ADRIAN MCCLURE

I received my PhD in medieval literature from Purdue University in 2020 and am spending 2022-23 as an honorary fellow at Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m especially interested in the intersection of medieval literature and the construction of religious identity, and my work typically combines literary and historical analysis. Other areas of interest include trauma theory, gender/queer/trans studies, antisemitism studies, and modern medievalism.

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I published an interdisciplinary study reading the Oxford Roland as a theologically inflected text in Speculum in 2019 and recently submitted an article on The Book of John Mandeville exploring fears of collapsing Judeo-Christian identity, fears perhaps most evocatively expressed in the narrator-figure's transmutation from would-be soldier of Christ into de facto

"Wandering Christian." I'm currently in the finishing stages of writing my first book, Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Albigensian Crusade, which reads this phantasmagorical, carnage-soaked thirteenth-century Grail romance as a profoundly significant work of trauma fiction tied to the brutal persecutory violence of the Albigensian Crusade. My second book, now in planning, is tentatively titled The Nonbinary Middle Ages: Arthurian Romance and the Christological Reenvisioning of Gender.

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I’m on the autistic spectrum, which I mention here both to promote awareness and because it’s integral to who I am as a scholar—one who is driven to chase connections and who is fascinated with alternative ways of thinking and issues of identity.