Adrienne Williams Boyarin: Literary Art & Identities of Faith

Adrienne Williams Boyarin writes on religious material in medieval poetry, but she’s also been at the forefront of the important conversation on bringing religion – and religiously committed scholarship – back into the study of the humanities. Her expertise in literature and her commitment to exploring Jewish Christian relationships within it, her interest in the written lives of the saints and in the relationship between religion and academia – any of these would have made great reasons to seek her out in one of our Luminous conversations.

Adrienne is Associate Professor of English and English Graduate Program Advisor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2006. She has made significant contributions to conversations on the place of religious faith in secular academic contexts, as a matter of both personal commitment and scholarly research.

Her research interests include Jewish-Christian polemics, medieval Anglo-Jewish history, Early Middle English (and the multilingual Early Middle English period broadly), manuscript studies, Marian texts, and gender studies. She is a former member of the MLA Executive Committee for TC Religion and Literature (2014-2019) and the MLA Delegate Assembly (2017-2019).

She is author of Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (D.S. Brewer, 2010), praised as “elegantly written, scrupulously researched,” and a model of “codicological expertise” (Speculum 88.1, 2013), as well as two important articles on religious belief and scholarly identity, “This Is No Museum” and “Desire for Religion,” both in Religion and Literature. She is editor and translator of the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem (Broadview 2013, rev. in TLS) and Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English (Broadview 2015, rev. in TMR), and the founding Executive Editor of the journal Early Middle English (Arc Humanities/Amsterdam UP). Her most recent publication is The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism (UPenn Press, 2020).