English

Mary Dzon

Mary Dzon

ADDRESS
214 McClung Tower
Website
https://utk.academia.edu/MaryDzon

Mary Dzon

Associate Professor

Animal Studies; Medieval/Early Modern; Religion, Spirituality, Secularism; Women/Gender Studies

Professor Dzon’s research focuses on later medieval literary culture, especially Middle English and Latin religious texts. She has published extensively on the figure of the Christ Child and has worked on narratives and images concerning the Virgin Mary and other saints venerated in the Middle Ages. Additional areas of interest include animal studies, women and gender, the lifecycle, the body, the history of emotions, manuscript studies, and the translation of texts during the Middle Ages and of medieval texts in modern times.

Education

PhD, University of Toronto

Specialties

Animal Studies; Medieval/Early Modern; Religion, Spirituality, Secularism; Women/Gender Studies

Honors

    • 2023-2024 Best Faculty Mentor (in Classroom) – Awarded by Graduate Students in English

    • 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

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 Virgin, 1150-1500. (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.