University of California, Los Angeles

Graduate Student, English

Teaching Fellow

Thesis Title: Margery Kempe's Legal Imagination: Gender, Mysticism, and the Law in Late-Medieval England

About

I'm a Ph.D. candidate  with the UCLA English Department (www.english.ucla.edu) and a Teach for America Social Studies teacher in a rural Alabama high school. I also held a position as Student Affairs Officer at the UCLA Scholarship Resource Center (www.scholarshipcenter.ucla.edu), where I counseled students in their search for funding. A UCLA Daily Bruin article for which I was consulted on this topic appears here: http://dailybruin.ucla.edu/stories/2009/jan/29/resources-are-available-help-students-get-grants-l/.

My primary areas of interest are medieval English literature and culture, folklore, gender studies, and pedagogy. I also have research interests in Celtic studies (having a year in Ireland as a Fulbright Fellow), as well as speculative fiction, children's literature, the history of the book, paleography, and the emerging field of Digital Humanities.

My service work has included mentoring new teachers and serving on a teaching-award committee, advising undergraduates, ensuring the retention of under-served and non-traditional students, and advancing children's literacy.

Classes I teach include "Genres and Methods of Children's Literature," "Voices and Strategies in Outlaw Narratives," "Folk Tales and Their Uses in Literature," "Literature of Intercultural Encounter in the Middle Ages," and "Monkeys, ‘Monsters,’ and Machines: Defining Ourselves Against and Through Others," as well as Medieval, Renaissance, and Shakespearean survey courses.

I have published articles on teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and "The Wife of Bath's Tale" with the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, as well as an article on “The Lyric in Old and Middle English” with the International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages Online (IEMA). I also am the author of several book reviews in the journal Comitatus and an article on eighteenth-century folk gravestones that appeared in both The North Carolina Folklore Journal and The Guilford Genealogist.

I have presented papers at regional, national, and international conferences on topics including Margery Kempe's cultural literacy, Chaucerian obscenity, masculinity and nationalism in the Gesta Herewardi, and Horace Walpole's fascinations with medievalism and exoticism.

Before I entered my graduate program, I worked as a communications officer and legislative liaison for a public television network and held a marketing position with a multinational, Internet-based company.

I have a Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/afjones and a profile at www.linkedin.com/in/andreafjones.

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