Shoshana Adler
Assistant Professor of English
Shoshana Adler [she/her] is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her book manuscript, Visceral Empiricism: 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, transhistoricism, and lepers. Her work can be found 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: “Race, 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,” boundary 2, 2023.
- Article: “Claustrophobia, Race, and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,” Exemplaria, 2022.
- Book Review: “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng,” EuropeNow, 2018.
Awards
- Dean's Faculty Fellowship, 2025-2027
- 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.