Nancy is a Teaching Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures for the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department at Warwick. She is a scholar of pre-modern English literature with a research focus on the intersection of literary studies, religious culture, and economic history. Her current project--The Problem of Debt in Late Medieval Literature--examines the ways fourteenth- to fifteenth-century religious writers harnessed the legal, commercial, ethical issues of financial debt to invent new modes of penance that enabled penitents to become better economic agents. She won the Jean Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation at Northwestern University (Chicago, US) and was shortlisted for New Medieval Literatures’ ‘Scholars of Colour Essay Prize’.

Nancy is passionate about teaching and has taught a range of courses at both Northwestern University and the University of Warwick, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Bible as Literature, the Seven Deadly Sins, Introduction to Shakespeare, History and Textuality, Writing History, Arthurian Literature, and Medieval and Early Modern Literature. In 2019-20, she won the Northwestern Graduate Student Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, she was shortlisted for the Warwick's WATE Faculty Teaching Awards (Arts and Humanities) and, she is co-winner of the ECLS teaching awards 2023. Nancy is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Selected Conferences and Presentations:

"'Y wyll selle yow myn own body': Bound Bodies in Hereditary Debt", New Chaucer Society. Pasadena, July 2024

"Piers Plowman and the Virtues of Debt Suretyship," International Piers Plowman Society. London, July 2023

“For her Interest: Margery Kempe’s Penitential Credit Market,” New Chaucer Society. University of Durham, July 2022

“Women of Credit and Female Spirituality in Pre-Modern England,” Freedom and Work in Western European history conference. University of Exeter, July 2022

“Teaching Sloth’s Confession Online: Piers Plowman, Pandemic Pedagogy, and a Student-Centred Classroom,” International Medieval Congress. University of Leeds, July 2021

“Mercantile Bargaining and Confessional Exchange in Late Medieval Sermon Exempla Tradition,” International Congress on Medieval Studies. Western Michigan University, May 2021

“The Economics of Penitential Pedagogy and the Vernon Paternoster Diagram,” International Medieval Congress. University of Leeds, July 2020

Publications:

"Margery Kempe’s Penitential Credit," New Medieval Literatures 24 (2024): 168-98

“The Theme of Exile within Old English Christian Poetry: Developing the Positive Exilic Hero,” Quaestio Insularis 17 (2017): 1-19

‘A Case Study in Multi-Video Feedback on Student’s Writings for Chinese Language Learners’ in British Chinese Language Teaching Society Conference Proceedings, ed. Shijuan Liu (forthcoming, 2024), co-authored with Yinghong Shang

From Audits to Confessionals: The Influence of Accounting Technologies on Medieval Penitential Pedagogy’, in Media Technologies and Digital Humanities in Medieval and Early Modern studies, eds. Katharine Scherff and Lane Sobehrad (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 11-30

Education:

Ph.D. Northwestern University

M.St. University of Oxford

B.A. University of Oxford (First Class)