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Department of English

Shoshana Adler

Assistant Professor of English

Shoshana Adler [she/her] is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her book manuscript, "Tender Flesh: Race and Sensation in Late Medieval Literature," details the emergence of racial ideologies immanent to late medieval writings on the bodily sensorium. Other interests include queer theory, Christian and Jewish exegetics, and lepers. Her work is forthcoming in Exemplaria, boundary 2, and The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer.

Specialization(s)

  • Medieval literature and early modern literature, especially Chaucer
  • Travel writing
  • Pre-modern woman writers
  • Romance
  • Jewish and Christian hermeneutics
  • Queer theory
  • Literary theory
  • Cultural histories of racialization
  • Cultural histories of the senses.  

Representative publications

  • Book Chapter: “Jewishness and White Supremacy,” forthcoming in Visible Jews from the University of Pennsylvania Press, co-edited by Emily Steiner and Samantha Seal, 2024. 
  • Book Chapter: “Race” forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer, co-edited by Craig E. Bertolet and Susan Nakley, 2024. 
  • Article: “Spoiled History: Leprosy and the Lessons of Queer Medieval Historiography” forthcoming in boundary 2, summer 2023. 
  • Article: “Claustrophobia, Race, and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,” forthcoming in Exemplaria, winter 2022. 
  • Book Review: “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng” in EuropeNow, 2018.

Awards

  • SAS Graduate Funding Fellowship, 2021-2023.  
  • SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2020-2021. 
  • Certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, 2021.
  • Summer Fellowship at the Critical Theory Workshop in Paris, 2020. 
  • SAS-Gov funding for “Queer Urgencies,” University of Pennsylvania, 2019. 
  • Teaching Certificate, Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Pennsylvania, 2019. 
  • GAPSA Award supporting “Medieval Vulnerabilities,” University of Pennsylvania, 2018. 
  • London King’s College Research Fellowship, 2018. 
  • Benjamin Franklin Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, 2015-2020. 
  • The Kitsch Foundation Award, Brooklyn College CUNY, 2015. 
  • The Rosen Fellowship, Brooklyn College CUNY, 2014.