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Kellie Robertson

Kellie Robertson headshot

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, English

(301) 405-3821

3224 Tawes Hall
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Research Expertise

Early Modern Studies
Literature and Science
Medieval

Curriculum Vitae

Kellie Robertson writes about premodern literatures and cultures; her research and teaching are premised on the idea that a return to this earlier intellectual history can help us to better understand our own modern desires and philosophical commitments.

Her current book project, Yesterday's Weather: The Prehistory of Climate Change, 1300-1800, looks at how medieval and early modern societies depict the shock of the natural disaster during the period of the Little Ice Age. While the weather is notoriously changeable, human responses to it reveal some surprising consistencies across time, as each era struggles to respond to the durable dilemma of being subject to forces beyond human control. The stories we tell about weather, both then and now, are almost always stories about our own modernity, but it is a modernity experienced as somehow precarious. Looking back at how premoderns wrote about the weather helps us to explain more fully the stories that we tell ourselves about climate change today.

Recent projects have centered on environmental humanities, particularly the evolving relationship between humans and nature. With Anke Bernau, she is currently co-editing A Cultural History of Nature in the Medieval Era (under contract with Bloomsbury and due out in 2025). Her monograph Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) examines late medieval poetry in the context of its physics, arguing that both domains struggled over how to represent nature in the wake of Aristotelian science. Whether or not nature can speak in an autonomous voice is a problem with which modern environmental politics still struggles, and Robertson’s book argues that there is value in returning to medieval models of how the human was understood in relation to the rest of the nonhuman world.

She has a long-standing interest in labor history, Marxist criticism, and materialist philosophies. She is one of the co-authors (as part of the Keywords Project) of an updating of Raymond Williams’ work in Keywords for Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Her article “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto” argues that the Middle Ages has been systematically (and wrongly) omitted from philosophical genealogies of materialism because its views of matter (as hylomorphic and humoral) were considered insufficiently “material” by writers of the Scientific Revolution. She is the author of The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500, a book that explores textual and material responses to the first national labor laws in England. She is also the editor (with Michael Uebel) of a collection of essays entitled The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center.

Publications

"Medieval Nature and the Environment"

In The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment, eds. Alexander J. B. Hampton and Douglas Hedley.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 134-149.

"Labour and Time"

In The Oxford Handbook to Chaucer, ed. Suzanne Akbari and James Simpson.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Oxford University Press, 2020. 63-80.

"Scaling Nature: Microcosm and Macrocosm in Later Medieval Thought"

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49:3 (2019): 609-631.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

[A special issue entitled “Versions of the Natural from Antiquity to Early Modernity,” edited by Sarah Kay and Nicolette Zeeman.]

Keywords for Today

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

The book is authored by the Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who, with the support of the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly, have spent more than a decade preparing Keywords for Today.

Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Winner of the 2018 Beatrice White Prize (awarded by the English Association) and a 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

"Materiality and the Hylomorphic Imagination"

In Middle English Literature: Criticism and Debate

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Eds. Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (Routledge, 2014), 367-375.

"Abusing Aristotle"

In Petropunk Collective

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Ed. Speculative Medievalisms: Discography (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2013). 159-172.

"Exemplary Rocks"

In Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012).

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

In Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012). 93-123.

"Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto"

Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118.

"Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicity, and the Premodern Object"

Literature Compass 5 (2008): 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00588.x

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

Literature Compass 5 (2008): 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00588.x

"Authorial Work"

In 21st Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. 441-458.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

In 21st Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. 441-458.

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

This is an exploration the intellectual consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labour regulation in the wake of the 1348 plague. Bridging the medieval and early modern periods, this book analyzes a wide range of texts and images produced in this initial period of labour regulation.

The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Co-edited with with Michael Uebel.

English

Author/Lead: Kellie Robertson
Dates:

This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism. It contributes to the construction of a materialist historicism while, at the same time, proposing that discussions of work need not be limited to the clash between labor and capital. To this end, the essays offer more than a strictly historical view of the complex terms, social and literary, within which labor was treated in the medieval period. Several of the essays strive to reformulate the very critical language we use to think about the categories of labor and work through a continually doubled engagement with modern theories of labor and medieval theories and practices of labor.