Speaker's Curriculum

Sarah Beckwith

Sarah Beckwith is a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Duke University. She took her PhD from King's College, London University. Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing, particularly "middle English religious writing in its fully cultural dimensions and in the intersections of writing and religious practice." Her work includes publications on Margery Kempe, the literature of anchoritism, medieval theatre and sacramental culture as well as methodological issues such as the implications of Wittgensteinianism and ordinary language philosophy in medieval drama and culture. She is also beginning research on a book about childhood and revenge in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Selected Publications

° Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
° ________. Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. Routledge, 1996.
° ________. How to Do Words with Things: Medieval Theatre and the Sacrament of the Word. Book 2003 (forthcoming; a book of essays on medieval theatre.).
° ________. Absent Presences: Resurrection Theatre in York, in Festschrift for Derek Pearsall, edited by D. Aers, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer (2000).