Heather E. Blatt

Professor Blatt specializes in the literature, book history, and material culture of late medieval England, from the end of the fourteenth century to the opening decades of the sixteenth. She received her Ph.D. in English from Fordham University, her M.A. from the University of Virginia, and her B.A. from Cornell University. Her first book is titled Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England (Manchester University Press, 2018), which uses interactive practices in digital media today to reframe our understanding of readers' participatory roles in the fifteenth century. She also works on and publishes about gendered book culture, medieval ecocriticism, and medieval and early modern bookmarks, and hopes one day to convince a designer to create a medieval video game in which Margery Kempe decimates the armies of her foes by bellowing and weeping. Previous course offerings include classes on Medieval Monstrosity, Food in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Book History from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and the Global Middle Ages. Currently, she is working on a new book project entitled "Material Books."

Research Areas

Her particular interests focus on vernacular media and textuality, book history, materiality, gender, the environment, and food cultures, from verse painted on walls and dinner-plates to the poetry of bakers, millers and alewives.