “Birgitta of Sweden and Christ’s Clothing,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture, pp. 117-44.
  • “Cecily Neville and the Apocryphal Infantia salvatoris in the Middle Ages,” Mediaeval Studies 71 (2009): 235-300.
  • Review of Michael E. Goodich, Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150-1350 (Ashgate, 2007), in Speculum 84.1 (2009): 146-48.
  • “Margery Kempe’s Ravishment into the Childhood of Christ,” Mediaevalia 27.2 (2006): 27-57.
  • “Conflicting Notions of Pietas in Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina,” Journal of Medieval Latin 15 (2005): 67-92.
  • “Joseph and the Amazing Christ-Child of Late-Medieval Legend,” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 135-57.

Awards, Honors & Grants

  • 2022-2023 Faculty Fellowship at the Tennessee Humanities Center
  • 2021 Best First Book Award from SEMA (Southeastern Medieval Association)
  • 2016-2017 Huntington Library Short-Term Award (one month)
  • 2015-2016 Faculty Fellowship at the Tennessee Humanities Center
  • Spring 2011 Chancellor’s Grant for Faculty Research
  • NEH Seminar Participant, “St. Francis of Assisi and the Thirteenth Century” (Summer 2008)
  • 2007-2008 Junior Fellowship, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University