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 Trade of Penance: Commercial Practice and Penitential Piety in Late Medieval Literature--shows how fourteenth- to fifteenth-century religious writers harnessed the technologies and ethical debates surrounding commerce to invent new modes of penance that questioned and reinforced humanity’s responsibilities towards their resources and each other. 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’ (article forthcoming NML 24, Oxford University Press).

Nancy is currently working on turning her dissertation into a monograph (with a stronger focus on pre-modern debt) as well as a new project on cultures of trust in pre-modern female religious writings.

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, and in 2022-2023, she was shortlisted for the Warwick's WATE Faculty Teaching Awards (Arts and Humanities) and co-winner of the ECLS teaching awards 2023. Through the App Ex pathway at Warwick, Nancy is currently working on becoming a HEA fellow.

Selected Conferences and Presentations:

"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

Moderator, Women and Agency Symposium. University of Oxford, June 2021

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

“Reading the Knight’s Account Book of Conscience in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne,” Texas Medieval Association Conference. University of North Texas, Oct 2020

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

Education:

Ph.D. Northwestern University

M.St. University of Oxford

B.A. University of Oxford (First Class)