Kellie Robertson

Research Expertise
Literature and Science
Medieval and Renaissance
Kellie Robertson writes about medieval literature and culture; 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 most recent book, 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.
Her current book project, Yesterday's Weather: Narrative and Premodern Climate Change, looks at how medieval and early modern societies depict the shock of the natural disaster. 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 understand better the stories that we tell ourselves about climate change today.
She is also 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. These laws—designed to mitigate the effects of the unprecedented labor shortages following the appearance of the Black Plague—forced writers of all kinds to ask what constituted “true labor,” a question that became nearly unavoidable once work became the object of emphatic legal regulation. She is 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.
At the University of Maryland, she currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department.
Publications
Scaling Nature: Microcosm and Macrocosm in Later Medieval Thought
“Scaling Nature: Microcosm and Macrocosm in Later Medieval Thought.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49:3 (2019): 609-631. [A special issue entitled “Versions of the Natural from Antiquity to Early Modernity,” edited by Sarah Kay and Nicolett
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonKeywords for Today
Co-author (with the Keywords Project), Keywords for Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonNature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy
Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2017.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonNature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy
What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism.
English | Center for Literary and Comparative Studies
Lead: Kellie RobertsonFrom the publisher:
What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism. And yet nature's voice proved a powerful and durable ethical tool for premodern writers, many of whom used it to explore what it meant to be an embodied creature or to ask whether human experience is independent of the natural world in which it is forged.
Materiality and the Hylomorphic Imagination
“Materiality and the Hylomorphic Imagination.” In Middle English Literature: Criticism and Debate, eds. Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (Routledge, 2014), 67-375.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonAuthorial Work
“Authorial Work.” In 21st Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. 441-458.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonMedieval Things: Materiality, Historicity, and the Premodern Object
“Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicity, and the Premodern Object.” Literature Compass 5 (2008
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonMedieval Materialism: A Manifesto
“Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto.” Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonThe Rebel Kiss: Jack Cade, Shakespeare, and the Chroniclers
“The Rebel Kiss: Jack Cade, Shakespeare, and the Chroniclers.” In Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Visions of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah Kelen. Studies in Medieval Culture 52 (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2013), 127-140.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonThe Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500
The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonThe Laborer's Two Bodies
The Laborer's Two Bodies explores the intellectual, cultural, and political consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labor regulation in the wake of the 1348 plague.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonFrom the publisher's website:
The Laborer's Two Bodies explores the intellectual, cultural, and political consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labor 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 labor regulation (1349 to 1500), including texts by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, the Paston Family, and Barclay. The Laborer's Two Bodies demonstrates that the category of labor became increasingly problematic for writers who struggled to understand the meaning of work in a world where labor was simultaneously understood as punishment, virtue, and reward.
The Middle Ages at Work
This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonFrom the publisher's website:
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.
The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England
Co-editor (with Michael Uebel), The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonTalk
Abusing Aristotle
“Abusing Aristotle.” In Petropunk Collective., ed. Speculative Medievalisms: Discography (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2013). 159-172.
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Lead: Kellie RobertsonExemplary Rocks
“Exemplary Rocks.” In Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects(Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012). 93-123
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Lead: Kellie Robertson