WLL alumna receives prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

Misty Schieberle earned a double B.A. in Spanish and English, completing a study abroad in Mexico and working as a tutor in the language lab and one elective semester of French. She received an M.A. in English with a Spanish minor concentration, including classes on Don Quijote and the history of the Spanish language. An exploration of El libro de buen amor formed one chapter of her M.A. thesis on gender and medieval literature. She earned a doctorate in English from the University of Notre Dame (2008), with a specialty in late medieval English literature. Her research since then has required reading medieval texts and scholarship in English, Latin, French, and Italian, and she credits her experiences in the Texas State Department of World Languages and Literature with giving her the strong foundation in Romance language study to smooth her path (though she still hopes to return to Spanish literature one day). Her research interests include studies of medieval manuscripts, advice literature, and medieval challenges to misogynist stereotypes. Her books include the monograph Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1380-1500 (Brepols, 2014) and a critical edition Christine de Pizan’s Advice for Princes in Middle English: Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea and the Anonymous Litel Bibell of Knyghthod (Medieval Institute Press, 2020). She is currently working on a monograph Christine de Pizan and Fifteenth-Century English Literature that explores how English male writers tended not to credit Christine as an influence, even when they translated her works, copied manuscripts of her works, and cited unique content only available in Christine’s poetry. The project, which has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2021-2022, analyzes the gendered and political reasons for Christine’s erasure and provides new evidence that her writings were far more influential on the English literary tradition than scholars have assumed. Schieberle is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas.