Carolyn Cargile

Carolyn Cargile’s research attends to the constructions of history, race, and identity in early and high medieval literature, especially from the places we now call England and France. She is currently revising her first monograph, Feeling the Past: Form and Affect in Twelfth-Century History Writing, which traces a new literary history of historical writing in the wake of the Norman Conquest. It argues that twelfth-century English and Norman history writing uses literary form to shape new collective identity formations through shared affective responses to the past. She is also at work on a second book project, tentatively titled “From Margin to Center: Geography, Legend, and Race in the Beowulf Manuscript,” which approaches the Beowulf manuscript as a literary project with global, encyclopedic ambitions. This book draws on critical race studies and premodern global studies to examine how discourses of geography, encyclopedism, and human difference in the Beowulf manuscript reveal the paradoxes of knowledge and power in the early medieval world. Her scholarship has appeared in Viator, Brepols’s Transcultural Medieval Studies series, and De Gruyter’s Sense, Matter, and Medium series. Before returning to Fordham, she taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and University Writing Program at Columbia University.