Jessica Barr

She / Her

Professor and Director of the Program in Comparative Literature

Faculty
Jessica Barr headshot
Contact
Email
Email
Phone
Location
428 Herter Hall
Office Hours:
Wednesdays 9:00-10:00, Fridays 10:00-11:00
and by appointment

Jessica Barr's research interests include medieval visionary and dream vision literature, hagiography, and the role of reading in medieval devotional activity, as well as feminist approaches to medieval literature.  Geographically, her focus tends to be on France, Germany, Belgium, and Britain; temporally, it lies in the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. Her current book project, entitled "Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death," explores attitudes towards death and dying in the writings of medieval Christian mystics.

She is co-editor of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures and an associate editor of Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Division at Eureka College.

Frequently Taught Courses

  • Comp-Lit 122: Spiritual Autobiography (Gen. Ed. AL, DG)
  • Comp-Lit 340: Mystical Literature (Gen. Ed. AL, DG)
  • Comp-Lit 345: Legends of King Arthur (Gen. Ed. AL)
  • Comp-Lit 360: Dreams, Visions, and the Supernatural
  • Comp-Lit 470 and 670: Medieval Women Writers (graduate/undergraduate seminar)
  • Comp-Lit 697D: Writing Death in the Middle Ages (graduate seminar)

Education

B.A. Oberlin College, 1997
M.A. Brown University, 2003
Ph.D. Brown University, 2007

Books

  • Writing Holiness: Genre and Reception across Medieval Hagiography. Co-edited with Barbara Zimbalist. Cursor Mundi 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023)
  • Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women's Visions and Vitae (University of Michigan Press, 2020)
  • Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2010)

Articles (Selected)

  • “Beatrice of Nazareth and the Desire for Death.” In New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature: Essays in Honor of Denise N. Baker. Ed. Amy N. Vines and Lee Templeton (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2023), 129-44.
  • “‘The Soul Loves Its Own Flesh’: Death and Dying in the Helfta Literature and Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs.” Viator 52.1 (2021): 249-278.
  • "Rhetorics of Wonder in Three Lives by Goswin of Bossut," Cistercian Studies Quarterly 55.2 (2020): 177-99
  • "The Idea of the Wilderness: Gender and Resistance in Le Roman de Silence," Arthuriana 30.1 (2020): 3-25
  • "Imagined Bodies: Intimate Reading and Divine Union in Gertrude of Helfta's Legatus," Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 43.2 (2017): 186-208
  • "Visionary 'Staycations': Meeting God at Home in Medieval Women's Vision Literature," Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 52.2 (2016): 70-101
  • "The Secret Chamber of Her Mind: Interpreting Inner Experience in the Vita of Beatrice of Nazareth," Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23.3 (2011): 219-41

Curriculum Vitae